Okay, this is the best way I can explain Trump to my British friends.
As an American, I’m often asked: “Really, in a country with 350 million people, was Trump the best that America could come up with?”
And the answers always the same:
He wasn’t the best that America could come up with. He was the worst that America could come up with. That’s why he won.
But it takes too long to explain this in person. People rarely have the time or inclination, they really just want to say: “ugh” and be done with it. But there is a real answer to why Trump got elected. So I’m writing it down here as the election goes on, so that I can just link people to this page, rather than having to repeat it all the time.
This is important — people think of democracies as de facto meritocracies. That is how well designed democracies work but many democracies are not well designed. The United States is one of the worst designed, and it has the effect of separating the wheat from the chaff and electing the chaff.
1) No person can get elected or even run an effective campaign for nomination of one of the two major parties without either being rich or being funded by rich people who want power. Their interests are not usually the best interests of the electorate.
America has almost no public funding, Some states (three out of 50 at last count) have public funding statutes, but at the federal level, there is no federal public funding for congressional candidates. There is public funding for Presidential candidates, but the money from public funding literally isn’t enough to run on, given the restrictions that you can’t raise money from other sources, so in 2016, the only candidate to accept public funding was Martin O’Malley, who came in 3rd or 4th behind Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Even Sanders — whose campaign is predicated on reforming the way candidates raise money and are elected — could not raise enough money to be viable. The end result: You have to be rich, or corrupt, or both, to even be viable. People with the ability to become good public servants cannot raise money to campaign effectively, because good public servants want to break the stranglehold the rich have on who can get elected. In other words: No person qualified to do the job of elected official can win office.
2) America’s own system of voting: “Winner Take All” — is one of the major causes of the need to raise massive amounts of money to be elected.
Like the UK, America uses “First past the post” voting — or in some cases “Runoff Voting”. Either one of these systems produce “Winner Take All results.” This means that the amount of support a candidate has in the electorate has no impact on how much power they have. A win by one vote is just as powerful as a win by a landslide.
However, getting the bulk of your supporters to show up is rarely the problem — it is getting those last few voters to take you over the edge that matters in a race that competitive.
There is a law of diminishing returns. Imagine you are a candidate in a very competitive race. Most of your voters would vote for you anyway, even if you aren’t funded, just because of the D or R next to your name. Call that, maybe 40%. Not enough to win. Another 5% need a little poking and prodding and reminder. Get-Out-The-Vote efforts. Okay. The last 10% are the hardest to reach and the most expensive to persuade to vote for you. These are the lazy, the apathetic, the disengaged, and those who are none of the above but who may not actually like your candidate… and then there are the rarest of all — the actual swing voters. In a close race, the most expensive voters to reach are precisely the voters needed to ensure victory. The closer the race, the more the requirement to spend larger and larger amounts of money in order to get the last possible vote out.
3) “Winner Take All” incentivizes corruption through the Prisoners Dilemma.
Even if you have, by some miracle, two equally non-corrupt candidates, it is politically foolish not to become corrupt in the course of the election. Whether it’s campaign donations, smear campaigns, negative ads, etc, candidates are always better off “playing dirty” than “playing clean,” even if both are reasonable, well-meaning people.
The reason is simply that, no matter what your opponent does, you are always better off choosing to be corrupt than you are to play clean.
Let’s say that both candidates can get a 5% bump in the polls if they run a smear campaign against the other. Neither wants to do so, they feel it’s morally wrong. If neither do it — neither gets the bump — if both do it, the bump cancels each other out. But if one does it and the other doesn’t, they both get the bump.
Since candidates cannot coordinate (and that’s a good thing) with opponent campaigns, Candidate A knows the decision matrix looks like this
| play clean | play dirty | |
|------------|------------|----------------------|
| 0 | +5 | opponent plays clean |
| -5 | o | opponent plays dirty |Since +5 is always better than 0, and 0 is always better than -5, any candidate is better off playing dirty than playing clean. That is — corruption is incentivized, honesty is disincentivized.
Since +5 is always better than 0, and 0 is always better than -5, any candidate is better off playing dirty than playing clean. That is — corruption is incentivized, honesty is disincentivized.
More than that, however, candidates almost never lose support to their opponent by behaving unethically, because in order to vote against a candidate with low scruples, you must also choose to vote against your own political self interest. In other words, Republicans must vote for someone opposed to their ideology — Joe Biden — even if they don’t like Donald Trump. Therefore there is no corresponding disincentive at the ballot box for engaging in corrupt behavior, as there would be with a multi party system.
