I have never been more wrong in my 16 years as a political journalist than I was in 2016. In my defense, I was far from alone. To my shame, I especially should have seen this populist uprising coming.
I never thought President-elect Trump would win a single primary, much less the nomination. After he won the nomination, I thought he would lose the general election.
Trump’s victory truly was a surprise, because so many polls had never been wrong in such a meaningful way at the same time. I predicted the Electoral College going strongly for Clinton. My reasoning: she had a slight lead in the average of the polls in nearly all the swing states.
Year after year, I always justified following the poll-average with a baseball analogy: If a hitter always pulls the ball, then you position your outfield for him to the pull the ball. One day he may surprise you and slap a ball the opposite way, and you give up a triple. But all those years of taking away the left-field line from him will have made that triple a worthwhile price to pay.
Well, this year, we pundits who trust the polls paid the price for the years of leaning on that reliable guide. The polls weren’t wrong by much, but they were all wrong in the same direction, and across the threshold. In other words, not only did Trump win a handful of big states where the poll-average favored Clinton — Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan — he didn’t lose any of the states where he narrowly led the polls (Iowa, Ohio and North Carolina).
And while the “error” in these polls wasn’t huge — just a few points — it was decisive. By comparison, Obama outperformed most state polls in 2012, but that was the difference between a tiny win and a small win. Here, the same size error was the difference between a Clinton win and a Trump win — a Trump win which I had early on deemed nearly impossible, calling him “as close to a no-chance nominee as either party has seen in decades.”
Sad!
Less defensibly, I was wrong in the primaries because I didn’t trust the polls. Trump consistently led in the GOP primary polls basically from the moment he entered until the moment he won. I said he would fade away. In August I wrote “He’s going to shrivel up.” In December, I wrote, “nothing the brash billionaire could say or do can prevent the slide that is coming.”
I discounted national polls and the later-state polls, drawing on my 2004 experience with Howard Dean, 2012 with Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann, and so on — the loud-mouth beloved by the base but abandoned once voters get serious.
I correctly predicted that Cruz would win the Iowa caucuses, and I thought Trump would fade after his “winner” sheen was worn off. By mid-week in New Hampshire I knew I was wrong.
Why did I wave away the notion of the shy Trump voter in the general, and why did I dismiss Trump’s support in primary polls as weak? Because I misunderstood the nature and the magnitude of the populist ire in the provinces.
This is where I shift from Mea Culpa to Mea Maxima Culpa.
I had noticed, chronicled and cheered on the rising populist tide within the GOP for a more than decade. I was just mistaken, though, about its nature because I had projected my own views and biases onto this movement.
Suburban, heavily educated voters were going to flock to the Democrats, I wrote back in 2004, while blue-collar middle-America types would go the opposite way. Back then I thought the dividing line was social issues — mostly abortion and gay marriage.
The Right needed to become a populist movement, and the GOP should become the populist party, I argued in my 2009 book Obamanomics. At this point, I was mostly focusing on corporate welfare and cronyism. After the 2012 election, I argued, “Republicans need a new coalition and a new message. The heart of that coalition should be the working class. The message should be populism.”
I banged this drum again and again for the next few years.
So when the populist champion came and rose to the top of the polls, why didn’t I see it for what it was — the culmination of the populist uprising that had so clearly been brewing for years?
Maybe because my inside-the-Beltway sense of politics convinced me he would lose. Trump was too unfocused, too undisciplined, too underfunded to win.
But probably it’s something planted a bit deeper. My view of populism was mostly about battling government favors for the special interests, yet Trump came in calling for protectionism and singing the praises of the ethanol mandate — as a boon to the farmer. Distinguishing between a government favor for a special interest, and a big business profiting in the free market — that’s too ideological for Trump, who just sees good guys and bad guys.
Trump’s political strength was that he was largely liberated of ideology — which is exactly what turned me off. I have championed a populism wedded to conservatism, limited government and libertarianism. Trump unshackled populism from any ideology.
And, fitting with the Dougherty Doctrine, I refused to believe that unprincipled populism would have the appeal that I promised conservative populism would have.
I won’t make that mistake again. I’ll make plenty others, though.
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
