Thinking About the "Whitelash" in 2016

I am proctoring exams (well, really, just sitting in the rooms while students write for two hours) and was reading this excellent interview with Columbia University professor Sean Illing about identity politics and have made a connection between this conversation and the ones i have been having with my informal election bellwether demographic around me, my colleagues who work at our campus physical plant.  I think Sean Illing is on to something that I have been sensing for ages (my first encounter with this debate was with my favorite ever Con Law professor, Elizabeth Hull, back in 1983, so this is a long, old thing bouncing around my mind), and thought I would start sorting out my understanding of why a significant number of people without college degrees voted for Trump despite their misgivings surrounding him.  Here goes...

I had a twenty minute conversation with a guy who works at the Physical Plant about why, despite his wife's threats to banish him to his basement cave forever, he voted for Donald Trump this year.  It had little to do with his love or even trust of Trump.  It had something to do with his unconscious misogyny toward Hillary Clinton, and more to do with his perception that--like every other politician out there--she has screwed over guys like him for decades.  But the most interesting insight I gained was the self-interest in his explanations after he espoused the "She is just one of those many politicians who have been messing me up for a generation" diatribe  I won't address here at this time.

I have been talking with this guy for at least ten years and possibly fifteen.  He took this job because, unlike the outsourced services at our college, as part of their union contract, Physical Plant employees are considered college employees and their children can attend Providence College tuition-free.  Not to get too deep here, but physical plant staff are usually licensed or skilled workers who have trade certifications (plumbing, masons, carpenters, electricians, HVAC, etc.), and although they may have be able to make more money in the private sector, for this guy the opportunity for his children to attend our college, combined with the certainty of income that comes with being a tradesman at a nonprofit and the relatively stable schedule, makes the job appealing to him. And this trade-off really paid off for these workers in the 2007-2016 period, when those with trades had few job opportunities in the private sector.

So, my friend's son gets to his senior year in high school with academic performance and career interests inconsistent with our college's admissions standards, so after graduation he tries a semester at the local state college and drops out, just like his dad did back in the 1970s. Unlike the dad, who was able to work his way up from laborer to a tradesman (I keep the trade confidential so as not to reveal him to those of you familiar with our college), getting certified only after years of doing low-level union laboring and gradually using apprenticeship to get a license that eventually got him his current position, the son is locked out of this alternate ladder, and so the path to comfort and security that dad had is not one that can be used by the son.  Why?

I am not an economist who focuses on labor force changes, but my observations and undergraduate teaching of organizational transformations tell me that there is less need for the type of grunt work many used to count on to get a wedge into the door to earning a trade license.  Instead, engineering of all sorts of products has led to a revolution of building and trades that reduces the need for on-site customization: prefabricated everything, flexible and smart tubing and wiring, new tools that eliminate the need for a second person (or a third and fourth hand) to install things, and other process changes that have replaced human bodies means faster.  Big box hardwarehouses make it possible for us to buy almost anything that we can do ourselves.

So, the son of my friend, and his buddy's son, both of whom would be the third generation of their respective family in the same trade, are blocked by the lack of jobs that precede the needed experience to work toward a license.  Plus, they are bombarded with promotions for expensive, for-profit technical colleges that have become the assumed best entry point for getting that desired license.  But those cost a ton of money and are not part of the tuition exchange program.  And so instead, the kids end up doing dead-end hourly jobs in retail, and get further an further away from their backup plans.  And dad, who feels bad that the kid doesn't have the kind of access he had when he bombed out of college, starts wondering whether the whole system is rigged against him.  And then he starts thinking about NAFTA, and the TPP, and wonders why we are helping all those other countries make money off of us while not finding a way to make sure his kid has a shot at financial independence.  And then he notices that half the doctors he sees are foreign nationals, and he sees Latinos, Blacks, Asians entering where he thinks his kid should be.

And so, this very nice guy who has decided (accurately, in my view) that the Democratic Party has abandoned the working person and that they are only in it for themselves (he uses the frame "career politicians, who get rich by promising us the world and then helping themselves").  And he doesn't like Trump, but likes the fact that he has no experience, since those with experience have sold him--am more importantly, his kids--down the river.  And Gary Johnson is "either an idiot or a burnout." And so, he goes into the voting booth this past election, took a deep breath, and filled in the dot next to Donald Trump.  Not because he likes him.  But because he is worried about his son's future.

