29 July 2016
Now that the Democratic National Convention is over…
I began watching the national political conventions in 1956, and for many years I watched them gavel-to-gavel. I almost attended the infamous 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Once, conventions were interesting events where decisions were made. Now they’re four-day propaganda productions, the secular variants of evangelical tent revivals, choreographed to deliver the party line and coronate the annointed. Real decision-making and honest debate are avoided. Therefore, I watch a few speeches, yawn, read a few news reports, yawn, mow the lawn and read a good book. I have but a few observations:
Hillary’s acceptance speech. After 15 minutes, I couldn’t stand any more of her smug, “Oh, I’m so damn proud of myself,” delivery and stopped watching. Instead, I read the as delivered transcript. It was not a good speech — see Jeff Greenfield’s analysis at Politico — but it may have been an adequate speech.
The Flesch-Kincaid reading ease score for the transcript was 74, and the Flesch-Kincaid grade level was 6.1. I think the speech is a bit more complex than that, but it scores that way because the speech’s 393 sentences are distributed into 334 paragraphs. I suspect the transcript was the teleprompter copy.
Stronger together. That was the convention’s theme, and it’s the theme of, and chief slogan for, Hillary’s campaign. It’s designed to draw a contrast with Donald Trump’s “I alone” strongman on a white horse approach to governing. But it’s also part of the Democratic Party’s DNA. The photograph to the right is of a Democrat in the 2013 Flathead County Fair Parade. Democrats worship compromise not just as a means to an end but as an end itself. They take comfort in cooperation (nothing wrong with that), but fear and disdain confrontation (plenty wrong with that; confrontation is often the most effective tactic and the most moral choice).
Impact on Montana. The last Democrat to win Montana was Bill Clinton, who won by a plurality in 1992. At this point, given the state’s recent history of preferring Republicans for president, I think Donald Trump is likely to prevail under the Big Sky. I doubt Hillary’s campaign will spend much money here. That could hurt the coordinated campaign, and could hurt Steve Bullock’s re-election campaign.
Start paying attention to the polls. The match-ups are set, and voting starts in nine weeks in many states. I prefer FiveThirtyEight’s approach that gives greater weight to the polls that include the Libertarian and Green Party candidates, and paying attention to the averages of polls:
One relatively important factor, for instance, is whether you use the version of polls with third-party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein included, or the two-way matchup between Clinton and Trump instead. Recently, polls that included Johnson and Stein as options have been a percentage point or so worse for Clinton, on average. FiveThirtyEight’s models use the version of polls with third-party candidates when they have the choice, which slightly helps Trump.
The election will be close. Democrat’s should not count on Donald Trump’s self-destructing. He’s an ignorant, power hungry, racist, the candidate of resentment, but his followers consider those things features, not bugs. His sole vulnerability is that his business practices are, to be charitable, dodgy; that he’s really no financial friend of the white working class voters who love his attacks on political correctness. Elizabeth Warren and Michael Bloomberg made that clear in their convention speeches. But he’s a strongman running against a Democrat with high negatives and trust issues. Hillary Clinton is a Democrat that Trump can defeat.