America's Post-Election Political Landscape

Brenna Miller 

Welcome to History Talk, the podcast that brings together a panel of experts to discuss current events in historical perspective. I'm your new host, Brenna Miller.

 

Jessica Blissit 

And I'm your other new host, Jessica Blissit. The 2016 presidential election has been historic for having the first female nominee from a major party and for electing the first person to have never before served in office or in the military. But the vitriol and divisiveness of the campaign has also seemed historic too, as levels of citizens' trust in the candidates and the system seem at an all-time low. All of this came to a head on election night, when the polls showing a Clinton win turned into a Trump victory.

 

Brenna Miller 

We're here with three historians to try to make sense of this by placing the 2016 election into historical perspective, and to examine where we may be going from here.

 

Jessica Blissit 

Via phone from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, we have Dr. Kimberly Hamlin, an associate professor of history and American studies. She specializes on women and gender history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

 

Kimberly Hamlin 

Hello.

 

Brenna Miller 

And in the studio, we have with us Marc Horger, a senior lecturer in the Department of Human Sciences at The Ohio State University, specializing in cultural and intellectual history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

 

Marc Horger 

Pleasure to be here.

 

Jessica Blissit 

And finally, we also have Paula Baker, an associate professor at Ohio State University, who studies American political history, especially campaign finance.

 

Dr. Paula Baker 

Good morning.

 

Brenna Miller 

Thanks to all of you for joining us today. So we kept hearing that the election was the ugliest it's ever been. But this is far from the first presidential campaign in which things turned ugly. So how does this election compare to past elections as far as personal tax and accusations of criminal behavior go? And is there any reason to how and why such personal attacks sometimes dissipate versus gaining traction? And I think we'll start here, maybe with Marc.

 

Marc Horger 

Okay, well, you can certainly come up with previous presidential cycles where there was a great deal of intense personal unpleasantness between the candidates. The one I think might be the closest example might be 1828, when supporters of John Quincy Adams were quite open in their efforts to try to disqualify Andrew Jackson from the presidency on the basis of how many people he had killed personally, or had killed under his direct supervision, either as a horse racing tout in the streets of Nashville or as a militia leader. And so you can think of examples along those lines. When I was trying to come up with an analogy, though, of the character of the animosity this cycle, and in particular, the degree to which the character of this animosity wasn't just personal animus against the Clinton candidacy, but also based in xenophobic, and I suppose we might as well just say them calling racist attacks not just against the candidate, but against your coalition. The other analogy I thought of was the 1928 cycle when Al Smith was nominated by the Democrats, as the first Roman Catholic to be nominated on a major party ticket. And there was a great deal of anti-Catholic rhetoric in that campaign, that would strike the modern observer as similar in its xenophobia to what we've seen this cycle.

 

Brenna Miller 

Were those criticisms in the past, those kinds of attacks as effective or do you think that they gain more or less traction?

 

Marc Horger 

Well, it's hard to judge because in the two examples I gave you, the perpetrators both won but the perpetrators both had significant structural advantages in the electorate that suggest they would have won no matter what the rhetoric in the campaign. Here we have an election that was very, very closely run on the map, county to county. In fact, if you actually go in and look at the vote totals, it looks strikingly like the 2000 election, in which we have a situation where one candidate narrowly won the popular vote and gained seats in both houses of Congress, and yet managed to suffer devastating defeat, based on where the votes fell in the Electoral College. So the question of whether xenophobic approaches were effective this cycle strikes me as a much more live question for analysis than previous examples I can think of in earlier cycles.

 

Jessica Blissit 

Paula?

 

Dr. Paula Baker 

The level of personal attack in this cycle strikes me as kind of not unusual, we could look at 1828, we could look at 1824 and its aftermath, we can look for most any election in the nineteenth century. I began to think about 1884, in this connection, also where the election seemed to have to do with how on one side, one candidate had an illegitimate child, and on the other side, a candidate who had a history of corruption, dealings with railroads, that sort of thing. So all of that strikes me as not particularly unusual and not something where, on the other hand, we seem to get ourselves up into a lather about how this was an incredibly divisive election and all of that. And at the end, your question about whether this takes us anywhere and what has traction, it's really up to us and civil society. What I don't see is anything here as divisive say, as slavery.

 

Jessica Blissit 

Yeah, it's good to keep those things in context.

 

Marc Horger 

And other election cycles where you could see similar kinds of obviously xenophobic, rather, and racist approaches, where the degree to which the Democrats rebuilt themselves as a national party in the 1860s and 1870s, on a quite explicitly a white supremacist platform, branding the Republicans as the Black Republicans. A lot of the iconography of those elections were quite obviously, quite frankly, even by the standards of the day, quite obviously racist. It's not like you have to read that back as a historian from a contemporary example.