Sad.  But rational, and arguably self-interested...

A Brief Break From the Presidency: State Government Well-Run

An article in the August 21, 2016  Providence Journal summarizes an approach taken by Rhode Island State government to streamline processes for executive agencies in Rhode Island. It is an example of how innovative and smart elected officials like Governor Gina Raimondo (full disclosure: I think Raimondo is both smart and interested in innovation) can streamline government, reduce red tape, lower costs for the state, and better serve the people of Rhode Island.  It is one of those increasingly rare stories that shines light on the often hidden competence of government.

In the story there are two less obvious points that are as important as Governor Raimondo's attempt to improve government performance and efficiency:

1. The program, implemented through executive order (RI has only recently seem governors use executive orders to expand the scope of authority in this legislative-centered government), was funded at $100,000 for Fiscal Year 2015 but was eliminated when the RI General Assembly passed its budget in June of this year.  Why? My guess is that efficiency is not the first priority of the General Assembly (there is a lot of patronage in the state government and the General Assembly is where the "principals" reside, not the Governor's Office).  Another possible explanation is that it was just a small way of retaliating against the governor for larger conflicts, slights, and slightly bruised egos, especially from the House leadership, which is the center of the closet Republican Party in Rhode Island.
2. The article reports that despite making processes for applying for licenses or programs accessible online (hunting licenses are the main focus of the story), the governor's executive order cannot change things like the annual renewal requirements on hunting licenses because the legislation creating the licensing requirements requires annual renewal. This suggests that in order for RI to become even more efficient, the State Assembly has to embrace the "Lean" program implemented by Governor Raimondo.

So, here we see the executive branch doing what it does well: using management innovations to increase government quality and efficiency.  We also see, however, the implications of having a state that was for centuries run from the General Assembly.  Only recently has Rhode Island embraced the separation of powers when it comes to executive implementation, and so the long-term effects of legislative dominance explains part of why Rhode Island seems to only now be discovering the value of using information age technology.

I wonder how much longer the General Assembly will take before it gets on the bandwagon and actually uses it to improve government?  Maybe when the closet Republican Party actually changes its affiliation and the state develops a competitive two-party election system, since that among the best predictors of well-run, efficient governments.

Why Trump and Every Other Presidential Candidate Ever Will NEVER "pivot."

Fifteen years ago, Kathleen Hall Jamieson wrote a book with a provocative title, Everything You Know About Politics..Is Wrong. In this book Jamieson describes so-called "conventional wisdom" about a wide array of assumed political knowledge and then explains how political science has established that we are wrong about them.  For example, most people assume the media have an enormous influence on campaign outcomes, but there is little to no evidence that this is the case. Campaigns are not nastier than they used to be.  Politicians actually DO try to make good on their campaign promises.  And so on...

If Jamieson was working on an update for this book, she would do well to add a new incorrect bit of wisdom about politics: presidential candidates shift gears once they lock up their party nomination and start behaving differently, emphasizing different issues than those promoted in the primaries, and communicating different ideas than they had earlier in the campaign season.  The logic of a so-called "pivot" is sound: candidates must appeal to more ideological or to issue-specific segments of their party in the nominations, but then must realign to the center during the general election comes in order to appeal to a larger, more centrist general election pool of voters.

Despite the elegance of the logic, this is not the case.  In fact, candidates do not pivot, but instead continue to use the same message and emphasis that got them the party nomination.  Yes, they may incorporate some of the policy stands and issues raised by their competitors in the primaries (Bill Clinton did this with Paul Tsongas in 1992 and Hillary Clinton is doing it with Bernie Sanders in 2016), but there is no evidence that candidates try to change.  Even in 2012, when Mitt Romney's campaign staff argued that an "Etch-A-Sketch" moment would occur once Romney secured the nomination, the study I did of Romney speeches in 2012 found no change in issue emphasis, tone, or positions.  A Romney speech from September of 2011 is almost identical to a Romney speech in September 2012.  In other words, he did not pivot, change, or even modify either his message or the way he talked about his candidacy.

When you hear or read something about how Trump's "pivot" has not happened, remember, it is because candidates do not (and probably cannot) pivot away from the very message they used to be on the national ticket.  

