Two Despised Frontrunners, Two Dying Parties. How Did We Get Here?
Despite the unkillable Whack-a-Mole candidacy of Sanders — who, as I argued this week, has channeled an insurgent and quasi-revolutionary class-consciousness that other politicians didn’t even know existed — we are likely to end up with a general-election campaign between the two least popular major-party nominees in political history. OK, I suppose we can’t know that for sure: We don’t have polling data to consult from the infamous election of 1828, when Andrew Jackson accused President John Quincy Adams of procuring hookers for the Russian czar and running a gambling den in the White House. (Adams accused Jackson of being a bigamist and an adulterer, and also hinted that he might be partly black, despite his overtly racist views.)
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Of course polling data is not sacrosanct, and ambiguous perceptions like “favorable” and “unfavorable” tend to wobble around even more than voter preference. But by any standard the CBS/New York Times poll published three weeks ago was remarkable. It sort of blew through the news cycle and then out again, like an indigestible fast-food meal: more weird and crazy numbers in a weird and crazy year. But just take a whiff, and tell me it doesn’t smell like democracy dying on the vine. Donald Trump was viewed favorably by just 24 percent of the voters surveyed, and unfavorably by 57 percent, making him by far the least-liked major-party frontrunner since CBS began asking this question in 1984.
Who’s in second place, in this historic sweepstakes of hate? Hillary Clinton, in the same poll: She was viewed favorably by 31 percent and unfavorably by a mere 52 percent. I see you in the back of the room waving your slide rules, eager-beaver Democrats. And yes, you’re right: Every national survey so far, including that one, shows Clinton beating Trump easily. Math was never my strong suit, but 31 percent is more than 24 percent, as I understand it. But are you guys really going to act like that’s a cause for high-fives and #WeGotThis retweets and celebratory glasses of Sonoma Chardonnay? If that’s a silver lining, it’s made out of aluminum foil from the bottom of the cat box. We’ve got the second least-popular candidate ever — that’s what time it is! Winner-winner chicken dinner!
Just to review, those Trump and Clinton numbers are the two highest unfavorable ratings in the 32-year history of the CBS poll, and also the two largest “negative net ratings,” meaning the difference between the positive and negative numbers. The only previous candidate to come close was Bill Clinton in March of 1992, when he was surrounded by allegations of multiple extramarital affairs. (He came back from that minus-17 nadir to win the election, of course, but even at his low point his negatives were nowhere near as high as Trump’s or Hillary Clinton’s are now.) In the previous eight presidential cycles, there has never been a poll showing both major-party candidates with negative net favorability ratings, let alone double-digit ones.
The nationwide Clinton-Trump hate-fest can be viewed as the continuation or culmination of a long-term downward trend that is easy to summarize: Americans don’t much like either political party or the people they nominate. There are peaks and valleys within that downward arc, to be sure, and significant deviations from the mean: Sometimes people dislike one party considerably more than the other (right now the Republicans are in the doghouse) and occasionally an individual candidate breaks through the antipathy, like Ronald Reagan in 1980 or Barack Obama in 2008. But the data suggests an awful lot of blah: At this point in 2004, John Kerry’s numbers were a smidgen negative and George W. Bush’s a smidgen positive; in the spring of 2012, Mitt Romney stood at minus-7 while Obama’s up-down balance was dead even.
I can only conclude that many people who are embedded within the two-party system glance at that kind of data and shrug it off as a meaningless aberration, because it doesn’t conform to their understanding of the world. They carry on pretending they haven’t noticed the gorilla in the room of American politics, which is that their parties are visibly crumbling beneath them. (To be fair, Republicans are having a tough time ignoring that this year.) The proportion of American adults who identify as either Republicans or Democrats is at or near all-time lows. Much of this seems paradoxical: Democrats hold roughly the same slim edge over Republicans that they’ve held in opinion polling for decades, yet according to this year’s Gallup poll, Democratic identification fell below 30 percent for the first time ever. (Another reason to cancel those “Emerging Democratic Majority” parties.)
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http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/two-despised-frontrunners-two-dying-parties-and-deeply-broken-system-how-did-we-get
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