4) Most races in the United States are uncompetitive — and have been made uncompetitive deliberately by state legislatures.
In the United States, elected officials — state legislatures — are entrusted with the power to determine the boundaries of election maps for their own elections and elections to federal government. Even where such maps need approval from some authority, the result is that most maps are uncompetitive. This is due to “packing” and “cracking”.
In a “Packed” district, the boundaries are drawn so that almost all the members in that district vote for the same political party. Since a landslide victory is the same as a victory by one vote, this is disadvantageous. Take, for example, this grouping of X and Os;
XXXXX
XOOOX
OOOOO
Here, there are 7 X and 8 Os. There are three seats, each district has five voters. If you were to draw the boundaries like this:
XX|XX|X
XO|O |OX
O |OO|OO
you would get 1 seat for X, and 2 seats for O.
Arrange them like this, however:
XX |XXX
XOO|OX
------
OOOOO
And you get 2 seats for X, 1 for O. Even though O has a clear majority of the *people*, X gets a clear majority — an overwhelming majority — of the *power.* In the latter example, the 5 Os in the bottom have been “packed”, while the three Os on the top have been “cracked.”
Since voters rarely, if ever, change their minds about who to vote for, and it is possibly to accurately identify which voters will vote for whom, and where they live, it is elected officials — state legislatures — who choose who will vote for them through gerrymandering, rather than voters who choose elected officials. Most races are already “won” long before any candidate has announced the election.
5) If the vast majority of races are uncompetitive at the general election, any competition occurs at the primary level, and primary voters are the most extreme voters.
Primary voting often requires primary membership, registration, etc. Most people who vote only do so in the general election, primary voters, however, have made a choice about which party they will support. By design, primary voters are almost always “straight-ticket” voters as well, as one cannot vote in both the Republican AND Democratic primaries in most states (Some states, such as California, have “open primaries” which is like the French system where the top two candidates continue on — this is the exception, not the rule)
If there is competition, it happens at this stage — it is a fait accompli that the Republican candidate will win, for example, TX House District #106, the question is, who will the nominee be? The result is that the nominee will be the candidate that most appeals to the parties most extreme and most loyal factions — the Primary voters. These voters determine who is even eligible to run. If candidates, A, B, and C run, A is extreme-left, B is extreme-right, and C is a broadly electable moderate who 90% of the populace likes, it is all but certain that C will be eliminated at the primary stage, as if C ran as a Democrat, he would lose to A in the Democratic primary, if C ran as a Republican, C would lose to B in the Republican primary. Reasonable, moderate candidates who have based their policies on observation, experimentation, reason, and compromise are eliminated at the primary stage, leaving only radical ideologues.
6) It is far better to be an extreme candidate with a sizable but unwavering minority support than it is to be a moderate candidate competing for the moderate faction of your party.
Donald Trump was never not known to be overtly racist. He started his campaign with an overtly racist announcement speech. This got him an extreme, radical core of voters, 30% of the Republican Primary voter base. That is a tiny fraction of the American people. The problem was — he was up against 15 other more moderate candidates, who all split the 70% of anti-trump primary voters so that none of them ever got more than that 30% voting share. None of these candidates would drop out and coalesce behind one candidate, so Trump rode early campaign victories with a plurality of votes in a First Past the Post system to the point where he could not be beat — having been unable to “beat ‘em”, the Republican party chose to “join ‘em.”
Corollary to the above observations: The American system provides an example of a poorly functioning democracy, and the poor functioning of the democratic systems ensure that it cannot be reformed into a good functioning democratic system.
None of these problems are theoretically insolvable, political scientists have known the solutions for decades (Duverger published his findings in 1951). Use public funding for political campaigns, encourage public participation, teach civics, rhetoric, and critical thinking in grade school, and use some form of Proportional Representation when encourages a plurality of ideas, compromise in government, and viable moderate candidates.
They are, however, practically insolvable because the current system gives power to those who have no vested interest in changing it. Even if there was a massive movement for public campaign finance reform and election reform, there would be no candidate who could take up that banner and be politically viable in the American system.