Why don't candidates pivot?  The reality is that they actually believe what they run on in the first place, and it is a poor tactic, since their earlier positions are on the record and can be used to make the claim that the candidate is (Mercy!) flip-flopping.

Why the conventional wisdom?  Well, never let evidence get in the way of either good deductive logic or lazy information processing (if we believe it to be true when we hear it, we do not have to actually investigate whether pivots occur).

Why Democrats Should Be Compassionate to Their Republican Friends and Neighbors

I have been reminding my associates and friends who are Democrats to be kind to Republicans around them.  Some responded positively, some negatively, and some with the opinion that they need not worry about people who have brought the current state of Republican party politics upon themselves.  There are personal reasons for my plea, but there are ones based on my professional expertise as well.  Although there is not much depth to some research on the role of relationships and party identification, there is some.  In addition, there is a deeper body of research into linguistics and even neuroscience that might suggest that it is in the best interest of Democrats to be nice.

First, the cognitive science research, since it is probably the most widely respected and best known of the work I am thinking of as I write this.  George Lakoff has the most notable and deeply nuanced study of language and how it affects people based upon the perceptual screen we tend to use.  Republicans tend to embrace the "strict father" metaphor for understanding politics while Democrats tend to embrace the "nurturing mother" metaphor.  For a great summary from Lakoff, go here. Although Republicans tend to take the hierarchical position on authority, politics, and life in general, they are not monolithic, and there are significant numbers of pragmatic and Laissez-faire Republicans who can be coaxed to abandon this narrative this year.  So, being nice to these Republicans while taking deep breaths to cope with the Trumpstinstas (my term, purposely chosen because it is an ironic depiction of authoritarian types) is a good tactical approach to trying to persuade people of sound thought and Republican identification to come over to the Dark Side for just this one moment.

The more controversial reason for the self-interest motives of Democrats relates to both survey and experimental research done by political psychologist Michael Milburn.  this research is less famous and more controversial, but it suggests that the authoritarian tendencies of people (mainly men) are often connected to the way they were raised (authoritarian minded people tended to have punitive parents, especially fathers), and that one becomes less authoritarian in his political values when he has a venue to vent and heal the wounds often caused by punitive parenting.  Thus, Milburn argues in one study, men who go through counseling and therapy become less authoritarian in the viewpoints.

My point here is not to contend that being a Republican is a mental illness; clearly it is not.  But, for those who feel aggrieved by a world that has mistreated him or her, it is possible that kindness and compassion can provide a counter-narrative to the hierarchical.  There clearly are many Republicans looking for a way out of their dilemma of having Donald Trump be their party's standard bearer; what better way than to provide a positive model for them as they try to cope with the dissonance that comes with being a Republican with a punitive father at the top of the ticket?

Let's Not Go Overboard With This, But Yes, Trump's Words on the Second Amendment Matter to Us All

Just when you think Trump has little room to outdo his own inappropriateness, he finds a way to top his last stab at showing the world he is incapable of editing his impulsive thoughts...

Lest we think that Trump was seriously suggesting that someone assassinate Hillary Clinton, we need to step back and watch the video, and then exercise the sharp critical eye of educated consumers of political communication.  He clearly had the sudden thought to make a quip that might rile Hillary Haters (yes, they should be capitalized now, since they have achieved the status befitting identification as a proper noun), especially those who love to pretend she is going to invade all their houses.  Trump is, after all, dependent on this base of simplistic thinkers for the modest support he current maintains.  So, a little red meat like this is probably an attempt on his part to keep the crowd foaming at the mouth over the prospects of a Hillary Clinton presidency.  And are we really surprised that he found little need to edit or ignore this temptation he so often ha to go over the line of decency and civility?  So, remember, it s less a plan or instruction from Trump to the extremists among his fans than an off-the-cuff statement by a candidate with a limitless supply of shamelessness, no self-control, and a desire to thrive on the denigration and hatred of his adversaries.  In other words, this is the bluster of an offensive bully who has no self-control.