 

Dr. Paula Baker 

Except that even in 1872, the Democrats noticed that they weren't going to carry a national election with that in mind. And so at that point, we're looking for some sort of new departure and the Democrats struggled with that.

 

Marc Horger 

Yeah, another cycle that I saw as an analogy, not in terms of what the campaign itself was like, but if we're interested in, Paula mentioned, how we handle this moving forward as a divided nation and as a divided culture. The other cycle that occurred to me as analogous was 1920, where the campaign itself was not particularly vitriolic, but in retrospect, that clearly represents a turning point between an era in American history where a generation of immigration had made the country much more cosmopolitan, particularly in urban areas, and in which the Wilson administration had recently based a great deal of its legitimacy on the internationalist nature of its foreign policy views. That was followed by a period of social violence after World War One, of labor strikes in 1919, the people associated with Bolshevism, race riots in places like Chicago, what we today would almost certainly call terrorist bombings and fear of domestic infiltration. And there was a period of social violence that a lot of Americans interpreted as the result of the confluence of the country becoming more cosmopolitan and the country becoming more internationalist. And it was followed by an era of immigration restriction, an era in which the politics of city versus country revolved around things like the emergence of the Klu Klux Klan, the second Ku Klux Klan. And I think, speaking as someone from the center-left, looking back to previous cycles for what I'm afraid might happen, the cultural politics of the 1920s represents something that I think some of the people who were very disappointed this week are afraid we might be entering into.

 

Dr. Paula Baker 

Well, though we should remember that it was the Democratic, it was Woodrow Wilson, who had -

 

Marc Horger 

Yes.

 

Dr. Paula Baker 

- clamped down on dissent and all of that. And it was, on the other hand, the Democrats, the Democratic Party's job to rebuild its shattered base.

 

Marc Horger 

Yes.

 

Dr. Paula Baker 

But never quite figured it out.

 

Marc Horger 

And the coalitions were so different at the time, that that was an election where that was not a fact. I think that might have been the largest popular vote spread of any straight two-party election. And so the coalitions were very different. But I know a lot of people who are disappointed this week are as disappointed about whether or not we're going to enter a period where the kind of white nationalist politics that's been represented on social media the last six months or so, is that going to taper off? Or are we going to be dealing with that in the culture over the next ten years?

 

Jessica Vinas-Nelson 

Well, that's a perfect transition to our next question. So as Mark pointed out, there were some gains by Democrats in the House and Senate, even though it wasn't enough. So while the first female nominee from a major party was defeated this year, the Senate now has more female senators than ever before, and is generally becoming more ethnically diverse. What did the election expose about what's going on in the country in terms of race and gender? Kimberly?

 

Kimberly Hamlin 

Thank you for that. I think that in terms of the level of vitriol, I do think, before we talk about where we're going, to emphasize that the contrast or distinction between the 2016 election is the course right level of misogyny that was expressed during the campaign. And I think it's important to connect that to other trends in our culture, such as rape culture and the continued problems of sexual harassment and sexual assaults on college campuses and elsewhere. And I think in the way that our media, in some ways tacitly, in some places explicitly, condones, accepts, promotes such things through the sorts of television shows and movies that we watch. So I think that that is, for me, a huge part of this election, I do think that it revealed, exposed, made acceptable some of these darker areas of our culture. I drove to work in southwest Ohio behind bumper stickers that say, "Trump that bitch." So I think we need to acknowledge that that was an important part of this election. But on the looking forward side, in some ways, I also feel like maybe this is a Clarence Thomas moment, because I've been thinking about Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, and we saw the confirmation of Clarence Thomas by an all-white, all-male Judiciary Committee, and then the largely white male congressional approval, but as a result of this sort of public nature of those hearings and the public referendum on sexual assault, or sexual harassment and sexual assault, now we have a culture that recognizes that sexual harassment is illegal, that it is a thing, that there are lawyers who specialize in this, and that women can now bring claims about sexual harassment and win, even in places like Fox News, whereas previously, that wasn't part of our national consciousness, the level that it is now. So that's in some ways how I'm thinking about this, maybe we have the moment where we discussed the sorts of misogynistic things that Trump has said, and that Trump's candidacy, the election of Trump has made kind of, in some ways, you may say, acceptable or so, and that people think that that's okay. But that in the aftermath of this, maybe we'll have a larger conversation, which will lead to real change on those issues.

 

Dr. Paula Baker 

Was misogyny okay when it had to do with Sarah Palin?