Trump and Trumpism won in the American system not because of the merit of its ideas or the popularity of its leadership but in spite of the lack of those things. It succeeded because it successfully exploited the flaws in a deeply dysfunctional system. Trump literally won the Presidency because he was the best at exploiting the undemocratic flaws in the US political system; these flaws exist today, and even if Joe Biden does win in 2020 due to Trump’s insanity in handling COVID, unless those flaws are fixed, another Trump is inevitable in the American system.
He wasn’t the best that America could come up with. He was the worst that America could come up with. That’s why he won.
This is important — people think of democracies as de facto meritocracies. That is how well designed democracies work but most democracies are not well designed. The United States is one of the worst designed, and it has the effect of separating the wheat from the chaff and electing the chaff.
1) No person can get elected or even run an effective campaign for nomination of one of the two major parties without either being rich or being funded by rich people who want power. Their interests are not usually the best interests of the electorate.
America has almost no public funding, Some states (three out of 50 at last count) have public funding statutes, but at the federal level, there is no federal public funding for congressional candidates. There is public funding for Presidential candidates, but the money from public funding literally isn’t enough to run on, given the restrictions that you can’t raise money from other sources, so in 2016, the only candidate to accept public funding was Martin O’Malley, who came in 3rd or 4th behind Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Even Sanders — whose campaign is predicated on reforming the way candidates raise money and are elected — could not raise enough money to be viable. The end result: You have to be rich, or corrupt, or both, to even be viable. People with the ability to become good public servants cannot raise money to campaign effectively, because good public servants want to break the stranglehold the rich have on who can get elected. In other words: No person qualified to do the job of elected official can win office.
2) America’s own system of voting: “Winner Take All” — is one of the major causes of the need to raise massive amounts of money to be elected.
Like the UK, America uses “First past the post” voting — or in some cases “Runoff Voting”. Either one of these systems produce “Winner Take All results.” This means that the amount of support a candidate has in the electorate has no impact on how much power they have. A win by one vote is just as powerful as a win by a landslide.
However, getting the bulk of your supporters to show up is rarely the problem — it is getting those last few voters to take you over the edge that matters in a race that competitive.
There is a law of diminishing returns. Imagine you are a candidate in a very competitive race. Most of your voters would vote for you anyway, even if you aren’t funded, just because of the D or R next to your name. Call that, maybe 40%. Not enough to win. Another 5% need a little poking and prodding and reminder. Get-Out-The-Vote efforts. Okay. The last 10% are the hardest to reach and the most expensive to persuade to vote for you. These are the lazy, the apathetic, the disengaged, and those who are none of the above but who may not actually like your candidate… and then there are the rarest of all — the actual swing voters. In a close race, the most expensive voters to reach are precisely the voters needed to ensure victory. The closer the race, the more the requirement to spend larger and larger amounts of money in order to get the last possible vote out.
3) America’s own system of voting: “Winner Take All” incentivizes corruption through the Prisoners Dilemma.
Even if you have, by some miracle, two equally non-corrupt candidates, it is politically foolish not to become corrupt in the course of the election. Whether it’s campaign donations, smear campaigns, negative ads, etc, candidates are always better off “playing dirty” than “playing clean,” even if both are reasonable, well-meaning people.
The reason is simply that, no matter what your opponent does, you are always better off choosing to be corrupt than you are to play clean.
Let’s say that both candidates can get a 5% bump in the polls if they run a smear campaign against the other. Neither wants to do so, they feel it’s morally wrong. If neither do it — neither gets the bump — if both do it, the bump cancels each other out. But if one does it and the other doesn’t, they both get the bump.
Since candidates cannot coordinate (and that’s a good thing) with opponent campaigns, Candidate A knows the decision matrix looks like this
play clean | play dirty
0 +5 opponent plays clean
-5 0 opponent plays dirty
Since +5 is always better than 0, and 0 is always better than -5, any candidate is better off playing dirty than playing clean. That is — corruption is incentivized, honesty is disincentivized.
More than that, however, candidates almost never lose support to their opponent by behaving unethically, because in order to vote against a candidate with low scruples, you must also choose to vote against your own political self interest. In other words, Republicans must vote for someone opposed to their ideology — Joe Biden — even if they don’t like Donald Trump. Therefore there is no corresponding disincentive at the ballot box for engaging in corrupt behavior, as there would be with a multi party system.
4) Most races in the United States are uncompetitive — and have been made uncompetitive deliberately by state legislatures.
