The 2016 election cycle has thus far been anything but normal. Both major political parties have nominated a candidate who is a national first. The Democrats made history by nominating the first woman for the Presidency, a post whose tenant has thus far only been described as “the most powerful man in the world.” The Republicans, not to be outdone, nominated the nations’ first sentient loofa ever to run for the highest office in the land.
As of this writing there are 83 days until the general election. And with the Trump campaign continuing to falter on both domestic and foreign policy concerns after the midsummer conventions it is looking more and more likely that Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States. Nate Silvers’ FiveThirtyEight Polls-Only Projection gives Trump a mere 11.7 percent chance of winning the election, come November Eighth. And while 83 days is a long time for things to go south, the likelihood that Trump will get his act together in order to make that happen is even lower than that.
This piece, however, is not about Trump and his egomaniacal brand of campaigning. It is not about the racism and jingoism implicit (and sometimes explicit) in his message. It isn’t even about his policy proposals, which are both astonishingly vague as well as incredibly misinformed on nearly everything. This post is not about Donald Trump; it is about his supporters.
We need to look beyond the election, beyond the campaign, to what happens after the polls close and the results are announced. What happens when Trump likely loses and his adherents refuse to accept the results? Trump has made headlines recently by saying that the only way Clinton could win in Pennsylvania (where she leads in the polls by 9.2 percentage points) is if she were to cheat. Before that, he caused even more of an uproar when he suggested that “second amendment people” might be able to prevent Clinton from nominating judges that he claimed would help her “abolish the second amendment.” This kind of rhetoric is very, very dangerous.
One of the primary concerns with the inflammatory statements upon which Trump has built pretty much his entire campaign is not what Trump actually says, but what people hear. When The Donald made his remarks about the second amendment he and his surrogates quickly made the excuse that he was talking about people going out and voting (a rather tenuous excuse). When he called Obama the “founder of ISIS,” he later said he was being sarcastic. (I consider myself a bit of an expert on sarcasm and in no universe were Trumps statements sarcasm). Despite these inept dodges however, there are hundreds of thousands of people that hear what Trump says at the outset and immediately hear exactly what they’ve been wanting to hear: Someone calling on them (directly in their mind) to take action to defeat the forces attempting to destroy the “real America.” If and when Trump loses this election, those sentiments are unlikely to go away. In fact they are likely to increase even further. To many Trump supporters, a Clinton victory is only evidence of widespread corruption and voter fraud (a nearly imaginary problem).
This is not to say that all Trump supporters are ready to engage in violence if their man loses; there are indeed rational Trump supporters. However, we do need to look ahead to the aftermath of the crazy election season to make sure that those Trump supporters who are potentially threatening are unable to make good on those threats.
A related issue, aside from needing to worry about actively dangerous (and angry) Trump supporters, is the fact that if Trump loses, none of his supporters are going anywhere and we will still live in a deeply divided nation. We therefore need to find some way to bring wayward Trump supporters back into the fold. This doesn’t mean giving them everything they want of course, as that includes a multitude of disastrous proposals, but it does mean finding a way to deal with some of the legitimate issues that his supporters are facing, stagnant regional economies, the loss of low skilled jobs overseas, and an overall perception that they do not have a voice in government. It is not sufficient simply to win the election and then only consider the voices of the winners.
We have to live with Trump’s adherents whether we like it or not, and it is in our best interest to be gracious in victory if indeed the Democrats hold onto the White House for another four years.