 

Kimberly Hamlin 

No, or Elizabeth Dole. I mean, I've written a lot about the history of other women running for president and they too were 100% subject to misogynistic attacks. But because they didn't make it as far as Hillary, neither did these misogynistic attacks. Of course, misogyny was a factor for Sarah Palin. Of course, it was for Geraldine Ferraro. Of course, it was for Margaret Chase Smith and all of the women who ran before, but we didn't talk about it as much because they were not the major party nominee.

 

Jessica Blissit 

So it didn't create, of course, any of these tendencies, but by exposing them and even stirring them up, it's led to a conversation that you see as potentially being productive.

 

Kimberly Hamlin 

Yes, that's what my hopeful side is saying.

 

Brenna Miller 

Well, let's turn to sort of a question of trust in the system. So despite the lack of evidence supporting Trump's claims of voting rigging, or potential voting rigging, the numbers of people who shared his suspicions suggests that there was a profound mistrust of the democratic system as a whole, the media, and political elites. So any thoughts on how such a lack of trust played out in the past and what might have contributed to our lack of trust in the system and elites today?

 

Marc Horger 

Well, it's difficult to know how to approach that because the people who thought they didn't trust the system seemed to have won and so now they're not so worried about trusting the system. I will say that again, to compare this cycle to the 2000 cycle, even in terms of the way it played out election night, obviously, this didn't last for a month. But we saw a similar play out on election night of an election that did not look close at the beginning of the night, and then narrowed down and narrowed down and narrowed down and narrowed down and then led to a situation where there might have been recounts, and the person who had won the popular vote, it looked like they weren't going to win the electoral vote. And I actually think part of the reason that things have been calm, with respect to the legitimacy of the election under those circumstances, is that a lot of people went through it in 2000. And a lot of people saw the system survive the process of filtering it out, in what was actually a much more prolonged and problematic situation than this one was. I also have a suspicion that there were so many unusual and unprecedented things about this particular cycle that it can be hard to separate them all out. And things that under ordinary circumstances would have stood out as something to be outraged about just get buried in the total signal.

 

Jessica Blissit 

Such as?

 

Marc Horger 

Well, I think there are three or perhaps four different layers of how Donald Trump is an unprecedented candidate, that we tend to conflate when we talk about him, some of which we've already mentioned. The one is that he's completely devoid of any kind of public service experience of any kind. His rhetoric was both xenophobic and also obviously less interested in leaving a trail of breadcrumbs back to the truth than previous candidates. And in fact, some of the divisive rhetoric we've been talking about when we've been making analogies to previous cycles, most of them have been by surrogates. The anti-Catholicism in 1928, I don't recall coming out of Herbert Hoover's mouth, it was traced to surrogates.

 

Dr. Paula Baker 

Candidates still were shy about campaigning in person at all, so.

 

Jessica Blissit 

Not the case this election.

 

Marc Horger 

Not the case this election. And then there's also the layer of Trump getting the nomination despite being largely at war with his party on a variety of policy and structural -

 

Dr. Paula Baker 

And continued to be.

 

Marc Horger 

And continuing to be.

 

Dr. Paula Baker 

I mean, in the middle of the campaign, picking fights with Paul Ryan. The closest analogy I could think of here is 1848, which was different because it was the Whig Party that picked Zach Taylor, not the base that probably would have preferred Henry Clay. But as someone who had never voted, wasn't clear he was a Whig or anything else, was writing too much, which was that version of talking too much. To the point where the party leadership was really trying to shut him down and stick a pillow over him.

 

Jessica Blissit 

They cut off his Twitter access.

 

Dr. Paula Baker 

They did their version of cutting up, just pulling...yes, of doing that. And who then wasn't allowed to say something like, "I'm a Whig, not an ultra-Whig," and wound up being someone in office, the two years that he served before he died, being someone who confounded both parties.

 

Jessica Blissit 

Kimberly, do you have anything to add?

 

Kimberly Hamlin 

One thing that I've been thinking a lot about that also, I think, maybe distinguishes this election or that this election is the culmination of some twentieth century trends. One I think a lot about is what some sociologists, there's a great book called, The Big Sort, you know, sort of how we sort ourselves into like-minded groups and how this longer tradition of civil discussion, civil debate being kind of eroded in last 30-40 years, and I also thinking here of Jill Lepore's great recent article in The New Yorker about the presidential debates, but also about how regular people debate and sort of the demise of high school debate teams and the fact that now we have again, since the '70s and '80s, really sorted ourselves into kind of like-minded bubbles that play out in electoral maps in terms of redistricting and that play out by supporting extremism. Because when we mostly talk to people who believe what we believe, it's easier to go extreme. Whereas when we talk to people with whom we disagree, that conversation tends to moderate itself as you learn other ideas. And now, I think, one other thing that I'm thinking about, and I think that this election is not necessarily distinguished by because this is a longer trend, but I think it's maybe the kind of apotheosis of is this "big sort" of ourselves into extreme camps. And I feel like, I don't know as a nation, how many more 49.8 to 49.9 elections, we're going to have before we start thinking, how can we maybe reverse this trend? How can we talk to each other? And how do we engage with people with whom we disagree in the absence of bowling leagues and sort of community ties that used to bring people of different ideas into contact with each other.

