Who could hate a face like that? Photo by John Sommers II/Getty Images
Some people deride the US presidential campaign as a popularity contest, but they're wrong. For one thing, both of the likely major party nominees are incredibly unpopular.
As longtime pollster Tony Fabrizio noted in RealClearPolitics on Sunday, "As far back as I can recall, the presumptive GOP and Democrat nominees have never been in such bad shape image-wise with the voters as Trump and Clinton find themselves." A recent CNN poll found that 56 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of Hillary Clinton, and 67 percent didn't like Donald Trump; other polls show similar results. Registered Democrats and Republicans support Clinton and Trump respectively, of course, but Americans as a whole can't stand either of them. And unless something unexpected happens, one of them is going to be president in 2017.
Part of the problem is that neither candidate is "likable" in a traditional sense. Trump is a loud man with bad hair who says racist things and brags about his money constantly; Clinton is disliked by liberals for her Wall Street ties and by conservatives for whatever they think happened in Benghazi. But this trend goes deeper than just the people at the top of the ticket: 2016 will go down as one of the most depressed, hateful election seasons of the modern era.
Campaigns, even the most contentious ones, usually contain a dash of uplift, something to make voters feel good about putting a check mark in the box. In 1984 Ronald Reagan reassured folks it was "morning in America"; Bill Clinton adopted Fleetwood Mac's upbeat "Don't Stop" in 1992; Barack Obama brought us "change we can believe in" and "yes we can" in 2008. In 2016 we have the muted, almost resigned "Ready for Hillary" on one hand and the snide "Make America Great Again" on the other. Trump is going around saying that the US is a "poor country"; Clinton's latest speech, in Wisconsin, focused on the calamity that would result if Trump (or any Republican) were allowed to pick the next Supreme Court justice. The message based on the speaker and the audience, but over and over the core theme is the same: Imagine an America run by the other team. Imagine the racist riots a fascist Trump would inspire, or the unchecked corruption and socialism a Clinton presidency would bring. The country is on the brink, and only our side can stop it from going over.
Make no mistake, the general election will be another "lesser of the two evils" sort of choice. Some people are genuinely excited, not just ready, for Clinton (or at least the prospect of a female president), and some Trump fans are looking forward to him building the wall and banning Muslims from entering the country. Most of us, though, will be voting against a catastrophic future, and the two campaigns will anticipate are anxiety. "The Only Strategy for Hillary Clinton Is to Scorch the Earth" read a February Buzzfeed News headline topping an article by Ben Smith, the gist of which is that 2016 is a "contrast election," a.k.a. a mudfest.
"It will be her versus a fucking asshole in almost any scenario," an Obama supporter told Smith. "It's going to be a lot of fear, but she's going to have a lot of room to run, and she's not going to have to destroy the other person, because the other person is going to be so eminently destroyable."
Trump, of course, will be in the same spot—he's already made an art of insulting nicknames like "Lyin' Ted" and "Little Marco," and the broader themes of his campaign are all negative: America is weak, America loses, Americans are getting screwed by immigrants, ISIS, and even our allies—and obviously Obama, and by extension Clinton, are responsible.
Blaming the candidates for not being positive gets this phenomenon backward. GOP voters had their choice of over a dozen candidates and picked the loudest, most abrasive one of the bunch. Their second-place candidate, Ted Cruz, is a universally disliked Tea Party Senator who came close to calling Trump a "ratfucker" last week; John Kasich, the only one who tried to mount a positive campaign, is a hopeless afterthought. The Democrats have Bernie Sanders, who is inspirational in the way he enumerates exactly how we are screwed, but he has yet to catch Clinton, and he's running out of time. Sanders and Kasich, by the way, generally have net positive ratings in the polls, but haven't scored the votes that Trump and Clinton have. People seem to like them, in other words, but not enough people like them enough to actually put them in the country's highest office.
It's hard to predict how all this hatred will impact the final result. "The other side sucks way worse!" is a shitty rallying cry, and both Democrats and Republicans will have some tough decisions to make in the solitude of the voting booth. Will right-wingers who have despised Clinton for decades really cast their lot in with a candidate whose persona is basically "Rodney Dangerfield with a racist streak"? Will Sanders supporters hold their noses and back a candidate they think is the embodiment of what is wrong with the Democratic Party?
Anecdotally, there are GOP diehards who hate Trump too much vote for him. And there are Bernie fans like Susan Sarandon who feel so deflated by the prospect of a Clinton presidency that they wonder if Trump would be that much worse. These people are not going to be energized by months of vicious attack ads and take-no-prisoners debates. Some will cast third-party ballots, or wistfully write in "Bernie Sanders" or "Barack Obama." Others will give up on the prospect entirely—come election day they'll turn off their phones, ignore the news, and drive and drive and drive until they reach a place where they don't see any candidate yard signs.
In the end, of course, someone will have to be president. And next January, that person is going to face the prospect of running a country that probably doesn't like them all that much.
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