I hear two observations about the 2016 American presidential race so incessantly that they’re like hit songs at peak ubiquity. The lyrics are seared into my brain.
One is that the Republican and Democratic nominees leave voters with no real choice. That’s nuts, because it implies that Republican candidate Donald Trump and his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton are equally unpalatable and it misunderstands “choice” as profoundly as Trump misreads polls. He and Clinton may not be the political buffet of our dreams. But one entree is perilous, while the other has tired ingredients in a suboptimal sauce. Salmonella or salmon with cucumber and dill: That’s a choice. I know what I’m putting on my plate.
The other observation is that when Clinton is elected — sorry, if Clinton is elected — she’ll have shaky authority and murky marching orders, because she’ll be the beneficiary of an anti-Trump vote, not a pro-Clinton one. This, too, misses the mark. Even if we grant that voters aren’t so much rushing to her as fleeing him, they’re fleeing for specific reasons. They’re expressing particular values. Those reasons and values are her marching orders and there’s nothing murky about them.
I’d go even further and say that they amount to a mandate, which is this: To safeguard the very America — compassionate, collaborative, decent — that Trump routinely degrades.
First, though, some math. As Damon Linker explains in the Week, Clinton is in a position to notch up a resounding victory by historical standards. As of late Tuesday, the Real Clear Politics average of recent polls put her 5.4 percentage points ahead of Trump in a four-way race and 5.1 ahead in a one-on-one matchup. In three of the last six presidential elections, the margin of victory was significantly smaller than that; in the other three it was larger, although only slightly in the 1992 contest (5.5 per cent), which her husband won.
Given early-voting patterns, Trump’s erratic behaviour and Clinton campaign’s superior ground game, I think she’ll exceed current projections; an ABC News tracking poll last week had her up by 12. The largest national margin since Ronald Reagan’s 18.2-point advantage in 1984 was the 8.5-point spread with which Bill Clinton was re-elected, and that was 20 years ago.
It’s true that none of the victors in the contests over the last three decades had an opponent as unprepared, unsteady and unsavoury as Trump. But it’s also true that Trump is the protest candidate — the “change agent”, in prognosticators’ preferred parlance — at a juncture unfavourable to an insider like Clinton, who’s no darling of voters to begin with.
So if voters hand Trump an overwhelming defeat, it’s a bold statement, with undeniable messages. They’d be saying that sexism like his is intolerable. That’s evident in the yawning gender gap that he confronts, in the disproportionate number of women who are voting early and in the possible surge, after Election Day, of women in Congress. The Year of Trump is turning out to be the true Year of the Woman, and not only because of a glass ceiling’s shattering.
This gives Clinton a mandate to make sure America’s public discourse and laws never treat women as subordinate to men.
Voters who weren’t intrinsically anti-Trump but ended up in that column are punishing him for the way he attacked the family of deceased American soldier Humayun Khan, former miss Universe Alicia Machado and so many others before and since. That’s clear in the words and timing of Republican leaders who defected from Trump. Each reached a point where, for reasons moral or political, Trump’s pettiness and viciousness could no longer be shrugged off.
There’s a mandate for Clinton in this as well. It’s to rise above and push back at the corrosive politics of insult, and she did more to betray than to honour this with her “basket of deplorables”.
Trump’s repudiation by a definitive majority will tell Clinton that she’s being trusted, as Trump never could be, to lift America above such labelling and — to borrow a bit from her own stump speech — build bridges instead of walls.
While her election may not be any validation of her prescriptions for health care, the Middle East or trade, it would say loudly and clearly that America cannot survive the divisiveness that Trump promotes and will not abide by the bigotry that he projects.
Acting in accordance with that wouldn’t give America’s first female president most (or even much) of the legislation that she wants. But it would give her all of the authority that she needs.
— New York Times News Service
Frank Bruni is a writer and author of Born Round and Ambling into History.