HOWEVER...my greatest fear since Trump started his scorched earth campaign was that he would lose control of the very people he seems to love to stir with comments like this.  I have in the past referenced the movie "Bob Roberts," where a group of followers of the fictional candidate decide that they will rake the suggestions of the candidate and ratchet them up to exact violence in retaliation for the staged assassination attempt of their leader.  The point of this is that in his penchant for doing what he can to keep attention focused on himself, Trump will continue to say horrible things like this. But what happens if someone (or a conspiracy of evil dunces who do not understand that Trump is simply mimicking a professional wrestler when he says these things) decides to take up his suggestion?  Clearly, if someone tries to assassinate Hillary Clinton now or after she is elected, Trump should be the first person to take responsibility beyond the actual assassins.  Will he?  Of course not.

So, let's not go too far in asserting that Trump is making a recommendation; he does not really think that far ahead.  But let's also understand that he has gone so far over the line this time that he needs to stop lying about his impulsive intent, apologize for suggesting that violence is acceptable political action if you lose an election, and start changing his verbal behavior and control himself.  The only bet I will make here is that he will do none of these.  I only hope that nobody takes Trump's insipid comment to heart.

Why The Khan Incident May Be Different Than Anything Else Donald Trump Has Done (or..NOT)

Okay, we all now know that Donald Trump cannot keep his mouth shut, even when almost everyone knows he should.  Is the series of events related to what I call "The Khan Incident" any different than his riffs against John McCain, entire nationalities and religions, or even Pope Francis? At first blush, probably not.  But this one is different, and could spell the end of any serious chance for Trump to win the presidential election in November.  Below I explain why I think this one is different.

But first, remember, this is not a prediction; it is simply an explanation of how political psychology might give us the opportunity to see things not noticed by others.

When I was in graduate school, the research of Samuel Popkin, of the University of Californiia-San Diego, was increasingly prominent in the sub-field of voting behavior.  My adviser was not a fan of Popkin's work because it argued (with general success, it turned out) that voters need not be "rational" in the traditional sense of the word, which as the time required they thought ideologically, had specific issues about which they had adequate information to discern between party and/or candidate positions, or used party identification as a filter for making decisions. Rational voting was the realm of political scientists who felt that voters had to have at least a moderate level of knowledge, interest and/or sophistication.

Popkin, a political psychologist, introduced the concept of "low information" rationality.  His book, The Reasoning Voter, argues that voters not need be deeply engaged in information in order to make good decisions, but instead can make such decisions on the basis of gut instinct (later, research at the Max Planck Institute in Germany described gut instinct as subconscious cognitive predictions based upon an instant calculation in the brain with the available information to predict the best possible outcome).

As cognitive misers (we try to make the best decision based upon minimally necessary scanning of information), this gut instinct can come from a series of impressions garnered from seemingly disconnected and sometimes even trivial information.

Examples of information "good enough," according to Popkin, are seemingly innocuous and unimportant campaign snafus like George McGovern ordering roast beef and milk at a kosher deli or Gerald Ford eating a tamale without shucking the husk.  Later in 1992, I noticed that President George H.W. Bush wore a starched white dress shirt that made him stick out at a rally in Branson, Missouri, as he was surrounded by country music stars.  It did not help that Bush kept his tie tight and couldn't keep the beat when trying.

When combined with other minor and sometimes trivial bits of information, Popkin argues that voters need not spend hours a day reading and watching campaigns in order to make good decisions, but instead can rely upon their impressions (their "gut" if you wish) and make pretty sound judgments about voting preference.

So, where does the Khan Incident come in?  Seen as yet another example of Donald Trump's thin skin and aggressive response to anyone over anything, it probably won't have much of an impact. But this one is different.  The magnitude of difference between Trump and any other politician's response (see Clinton's response to the mother of a slain security personnel staffer in Benghazi, or George W. Bush's response to Cindy Sheehen twelve years ago) is enormous, something that stands out as an important distinction between him and others (indeed, almost any other person). It is highly unlikely that anyone will forget Trump's behavior this past week.

Yes, what he said about Rosie O'Donnell was bad; about Megyn Kelly crude; about John McCain offensive, but the Khan family is not one that would usually be considered to be in the public eye like the others. And, the taboo of attacking family members of people killed in service to their country is one of the more universal barriers between reasonable and unreasonable behavior.

