Trump, the Working Class Candidate

The American president represents a kind of politics that is not ideological and that rejects the current system. In his first campaign act, he was the victim of one of the aspect of this novelty, the weight of social networks.

In the United States, the president is selected by an Electoral College of 538 members, who are appointed according to the legislation of each state in the Union. The candidate that gets a minimum of 270 electoral votes becomes the new leader of the country. Maine and Nebraska use a method meant to allow the representation of minorities. The winner of the statewide vote gets the two electoral Senate votes, and the person who wins in each Congressional district gets one electoral vote. In every other state, whoever wins statewide, even if it’s by one vote, wins all of the state delegates’ electoral votes.*

That’s why there is little campaigning done in states considered “secured” by one of the parties; because they have repeatedly won elections in that state and because their candidate is leading the polls. When these two conditions aren’t reached, the state is cataloged as a swing state, in which any candidate can get all the delegates’ electoral votes.

Surprise

In 2016, Donald Trump took many people by surprise: he won in the industrial Northern states, which were cataloged as Democrat. He won in Michigan with 47.5% to 47.3%, in Pennsylvania with 48.58% to 47.86%, and in Wisconsin with 47.2% to 46.45%. Those small percentages gave him 55 electoral votes. Without them, the 304 votes that Trump got, would have been 249, and if we added the Northern share to Hillary Clinton’s 227, they would have totaled 282. Clinton would have been president.

In the United States, polls about the nationwide vote intention create confusion, since the important thing is the number of delegates. Democrats triumphed widely in the states with a larger presence of the intellectual elite. New York (59/58), Massachusetts (61/34), California (62/32), Washington, D.C., (90/4), but even if Trump’s recent behavior widens the gap to 90/1, the number of delegates does not change; the same thing occurs with the given groups of electors. Trump got 8% of votes among African Americans, against Clinton’s 88%. It’s possible that the mobilizations because of George Floyd’s death may have weakened him among liberal voters, and strengthened him among racists. But in order to win the election, it is better for him to lose tens of thousands of votes in a decided state if in exchange for that he gets a few that allow him to win in a swing state.

The proposal of defunding the police increased Trump’s votes. The vast majority may criticize those in uniform, but if they disappear, they’d fear to be victims of crimes. The consequences of these demonstrations will depend on how swing-state electors react.

Ideology

This new kind of politics is not ideological. It’s a way of doing politics that utilizes people with different views of the world, who reject the current system. Some of these leaders believe in science and participate in the Intelligence Revolution, some others are anachronistic, but they all want this to change.

Regarding ideas, the Democratic Party gathers the most progressive Americans. Oddly enough, their last candidates have had an anachronistic image. Clinton looked like the representation of the Establishment, with her impeccably tailored suit, her husband, and her attitude of a well-educated lady. It was hard for her to attract the anti-Establishment voters of Bernie Sanders, who wasn’t so much into ideologies in that campaign and represented a liberalism linked to Woodstock.

In this election, Biden is a politician with a great resume, who speaks like an educated person. Like Clinton, his image is not that of someone who seeks a change. He wouldn’t be very welcomed at Silicon Valley. If Bill Gates was the Democratic candidate, he could severely defeat the electorate of the hesitant states.

Trump is an anti-system candidate who annoys serious politicians and well-educated people. He was the host of a reality show and continued acting as such in his campaign and at the White House. He is extremely nationalistic, but also the son of a Scottish immigrant mother, a German father, and married to a Slovenian woman. His speech is xenophobic, against immigration, economically protectionist and contrary to the political elites in Washington. When he ran for president, many people didn’t take him seriously; they thought he was just advertising the products of his company.

Provocation

He made elites laugh with his bizarre hair and his outrageous comments, but he could understand the frustration and contained rage of the white working-class affected by the technological revolution, globalization and immigration.

He harnessed their fears, hatred and prejudice, using racist language highly disliked by well-educated people and by most media. By doing this, Trump provoked their aggressive reaction, and at the same time, he became stronger among the white working-class.

