The 77,000 votes test: One year later, what not to learn from the 2016 election

It’s easy to draw the wrong conclusions from the small fraction of votes that put Donald Trump in the White House

Zero-point-zero-six percent. Of all the votes cast for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, 0.06 percent of them tipped the electoral college in favor of the Republican nominee. Putting aside the fact that Clinton received nearly 3 million more votes than her opponent, and that the electoral college has kept the winner of the popular vote from the White House in two of the last five presidential elections, that number should serve as a warning to progressives across the country: be wary of rewriting an entire political strategy based on what most would consider rounding error.

To be clear, that 0.06 percent wasn’t an actual rounding error; it was a hugely consequential difference in votes that changed the course of history. But it’s such a small fraction of the total votes cast that it’s a highly narrow and unsubstantiated foundation on which to base an argument that the Democratic party needs to upend its entire message, platform, and outlook if it wants to win another national election.

That’s not to say progressives don’t have a lot of hard lessons to learn from the last election cycle. They certainly do, starting, perhaps, with the importance of campaigning in the communities where they want people to vote for them. But it’s also far too easy to draw the wrong conclusions from 77,000 votes in three swing states that could easily have gone the other way.

Predictably, Clinton has been pilloried for noting some of the reasons why she lost (besides the candidate and the campaign’s shortcomings, which she’s acknowledged at length). Like many analysts, Clinton has pointed to a number of outside factors that influenced the outcome, from Russian interference in the election, to the media’s obsession with her emails (how’s that one holding up?), to former FBI director James Comey’s October 28th letter.

As FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver has argued, the Comey letter alone probably did shift enough votes to swing the election to Trump. But the point in sharing this list isn’t to relitigate exactly how or why Clinton lost the election; it’s to say that any one of these events could have tipped enough votes either way. In other words, we should be cautious of over-interpreting the significance of her loss.

Since Trump announced his candidacy for president, a common thought exercise has been to take something that Trump, his campaign, or his administration has said or done and consider how the country would have responded had Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton said or done the same. Although this exercise doesn’t necessarily accomplish much, it’s a deeply revealing look at the American psyche for its stark, excruciating exposure of the enormous double standard to which this country holds African Americans, women, and most people other than straight white men.

But an equally telling thought exercise is to ask the question, “What would have happened if 77,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania had gone the other way?” Would we still be having the same conversation and drawing the same conclusions about the Clinton campaign, the Democratic party, or the American electorate if the crucial 0.06 percent of the votes had gone for Clinton? If a post-election conclusion doesn’t hold up against this line of questioning, then it’s a political opinion in search of electoral evidence — a bias in search of a confirmation — rather than a lesson to be taken to heart.

A common post-election argument that clearly fails the “77,000 votes going the other way” test might sound something like this: “Hillary Clinton ran a disastrous campaign that was doomed from the start!” Yes, Clinton has her flaws, and her campaign made many mistakes, but no undertaking whose outcome hinges on a margin smaller than most rounding errors was doomed from the start.

Another post-2016 bias in search of confirmation, especially among the political establishment, has been that progressives need to redirect their entire platform toward the so-called “white working class.” That’s a profound conclusion to draw from a profoundly inconclusive number of votes, particularly when exit polls suggest that Clinton won among voters making less than $50,000 a year but lost among white college-educated men and barely won majority support from white college-educated women.

As Nate Silver pointed out in May of 2016, at that point in the Republican primary Trump voters’ median income was more than $70,000, exceeding the national median income ($56,000), as well as the median incomes of Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters ($61,000). The point, of course, is not that Democrats shouldn’t focus on the working class; it’s that they should focus on all working class Americans, not just the white ones. Nearly one year since November 8, 2016, that’s a conclusion that passes the 77,000 vote test.

Here’s another one that passes the test: voter suppression works. Wisconsin is a case in point, though far from the only case. As Ari Berman wrote recently in a must-read Mother Jones cover story, voter turnout plummeted in Wisconsin from 2012 to 2016 following the implementation of a highly restrictive voter ID law. As Berman noted, “more than half the state’s decline in turnout occurred in Milwaukee, which Clinton carried by a 77–18 margin, but where almost 41,000 fewer people voted in 2016 than in 2012.”

In a state decided by fewer than 23,000 votes, that decline is catastrophic for Democratic candidates — and for the legitimacy of a democratic election. Yet instead of covering these anti-democratic efforts with the seriousness and thoroughness they deserve, Berman writes, in post-election media coverage, “voter suppression efforts were practically ignored, when they weren’t mocked.” Democrats shouldn’t make the same mistake as the media.

Here’s a final conclusion that passes the 77,000 vote test: white resentment remains as significant a driving force in American politics as ever. Even if those 77,000 votes had gone the other way — even if Trump hadn’t ended up in the White House — the fact that he’d come so close with majority support from nearly every white voting demographic would have been more than enough to conclude that no, the United States still isn’t a post-racial society, and no, the consequences of centuries of dehumanization and discrimination still have not been remedied. That conclusion has been true throughout American history, and it would be true whether or not Trump was spending 2017 on The Apprentice or in the White House.

Each of these takeaways stands the test of the 77,000 votes and, in the United States, the test of time. Instead of focusing the Washington consensus of criticizing Hillary Clinton while chasing after the mythical “white working class” at the expense of the “entire working class,” Democrats should double down on what they stand for and what works. That means telling voters proudly and confidently why they fight for social, racial, and economic justice — a platform that encompasses most wings of the party — and then setting about winning that fight. They can start by focusing relentlessly on dismantling the obstacles that prevent far too many Americans from being able to exercise their right to vote.

Does Clinton deserve responsibility for her loss? Of course, starting with the fact that she and her team allowed the race to get close enough that 77,000 votes could change the outcome. Are there lessons progressives should learn from her campaign? Absolutely.

But those lessons are far more difficult than simply blaming Hillary Clinton or focusing more on white voters — two deeply American traditions that put Donald Trump in the Oval Office.

This column was originally published in the Medium publication ‘Extra Newsfeed.’