The 2016 Presidential Campaign and Election Term Paper

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Outcome of the 2016 Elections and the Evolution of the Campaign

The 2016 elections were a surprise to many—mainly because the establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton, lost to the upstart celebrity billionaire Donald Trump, who had never served a day of public office in his life. However, Trump had managed to do something that Clinton did not: he appealed to a marginalized people—the working class, angry, fed up with the Establishment types—the “forgotten men and women” (Sabato, 2017, p. 109) who had protested Wall Street, promoted the Tea Party, and who now wanted to see D.C. crash and burn; and in Trump they saw a candidate with the flair and desire to “drain the swamp” as he pledged to do (Schaffner & Clark, 2018). Trump made a habit of making bold claims and predictions—such as the idea that he would build a wall between Mexico and the U.S. and get Mexico to pay for it (Ginsberg, Lowi, Tolbert & Weir, 2016). Clinton on the other hand appeared confident from the beginning that she would be the Democratic nominee—even though the Democratic outsider Bernie Sanders had a Trump-like following of his own, mainly because he was seen as the anti-Establishment candidate of the left. When Clinton managed to take the nomination (thanks in no small part to her control of the DNC), the election became one in which the Establishment party was going to go toe-to-toe with a loud-mouthed anti-Establishment candidate with a strong following of diverse voters.

Sabato (2017) notes that the 2016 election was similar to the 1948 election in which Truman upset the favored Dewey: in each, the winner was considered the underdog, had a no-holds-barred approach to the campaign (their rhetoric being based on attitude), while their opponents—Dewey in 1948 and Clinton in 2016—were content to utter platitudes, say and do nothing overtly risky, and to be happy “sitting on their leads,” which of course evaporated on election night (p. 2). Trump gained notoriety early on in the Republican primaries by lampooning his opponents, nicknaming them, and identifying their weaknesses while self-promoting in a tongue-in-cheek manner that made many commentators question his sincerity as a candidate.

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Voters, however, loved it—just like they did when Truman earned his populist stripes in 1948. The two said what the “common man” wanted to hear. The “people” were tired of political correctness—and Trump was just the man to stomp political correctness into the ground during the campaign. Thus, the Republican campaign evolved from one in which Jeb Bush, the expected frontrunner, made a quick exit, smarting from the verbal barbs lobbed at him by Trump. Finally, it came down to Trump versus Rubio versus Cruz—the former the last Republican Establishment holdout, the latter the social conservative. Neither had the broad appeal that Trump had with his swagger and “don’t give a damn” attitude.

Trump’s attitude contrasted sharply with Clinton’s politically correct platitudes in the end. The election outcome was perhaps unexpected by the pundits but not surprising to those….....

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