In the United States, elected officials — state legislatures — are entrusted with the power to determine the boundaries of election maps for their own elections and elections to federal government. Even where such maps need approval from some authority, the result is that most maps are uncompetitive. This is due to “packing” and “cracking”.
In a “Packed” district, the boundaries are drawn so that almost all the members in that district vote for the same political party. Since a landslide victory is the same as a victory by one vote, this is disadvantageous. Take, for example, this grouping of X and Os;
XXXXX
XOOOX
OOOOO
Here, there are 7 X and 8 Os. There are three seats, each district has five voters. If you were to draw the boundaries like this:
XX|XX|X
XO|O |OX
O |OO|OO
you would get 1 seat for X, and 2 seats for O.
Arrange them like this, however:
XX |XXX
XOO|OX
------
OOOOO
And you get 2 seats for X, 1 for O. Even though O has a clear majority of the *people*, X gets a clear majority — an overwhelming majority — of the *power.* In the latter example, the 5 Os in the bottom have been “packed”, while the three Os on the top have been “cracked.”
Since voters rarely, if ever, change their minds about who to vote for, and it is possibly to accurately identify which voters will vote for whom, and where they live, it is elected officials — state legislatures — who choose who will vote for them through gerrymandering, rather than voters who choose elected officials. Most races are already “won” long before any candidate has announced the election.
5) If the vast majority of races are uncompetitive at the general election, any competition occurs at the primary level, and primary voters are the most extreme voters.
Primary voting often requires primary membership, registration, etc. Most people who vote only do so in the general election, primary voters, however, have made a choice about which party they will support. By design, primary voters are almost always “straight-ticket” voters as well, as one cannot vote in both the Republican AND Democratic primaries in most states (Some states, such as California, have “open primaries” which is like the French system where the top two candidates continue on — this is the exception, not the rule)
If there is competition, it happens at this stage — it is a fait accompli that the Republican candidate will win, for example, TX House District #106, the question is, who will the nominee be? The result is that the nominee will be the candidate that most appeals to the parties most extreme and most loyal factions — the Primary voters. These voters determine who is even eligible to run. If candidates, A, B, and C run, A is extreme-left, B is extreme-right, and C is a broadly electable moderate who 90% of the populace likes, it is all but certain that C will be eliminated at the primary stage, as if C ran as a Democrat, he would lose to A in the Democratic primary, if C ran as a Republican, C would lose to B in the Republican primary. Reasonable, moderate candidates who have based their policies on observation, experimentation, reason, and compromise are eliminated at the primary stage, leaving only radical ideologues.
6) It is far better to be an extreme candidate with a sizable but unwavering minority support than it is to be a moderate candidate competing for the moderate faction of your party.
Donald Trump was never not known to be overtly racist. He started his campaign with an overtly racist announcement speech. This got him an extreme, radical core of voters, 30% of the Republican Primary voter base. That is a tiny fraction of the American people. The problem was — he was up against 15 other more moderate candidates, who all split the 70% of anti-trump primary voters so that none of them ever got more than that 30% voting share. None of these candidates would drop out and coalesce behind one candidate, so Trump rode early campaign victories with a plurality of votes in a First Past the Post system to the point where he could not be beat — having been unable to “beat ‘em”, the Republican party chose to “join ‘em.”
— -
Corollary to the above observations: The American system provides an example of a poorly functioning democracy, and the poor functioning of the democratic systems ensure that it cannot be reformed into a good functioning democratic system.
None of these problems are theoretically insolvable, political scientists have known the solutions for decades (Duverger published his findings in 1951). Use public funding for political campaigns, encourage public participation, teach civics, rhetoric, and critical thinking in grade school, and use some form of Proportional Representation when encourages a plurality of ideas, compromise in government, and viable moderate candidates.
They are, however, practically insolvable because the current system gives power to those who have no vested interest in changing it. Even if there was a massive movement for public campaign finance reform and election reform, there would be no candidate who could take up that banner and be politically viable in the American system.
— -
Bringing this back to UK politics and the topic at hand: Trump and Trumpism won in the American system not because of the merit of its ideas or the popularity of its leadership but in spite of the lack of those things. It succeeded because it successfully exploited the flaws in a deeply dysfunctional system. Trump literally won the Presidency because he was the best at exploiting the undemocratic flaws in the US political system; these flaws exist today, and even if Joe Biden does win in 2020 due to Trump’s insanity in handling COVID, unless those flaws are fixed, another Trump is inevitable in the American system.