His Twitter account, @realdonaldtrump, irritated the good citizens that have their tea at Four Seasons Hotel, with a mocking, rude and defiant speech, but he was the “anti-politician” that millions of anti-politics voters wanted to hear. John Brabender, a Republican political consultant, said that Trump didn’t pass the cocktail party test: in a social gathering, well-educated middle-class Republicans are ashamed of saying that they will vote for him.

The 2005 video from “Access Hollywood,” in which Trump bragged about touching women because he was a celebrity, appeared in the middle of his campaign. He was rejected by important personalities from the Grand Old Party like former President George Bush, former House Speaker Paul Ryan, and Utah Gov. Gary Herbert. Trump said that he’d said those things “in order to entertain.” His violent and chauvinistic attitude favored him in some areas and weakened him in others. He got an overwhelming majority among men (53/41) and was defeated among women (42/54).

As for this incident, some said that Trump was a clown, that he would be crushed by Clinton’s campaign and they even asked for the party to change the candidate. It was different with the white working-class, they represented a lower-middle-class that wanted a change, sick of the lack of progress. They wanted to end eight years of a Democratic-run government and replace the kind of politicians they didn’t trust. Those were many of Trump’s voters, especially in the states that gave him the win.

The most important mass media in the country turned against him. 683 of the most prestigious media and TV shows supported Clinton, and only 13 supported Trump. His threat against CNN, the most-respected TV channel on the continent, because they published a poll was another circus-like action. Like any other autocrat, he hates freedom of the press, but with that attitude, he positions himself as a character left out of the system.

Networks

Social networks will be a decisive element in the politics of the upcoming years. Old politicians thought that the platforms could be used to manipulate people, but that is false. The vertical society in which the teacher beat students, the husband beat the wife, and the politician harangued the obedient masses is now dying. The myths of fake news and Cambridge Analytics helped frighten people in the last campaign, but they don’t make much sense. There are as many Russian experts in elections as there are Tuaregs who specialize in polar bears.

Trump’s campaign was inaugurated Saturday, June 20 at the Tulsa, Oklahoma Bank of Oklahoma Center arena, which has 19,000 seats. Trump tweeted that “Almost One Million people requested tickets for the Saturday Night Rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma!” And one local official said that they expected tens of thousands to overflow the place and that a stage had been prepared for the candidate to speak. There were only 6,300 people, and the platform in a lonely square had to be pulled down.

Social networks made people’s freedom greater, they gave power to people who do whatever they want to, and do not obey their leaders or organizations.

Thousands of teenage Tik Tok users had registered to attend the event and pranked the campaign. This is a platform created for teenagers and it didn’t interest politicians. Teens had created a viral video with the subtitle: “Doing the macarena in front of my confirmation for 2 tickets to Trump’s rally so those 2 seats will be empty.” Hundreds of thousands did the same thing, virtually leaving the place of the event empty.

James Dennis, a professor at the University of Portsmouth, U.K. and author of “Beyond Slacktivism: Political Participation on Social Media,” told Newsweek magazine that it was a good example of how small acts of digital activism can make an impact when they go viral because they are easy to do, fun, and they contribute to a cause that their authors consider noble. This is one of the self-organized mobilizations that we’ve talked about many times in this column.

Trump has had problems with social media platforms. Twitter has censored his messages many times because they considered them to be fake news or inciting violence. Facebook had the opposite attitude. Mark Zuckerberg said that his platform won’t be “arbiter of truth.” The controversy started with a statement from Trump, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Twitter considered it as inciting violence, but Facebook allowed it to stay up on the website. These are the debates of the politics of the future, in which authoritarianisms will have difficulties.

Editor’s note: The United States selects its president through the Electoral College system. There are 538 electors appointed by each state, and the number of electors each state gets equals the total number of senators (always two) and the number of its representatives in Congress. The candidate who receives the votes of 270 electors or more wins the presidential election. Maine and Nebraska use an alternative method of appointing electors. These states allocate one electoral vote to each congressional district. The winner of each district wins one electoral vote, and the winner of the statewide vote wins the states’ remaining two Senate electoral votes.