Friday, February fourteenth, the UN says at least 22 people have been killed in a village in the Northwest region of Cameroon. Over half of those killed were children. No one has claimed responsibility for Friday’s incident but the opposition parties blame the killing on the government.
Why Clinton lost to the election
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How
Hillary Clinton managed to lose an
election to a candidate as divisive and unpopular as Donald Trump
will baffle observers and agonise Democrats for years to come. Once the
shockwave passes, some glimpses of rational explanation may become visible.
Incumbent
parties rarely hold on to power after eight years in office. George HW Bush,
following Reagan, was an exception, but politics has become steadily more
polarised since and pendulums have a habit of swinging.
Trump’s
defiance of expectations has itself also become somewhat of a golden rule in
American politics in 2016. Written off repeatedly during the Republican
primary, and only rarely taken seriously during the general election, he
nonetheless epitomises the same anti-establishment mood that led Britain to
vote to leave the European Union and Democrats in 22 US states
to nominate Bernie Sanders. Fairly or not, it is an establishment with which
Clinton could not have been more closely aligned in the minds of many voters if
she tried.
The
economy
“It’s
the economy, stupid” was a phrase coined by her husband’s adviser James
Carville in the 1992 election and, in many ways, it ought to have helped
Democrats again in 2016. Barack Obama helped rescue the US from the financial
crash and presided over a record series of consecutive quarters of job growth.
Unfortunately
for Clinton, many Americans simply did not feel as positive. Stagnant wage
levels and soaring inequality were symptoms of the malaise felt by many voters.
Trump successfully convinced them to believe this was caused by bad trade deals
and a rigged economy.
Despite
being pushed in this direction by Sanders in the Democratic primary, Clinton
never really found a satisfactory response. Her volte-face on trade sounded –
and was later proved by leaked emails
– unconvincing at best; deeply cynical at worst.
Neither
socialism nor the proto-fascist homilies of Trump offered much in the way of
coherent alternatives either, but the bottom line was that Clinton simply
failed to articulate a convincing defence of modern American capitalism.
Trust
One
big problem which undermined many otherwise plausible policy positions was a
lack of trust. Paid speeches to Goldman Sachs and a murky web
of business connections to the family charity left many Americans doubting
Clinton’s sincerity on matters of money and much else.
That
the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating the Democratic candidate
until just two days before voting with a view to bring possible criminal
charges for her flouting of data security laws was just the most extreme
manifestation of the issue.
It
was damaging not just that the FBI bungled its timing of what ultimately proved
to be a dead-end investigation but because it
played into the notion that the Clintons behaved as if the law did not apply to
them.
Message
vacuum
It
also did not help that what Clinton was selling was mainly herself. The
campaign’s strongest message was that she was uniquely qualified to become
president. This was largely true, especially when compared with the grotesquely
inexperienced Donald Trump, but big ideas took a backstage role.
There
was a cast of a thousand policy prescriptions, from tweaks to the healthcare
system to a watered-down version of the Sanders college debt proposals. Few
were memorable, even among supporters.
Campaign
slogans are notoriously vacuous. Obama’s “hope and change” turned out to be
more of the former than the latter. Yet Clinton’s “stronger together” only
really began to take shape in response to Trump’s divisiveness. It was
attractive to many Democrats as a symbol of what they felt the campaign was
about but it ensured the battle was fought on Trump’s terms.
Broken
polls
Amid
the recriminations, special attention is likely to be reserved for the pollsters,
who showed Clinton clinging to a comfortable three- or four-point lead in
national opinion polls going into the election. Granted, some, such as Nate
Silver’s 538 website, flagged up the risk of an upset in key swing states, but
even he had downgraded expectations of a Trump win to less than 30% on the eve
of polling.
The
failure partly reflects a broken industry. Reaching a vast audience no longer
using landlines, or even mobile voice calls much, with a 20th-century modeling
of statistical sampling has produced dangerously misleading results in
elections around the world of late.
But
the US fortune tellers were particularly confused by the scrambled demographics
of the 2016 election. Trump in many ways ran to Clinton’s left on some economic
issues, with a populist appeal to a growing group of unaffiliated
independent-minded voters, and yet analysts continued to assume that if
registered Democrats were voting early, or telling pollsters they were going to
vote, it meant a vote for Clinton.
That
all changed in 2016, a ground zero for a political bombshell that will mean the
US electoral map never looks the same again.
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