— -
Second corollary for UK politics: Whether conservative, progressive, or somewhere in the middle, the best defense against getting a Trump of our own in the UK is to push for systemic reform, the biggest of which would be a move to proportional representation of some form.
If you want to look at examples of a very well functioning democracy, look at New Zealand. New Zealand changed it’s election system from First-Past-The-Post to PR (MMP system) in 1996 (after a 1990 indicative referendum and a 1993 confirmation referendum). It has had both Labour and National [NZ Conservative] parties in majority, coalition, and minority governments since then, none of which have been disastrous. Not only has there been more racial and gender diversity in Parliament since then, (Before 1990, it was practically all white male lawyers — like the US Senate) but also diversity of income levels, occupations, etc. Minor parties are viable and in coalition or minority governments must be consulted before major legislation. And of course, you never have results like you do in the US where a person gets 2 million less votes but wins the election.
The most compelling effect of a PR system is that it makes minor parties viable, and in so doing, give voters options to “punish” misbehaving parties without voting against their own self interest. Corruption is disincentivized.
Taken above, there is no “prisoners dilemma” in this system, because voters who find that, say, the NZ Labour Party has become unethical, can choose to vote for the “slightly more moderate” United Future party, or the “slightly further left” NZ Green Party. These minor party defections can have a significant impact, as even if the country as a whole is majority-center-left, minor parties can determine the difference between majority governments, coalition governments, and minority governments. You lose more support from your own parties defecting to minor, but aligned parties (say, -6), than you hurt your opponent (+3). The above chart now looks something more like this:
play clean | play dirty
A 0 B +3 -6 = -3 opponent plays clean
C -3 + 3 = 0 D 0 -6 +3 = -3 opponent plays dirty
A: No change
B: Gain 3 from your opponent, lose 6 to minor parties.
C: Lose 3 from your opponent, your opponent loses 6 to minor parties, you count half of that, since those votes weren't going to you anyway.
D: You and your opponent cancel each other out, you lose six to minor parties, your opponent loses six to minor parties, halved)
In this scenario, there is no Prisoner’s Dilemma — it is always better to play clean — that is — to not be corrupt — than it is to be corrupt. The incentives have changed through the addition of viable minor parties.
Second corollary for UK politics: Whether conservative, progressive, or somewhere in the middle, the best defense against getting a Trump of our own in the UK is to push for systemic reform, the biggest of which would be a move to proportional representation of some form.
If you want to look at examples of a very well functioning democracy, look at New Zealand. New Zealand changed it’s election system from First-Past-The-Post to PR (MMP system) in 1996 (after a 1990 indicative referendum and a 1993 confirmation referendum). It has had both Labour and National [NZ Conservative] parties in majority, coalition, and minority governments since then, none of which have been disastrous. Not only has there been more racial and gender diversity in Parliament since then, (Before 1990, it was practically all white male lawyers — like the US Senate) but also diversity of income levels, occupations, etc. Minor parties are viable and in coalition or minority governments must be consulted before major legislation. And of course, you never have results like you do in the US where a person gets 2 million less votes but wins the election.
The most compelling effect of a PR system is that it makes minor parties viable, and in so doing, give voters options to “punish” misbehaving parties without voting against their own self interest. Corruption is disincentivized.
Taken above, there is no “prisoners dilemma” in this system, because voters who find that, say, the NZ Labour Party has become unethical, can choose to vote for the “slightly more moderate” United Future party, or the “slightly further left” NZ Green Party. These minor party defections can have a significant impact, as even if the country as a whole is majority-center-left, minor parties can determine the difference between majority governments, coalition governments, and minority governments. You lose more support from your own parties defecting to minor, but aligned parties (say, -6), than you hurt your opponent (+3). The above chart now looks something more like this:
play clean | play dirty
A 0 B +3 -6 = -3 opponent plays clean
C -3 + 3 = 0 D 0 -6 +3 = -3 opponent plays dirty
A: No change
B: Gain 3 from your opponent, lose 6 to minor parties.
C: Lose 3 from your opponent, your opponent loses 6 to minor parties, you count half of that, since those votes weren't going to you anyway.
D: You and your opponent cancel each other out, you lose six to minor parties, your opponent loses six to minor parties, halved)
In this scenario, there is no Prisoner’s Dilemma — it is always better to play clean — that is — to not be corrupt — than it is to be corrupt. The incentives have changed through the addition of viable minor parties.