Historical story

"He can do anything and he will be forgiven." What made Trump win the election?

The 2016 US presidential election was a product of technological destruction:the most significant form of political communication was ... Donald Trump's twitter profile. As a result, there was a media crisis, the credibility of which was questioned by anonymous sources and leaks. Some of them turned out to be part of the campaign carried out by the Russian authorities with the help of the so-called troll farm.

The elections brought out of the depths of American politics a huge amount of sludge and lingering hatreds. They revealed the sinister consequences of the shrinking middle class. They pointed to the price paid by the political stability of the Republic for the unequal constitutional status of women. They marked an end to the conservative Christian Coalition and exposed the terrible void of both major political parties.

The best, prettiest and fastest horse

17 candidates ran for the Republican nomination. At the conference, the campaign chiefs spoke about their candidates and the campaign in the way jockeys talk about their horses and the conditions on the racetrack.

"Our strategy was not to look up," said Florida Senator Marco Rubio, campaign chief. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's campaign chief said, "Our path was going to be a long game." Campaign chief Ted Cruz talked about which track his horse was racing on.

Trump's former campaign chief, CNN analyst Corey Lewandowski, spoke the longest. His horse was the best, prettiest, fastest, and ran "in the most unconventional race in the history of the presidency." He told a story, perhaps apocryphal, of how in 2012 Mitt Romney was driven to campaign meetings in a limousine to transfer to a Chevy at the last minute. But not Trump. Trump has flown his own jet everywhere.

Protests in the US after Donald Trump's victory in the elections

"Our goal was to ensure that we stand as populists, that we pride ourselves on our wealth, not run away from it, and monopolize media attention by using social media like no other," prided Lewandowski. "We knew when Donald Trump tweeted Fox News would be covering it live."

Organizing people on the ground was a thing of the past. Newspapers, press announcements? Doesn't matter, he said. "Donald Trump buys ink for TV stations," he said. Trump has not raced on any track. Trump was racing the plane.

How the polls lie

South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham's campaign chief said it depended heavily on Fox News's decision to use the polls to determine who would take part in the pre-primary debates, where which candidate would stand on stage, and how much vision time would be given.

In the 2016 election, the polls were a scandal almost on par with the "Dewey Beat Truman" scandal, a scandal predicted by industry people. During the 2012 presidential election, 1,200 political organizations conducted 37,000 polls, making over three billion phone calls. Most Americans - over 90 percent - refused to talk. The authors of the polls for Mitt Romney believed, even on election morning, that Romney would win.

A 2013 study - the poll - found that three out of four Americans did not trust opinion polls. However, nine out of ten people most likely distrusted the polls so much that they refused to answer the question, which meant the poll's results meant nothing at all.

The text is an excerpt from the book by Jill Lepore We, the nation. The New History of the United States, which has just been released by Wydawnictwo Poznańskie.

The polls opened the way to Republican Party debates, polls placed him in the middle of the stage and polls declared him the winner. "Donald J. Trump dominated the Time poll," Trump's campaign staff announced on its website after the first debate , referring to the "Time" text that 47 percent of respondents to the poll said Trump won the debate.

The "Time survey" was conducted by the PlayBuzz portal, which published popular content as well as "quizzes, polls, lists and other attractive formats" in order to generate traffic to the sites. PlayBuzz collected approximately 70,000 "votes" from visitors to the Time website in an instant online poll. Time posted a warning:"The results of this probe have no scientific basis." The less self-respecting parties didn't play with warnings.

"We almost made it"

Every major opinion polling center misjudged the 2016 election, predicting Hillary Clinton's victory. The difference in voices was not great. Clinton won the popular vote; Trump won the Electoral College. The Kennedy School meeting was one of the first formal attempts to understand exactly what happened.

After the campaign leaders of the Republican candidates had finished discussing their actions, the Democrats spoke. "Hillary, as many do not remember, found her way into electoral politics late in her career," stated campaign chief Robby Mook. "She started with the Children's Defense Fund ...". The Clinton campaign did not say much new about Hillary Clinton, a candidate known to Americans all too well. Mook apparently had little to add. Bernie Sanders' campaign leader looked exhausted. He shook his head. "We almost made it.

Hillary Clinton's speech in Philadelphia as part of the 2016 presidential campaign

The more obvious explanations for Clinton's failure have not been named. Obama has failed to raise a new generation of political talent. The Democratic National Committee, considering Clinton's nomination and even her victory inevitable, fought competition. Clinton, by devoting her time to fundraising with wealthy liberals from Hollywood to the Atlantic Coast, neglected the campaign. in the swing states, and she did not meet white workers. When Trump won the nomination, she didn't do much other than point out the flaws in his character, though high-profile Trump supporters right from the start have argued that this form of campaigning would be futile.

Clinton's staff believed that Trump's political career was over as the footage leaked to the media, saying the best approach to women was to "grab their cunt." Even that, however, did not deprive him of the support of conservative Christians.

"While the media tried to show Trump's personality as an example of a cult of personality, the irony of fate the only thing voters didn't get excited about was his personality," wrote Ann Coulter in In Trump We Trust , a hastily written campaign polemic that, like her earlier works, was not in the least concerned with the evidence. "I don't have time for footnotes," she wrote. When it comes to accusing Trump of duplicity and depravity, Coulter rightly predicted that voters would not care:"Trump can do anything and he will be forgiven," she wrote, "unless he changes his mind on immigration.

Source:

The text is an excerpt from the book by Jill Lepore We, the nation. The New History of the United States , which has just been released by Wydawnictwo Poznańskie.