In other words, Trump's words and responses (and, at this writing, his continued inability to let it go) are of a nature that are so far out of the norm, that most people will remember this, and for those who are "low information voters," this will be one of the first things they recall when processing information in about 14 weeks.  Even as the Khan Incident fades in the media and we are drawn to the inevitable momentary events yet to come, this event will be an important portion of the structure people will use when thinking about whether Trump is worth their vote.

Time will tell; there are just under 100 days for Trump to get our minds off of the Khan Affair.  If he apologizes, it might hurt him (because it would acknowledge that he was wrong to do it, a first for him in my memory, and so the event becomes even more prominent in the minds of low information voters).  And if he is clueless on why this is unwise (to be fair, I do not think he realized what the implications of suggesting Mrs, Khan was being prohibited from speaking on the podium at the DNC), who knows what the next gaffe will bring?  My guess, only further reinforcement that this guy is not mentally suitable to be president.

We'll see.  But think of Popkin's concept of low-information rationality as you continue to watch Trump.  I think the snowball effect is about to run him over.

What Do We Know NOW about the Presidential Selection Process: Using Physics, Psychology, Civic Responsibility to Explain the Mess of 2016 (Part I)

Presidential Campaign                 Presidential Campaign
      System in 1948                              System in 2016



[Thanks to Ms. Dorothy Obrupta, my high school physics teacher at Metuchen High School in New Jersey, for beginning the process of getting me to see how physics can be applied to politics.]

There is a lot in the above title, but I want to take some time to discuss what we now know about the presidential selection process.  Today, I will highlight the first of the three three major things we need to grapple with in order to make sense out of 2016.  Today I take a stab at examining how physics can help us understand why this has been such a weird presidential election cycle.

Science: this one is easy for a guy who is trained to inhabit the borderlines of science (using the scientific method but not having the benefit of controlling environments or subjects).  The most obvious application is the "S" factor: Entropy.

Okay, what do you need to know about entropy? For this discussion, not much: Wikipedia has a good non-technical discussion here that summarizes the important details that may relate.  There are three things I focus on related to entropy:

First, the current presidential election system has been moving a a direction for forty years that is now irreversible. The process is one-way and any kind of cobbling like those mentioned here will do nothing to change the reality that the system is finally nearing its state of full decay, Democrats and Republicans alike need to come to grips with the reality that the current state of the system will guarantee dysfunction.  To put it simply: the system is useless for achieving its fundamental purpose: allowing political parties to choose the best candidate in a process that maximizes their chances of winning the general election.

Second (in part because the theory is in the second law of thermodynamics), just as spilled milk or unwise choices of words posted in a discussion list (something we have been dealing with at our institution lately) cannot be recalled, the decay in our system is something that cannot be undone by anyone or anything.  In other words, it must happen  I believe this is referred to as a spontaneous process.  One look at the nominating process will uncover certain realities that are the political equivalent of hot air moving toward areas with cold air. In political terms heat is power or influence and the process of transfer is now sufficiently far along to have reached the point of inevitability.

Third, as power (the "heat" of politics) has made its long shift away from political parties and towards a plethora of alternate locations: egotistical candidates; campaign professionals; moneyed interests; mass media; wealthy individuals (thanks, Supreme Court!); and ourselves (long explanation on this one to come sometime in the future), we have witnessed an increase in political entropy in the system that results in good candidates being bloodied even in victory (think Clinton this year and Romney in 2012); and let's not even discuss the Republican system in 2016...

Sure, we dodged bullets before (e.g., Giuliani and Cain in 2012), but that was because the decay on the system may have been significant, but the system still seemed to work.  Along the way we have provided patches that kept the system working: McGovern-Fraser, FECA, superdelegates, etc.  But it really does appear that at this point, the system can no longer function in its current state.  Recent polls suggest (and we need to both attend to and suspect the usefulness of polls these days) that upwards of 2/3 of all adults are unhappy with both party candidates.  So much for one of the fundamental function of political parties: controlling access to the ballot to ensure candidates are electable and represent the party well in order to give voters clear choices.

To return to using this physics metaphor: the collapse of the presidential nominating system has been coming for some time, but 2016 is likely the point where the amount of political energy in this system that CANNOT be used to make the system work correctly has reached the tipping point and is in a state of collapse.

So, got the oddest of the three down...next time, psychology.  The third one is possibly the most controversial argument, as I will try to explain why it is our fault and not the faulty of politicians, campaign professionals, large donors, and the media.