 

Marc Horger 

You can trace Kimberly's point on the map, on the electoral map, particularly if you think about this as the replay of similar developments over the last few cycles. And significant examples of the "big sort" that you can see on the map is that if anything, the city mouse/country mouse thing has been intensifying and becoming more uniform nationally, and regional differences, North/South, going away a little bit too. So to take some specific examples, in Ohio, in the 2000 cycle, there were pockets of strong Democratic support in parts of the state that were industrial, but not urban and cosmopolitan, in particular, along the Ohio River, parts of the industrial northeast, and those are now solidly red, and in particular, have moved particularly to the right since the Obama cycles. Cincinnati, on the other hand, was once a city that voted Republican. And Cincinnati now looks very much like any other city. The other map I looked at closely was the Texas map, and Hillary Clinton did as well on a percentage basis in Texas as she did in Ohio. And the map looks the same. She won Harris County substantially. She won Dallas substantially. She won Austin substantially. And she lost the West Texas flats by an equally large margin. And if you look at the electoral map in 2000, as a historian, your brain immediately goes, "Oh, look. There's North/South." But if you look at it county by county, you see evidence of what Kimberly is talking about that the people who are very disappointed this week overwhelmingly live near other people who were disappointed this week and vice versa.

 

Dr. Paula Baker 

One thing I'd be interested in what you think is we've seen a cycle since the 1980s, of what got summarized as the culture wars. And the culture wars, I think it's fair to say the Republicans lost, and lost through the 1990s, it was clear, and a loss that accelerated and we could see this also in what I think could only be described as the demoralization of evangelicals who are still part of the Republican coalition. But the kind of, you know, we have to get the kind of energy, we have a plan, we're mobilized, we're organized, seems to have dissipated, voted for Trump, despite that lots about Donald Trump's history was sort of anathema. So have we reached the, are we looking at the end, perhaps, of the energy drawn by the culture war?

 

Marc Horger 

Well, I have two quick observations about that. The first being that principled religious conservatives are in some ways as not just as disappointed, but as shocked to learn the world is not what they thought it was, as some people on the left are this week. My other observation about the culture wars is that I can think of a number of previous, the cultural turning points in which it's clear in the long run, that the liberals won the culture war and the culture, which was followed by an election where they lost at the polls. That's a common interpretation of the second half of the 1960s, where Jefferson Airplane wins in the culture and Richard Nixon winds up in the White House. And we may have a cycle like that, where a number of significant victories, in terms of gay marriage, in terms of putting transgender rights into the conversation in a way that it really wasn't maybe even four years ago, never mind eight years ago -

 

Dr. Paula Baker 

But part of what was striking about this cycle is how class seems to have mattered. We also see it on the fringes in the culture too, at least in terms of new books that have gotten lots of attention, White Trash, for example. And wondering if that's a different dynamic that's beginning to break.

 

Jessica Blissit 

So where do the parties go from here then? Are we going to keep them as is or are we seeing a realignment?

 

Marc Horger 

I had an answer ready for this when I thought Clinton was going to win a narrow victory. And I thought the asteroid would miss us this cycle, but that the asteroid would hit us in the mid-term cycle, because of the seats that the Democrats have. The conversation we're about to try to have now I thought we were going to have in two years. And this is actually why I think the boring issue of staffing of the administration may actually be quite interesting to pay attention to, in terms of whether or not the White House and congressional leadership actually wind up at war with one another in the way that the rhetoric of the campaign suggested they might. You know, that's kind of a question mark as well.

 

Dr. Paula Baker 

Well, and also in all of this, we need to remember that events matter. And that events that haven't happened yet. Otherwise, I get the sense that there'll be some tension in the Democratic Party in two ways. One is the kind of Sanders or Warren/Clinton divide that will have to get itself worked out. And the other is just the sort of nuts-and-bolts stuff in rebuilding state parties. I mean, Obama had once talked about, and put into practice in 2008, the 50-state strategy, which seems to have disappeared entirely, and so it's the wipeout in the states.

