It’s fascinating to watch all the pundits debate why Hillary lost and Trump won. We hear about likability, trustworthiness, FBI letters, Wikileaks, etc. But at a very basic level, Trump had a plan and Hillary did not. You could point to Hillary’s policy papers and past political positions and whatnot, but who actually reads any of that?
I follow politics pretty intensely, and I can tell you pretty quickly what Trump wants (build a wall, stop bad trade deals, stop Muslims from coming into the country). Anyone with a modicum of economics education will tell you that those plans will be terrible for Americans, but voters in swing states don’t follow classical economic thought.
But what the hell was Hillary proposing? All I heard was stuff about extra tinkering in the tax code and subsides for clean energy. Her main point was that she wasn’t Donald Trump. That was good enough for me, and good enough for the 2.5 million more voters who chose her. But Trump’s actual, easy-to-recite plans were exactly the types of things white working class voters in swing states wanted to hear.
Meanwhile the establishment (and me) talked about hard-to-imagine foreign policy, institutional and economic risks that were difficult to imagine. Once Trump is President, those risks may become all the more real.
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