US presidential election: \'The race, stupid\'

In the USA, in 1948, all polls of the time and predictions had stated that the Republican nominee Thomas E Dewey would easily defeat the Democratic Party's nominee and the incumbent President Harry Truman who had become the President after Franklin D Roosevelt had died in office in 1946. That election was considered one of the greatest upsets in US presidential election. The US presidential election 2016 in which Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton has been even a bigger upset.

And all the polls, the media election pundits and even the Republican Party and Donald Trump's own campaign team had predicted that Hillary Clinton would become the first woman President of the United States. All expected that to happen except Donald Trump. On the eve of election night he said at midnight in Florida that the media, the pollsters, etcetera, etcetera were wrong and he would win Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Michigan and become the next president.

Thus all those who had predicted an easy win for Hillary Clinton scrambled for explaining one of the biggest election debacles in modern US history. The scramble is going on but a consensus on the explanation is emerging. That explanation is such a simple one that it in its wake is bringing out another mystery which is how it has been possible that all the experts and the pundits who had spent so much time and energy examining and analysing the election process had missed the most obvious fact that the issue of race was always there that Donald Trump exploited successfully on way to becoming the 45th President of the country.

Donald Trump won the US Presidential election 2016 despite all predictions to the contrary on the factor of race and race alone. His message to the majority white that constitutes 73 per cent of the country's population was that people of colour were taking away the country from them and they needed to unite against them and the immigrants.

The white working class of the Republican Party that suffered economic miseries embraced the racial message wholeheartedly. The Republican Party in its entirety accepted the message as the election process evolved. The crucial turning point came when many working class whites in the Democratic Party embraced Donald Trump's racial message. The Democratic Party failed to see the race factor in its full potential because it was lured into complacency by the media: polls and political pundits concluded confidently that the nature of Donald Trump's campaign and his personal character was such that Hillary Clinton would win very easily.

The white working class in the Democratic Party who crossed the party line and voted for the Republican candidate made the difference in the crucial Blue States of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin that sealed the fate of Hillary Clinton. If she had won these three states that it considered its firewall, Donald Trump would have lost. In fact, the Democrats were so convinced about Wisconsin that Hillary Clinton did not even go there once to campaign. She went to Michigan only once. When Donald Trump went to campaign in Michigan sensing the Democratic working class was crossing the party line, the Democratic Party thought that Donald Trump was wasting his time there.  The Democratic Party's misplaced confidence and the irony was based upon the fact that President Obama had turned Michigan's automobile industry on its head for the betterment of the working class.

The Democratic Party also was lured into misplaced complacency in Pennsylvania where it did not campaign seriously enough and it failed to realise that Donald Trump's racial message was sinking among its white working class supporters. The Democratic Party also made the same mistake in Ohio that was a swing state and where it campaigned seriously but without realising that the working class whites in its own party were quietly in the process of deciding to vote for Donald Trump attracted by little else but his racial message.

Still, Hillary Clinton could have offset the massive force of the racial call to the whites if the following had happened that the media and political pundits had predicted. First, if the Hispanics, African Americans, and women, who had every reason to unite against Donald Trump, had done so in record numbers. That did not happen. Unbelievably, 53 per cent women voted for Donald Trump! The Hispanics were not seriously bothered either with the insults or with the threats to them and voted for Hillary Clinton in numbers lesser than they did in 2012 for President Obama. In 2012, 71 per cent of them had voted for President Obama; this time 65 per cent went for Hillary Clinton. The African Americans had voted 93 per cent for President Obama in 2012; this time 88 per cent voted for Hillary Clinton.

Adding misfortune to these falling numbers among Hispanics and African Americans voters, Hillary Clinton failed to energise her own Party. Democrats in good numbers stayed away from voting influenced by the Republican propaganda that the election was a choice between the lesser of two evils. The supporters of Bernie Sanders also did not fully come behind Hillary Clinton. And the millennials who were expected to vote in greater number for Hillary Clinton did not do so as many of them were depressed enough for the same reason for which many Democrats did not vote.

The FBI Director James Comey's letter to Congress opening the Achilles Heel of Hillary Clinton's campaign, her email saga based on nothing but a hunch with just 11 days left before the election, acted as the final nail in the coffin of her campaign in two ways. First, it helped to unite the Republican Party. After the "Access Hollywood" video, the Republican Party was breaking at its seams and Republicans in the race in the Congress were considering him as a pariah. But in the critical final days of the election it sensed that the doors were opening for Donald Trump to win. Second, it depressed many Democratic, independent and undecided voters not to vote that favoured Donald Trump.

The FBI Director addressed a second letter a day before the election. He acknowledged that his intervention with his first letter was indeed a hunch and the 65,000 emails found in Congressmen Anthony Weiner's laptop were duplicates of emails the FBI had examined earlier or been of personal nature. The FBI Director's first letter therefore was illegal and conspiratorial without a doubt and it had a major adverse impact in Hillary Clinton's defeat. She herself has singled out the role of the FBI Director as the main reason for her defeat.

Nevertheless, in retrospect, it has been the factor of race that Donald Trump exploited successfully that united the Republican Party in the end and with them the Democratic working class whites to win an election that no one except the candidate himself believed he had any serious chance of winning. Thus like the elder President Bush's campaign team and his party were told after his loss to President Clinton in 1992 that it was 'The economy, stupid' as the reason for his loss, Hillary Clinton's campaign team and the Democratic Party would be told when the final analysis is made on the US presidential election 2016 that 'The race, stupid.'

The writer is a former Ambassador.

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