 

Marc Horger 

Yeah, and that's a consequence of the "big sort," too, if you look at the map, county by county.

 

Dr. Paula Baker 

Yeah. Well, and but that leaves a very shallow bench.

 

Marc Horger 

Yes.

 

Jessica Blissit 

Kimberly?

 

Kimberly Hamlin 

Another issue I think we should be mindful of, and especially as historians and humanities scholars, I want to urge us to keep thinking about and talking about, that I think has been revealed by this election, is our increasing trust on data and big data, and in this case, polling. I think, the 2016 election is also a story of misplaced trust in so-called "big data" in polls, and this is something that's continually and increasingly shaping our world. And I think we need to keep saying is this right? You know, data is not necessarily evidence, it's information, but it's not necessarily conclusive. Not all data is created equal. And I think that part of the shock of the 2016 election is that nobody really saw it coming except for maybe a few lone voices in political science, a few people in the Trump campaign, maybe, but for the most part, the people who trusted the polls, and look with hope to sort of The New York Times ticker every day, what are the odds? What are the odds? We were the ones who are most shocked. So I think this is a call to question our increasing reliance on big data and to also question sort of the ideology of big data, and what kind of information exactly it's contained in -

 

Dr. Paula Baker 

And to add to that, the other unusual thing about the Trump campaign is how little it spent, how few consultants it had on, and -

 

Marc Horger 

I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say they won the presidency without running a presidential campaign, in terms of what people used to think that meant.

 

Dr. Paula Baker 

And not in the sense that it's become where you needed your big data operation and had imagined those consultants, who have become not only stars in their own right but extraordinarily well paid, huh?

 

Kimberly Hamlin 

Yes.

 

Brenna Miller 

So as we're kind of wrapping up here then, any closing thoughts?

 

Dr. Paula Baker 

I was impressed by how, at least at some level, the institutions and normal stuff seemed to work, the speeches that we heard from Trump and Clinton and Obama, were all -

 

Marc Horger 

What they should have been.

 

Dr. Paula Baker 

- exactly what they should have been. And coming out of the craziness of this campaign, I found that striking and a good sign. And maybe we can, in a very strange way, expect some normal.

 

Marc Horger 

In terms of thinking about normal, one thing I will be trying to pay attention to is, because I expected to be outraged by the coming administration based on my personal political views, and so I will be trying to separate out whether I'm outraged by something that would have happened in the Cruz administration, or is it something that is happening that is uniquely problematic because it's not Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. But because it's something unique to who wound up on the top of the ticket, because those things can be very easy to conflate.

 

Kimberly Hamlin 

I'm heartened by a couple of things. One is the local elections, I think, tell a somewhat different story than Trump's victory, at least in southern Ohio, where I live. So I kind of am heartened by the local and energized by working more locally. And the second is I've been really heartened by the emergence of this wonderful secret Facebook group, "Pantsuit Nation." I don't know what extent other people are a member of this, but Hillary referenced it and thanked it in her wonderful and gracious and brilliant speech, and this has really emerged. And I hope that this can emerge as sort of a, you know, I hate to say this, but sort of a tea party for the left, in some ways it's a non-partisan. I mean, it's women and men from various political parties, from all sorts of backgrounds, from all around the country, united around this "Stronger Together" model. So it was united by support of Hillary but also in these larger ideals of what kind of nation do we want to live in, and how can we be stronger together? So one of the most heartening posts I saw on Wednesday was a woman who posted on "Pantsuit Nation," what if we made this a PAC? What if we made this a super PAC and how could we take this energy forward? So I hope that that happens, and I would really like to be a part of it and to one day live in Pantsuit Nation.

 

Jessica Blissit 

Well, we'll wrap it up on that note. Thank you to our three historians, Kimberly Hamlin, associate professor of history and American studies at Miami University, Mark Horger, a senior lecturer at OSU, and Paula Baker, an associate professor also at OSU.

 

Dr. Paula Baker 

Thank you.

 

Marc Horger 

Thank you.

 

Kimberly Hamlin 

Thank you so much.

 

Brenna Miller 

This episode of the History Talk podcast was brought to you by Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, an online publication of the Public History Initiative at the Goldberg Center and the history department at The Ohio State University in Columbus and Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Our main editors are Steven Conn and Nicholas Breyfogle. Our executive producer is David Staley and our audio and technical advisor is Paul Kotheimer. Our audio producers and hosts are Brenna Miller and Jessica Blissit. Song and band information can be found on our website. You can find our podcast and more on our website at origins.osu.edu, on iTunes, and on SoundCloud. And as always, you can find us on Twitter and Facebook. Thank you for listening.