The pollsters had Hillary ahead by a little. But Trump won. What happened?
The short of it is, we voters were given two unpalatable candidates. One candidate promised to get the country back on the right track. The other insisted that we were on the right track all along. But we weren't, we still aren't, and everybody except newsies know it.
Basically Wall St speculators crashed the world economy back in 2008. And it has stayed crashed. US GNP growth has been a measly 1% per year for the eight years of Obama. It should be 3%. Obamacare, the war on coal, 80,000 pages of new federal regulation, crazy federal tax policies and general federal meddling has combined to flatten US economic growth. And people feel it, they cannot find jobs, their children cannot find jobs, they don't get raises, they loose their houses to foreclosure, and everything costs more. The country is on the wrong track and everyone knows it.
So, faced with two unpalatable candidates, voters went for the unpalatable candidate that promised to fix the economy, rather than the unpalatable candidate that claimed things were just peachy.
The profession of economics did not help the situation. Economist say a depression is over when things stop getting worse. Great Depression 2.0 flattened out way back in 2008 but it hasn't gone away, the economy is still not growing. Voters, workers, and citizens don't think a depression is over until things climb back up to where they used to be (ought to be). So we had all the economists (a lefty lot) claiming Great Depression 2.0 was over back i9n 2009. The Obama administration liked this myth, and spread it around, and the newsies (another lefty lot) picked it up and pushed it.
But truth is stronger than fiction, and the voters knew things were bad and voted for a guy who said he would fix them, despite that guy's big mouth.
1 comment:
I heard canny old Karl Rove express this very idea on Fox News last night. Makes sense to me, more sense than most of the pundits who are off talking about class warfare and other strange theories.
And, the polls mostly had it right. For weeks before the election, the polls, at least the polls they report on TV, had the race very close, within a couple of percent, but with Hillary ahead by just a hair. Most of the punditry reported this as "Hillary will win". They should know better, any poll within a percent or two, is actually a dead heat.
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