The election is over. Stephen Ledrews asks Colin MacDonald what American will be like, now that Trump is in office. Will he build the wall? Will he tear up NAFTA? Tune in to find out what Colin thinks.
Aired on Live at Noon on CP24 Nov. 9, 2016, 2016
Jaime joins Matt Galloway on CBC Toronto to discuss the outcome of the U.S. election.
Aired on Metro Morning on CBC on November 9, 2016
In the aftermath of an unexpected victory for Donald Trump on election night, questions have been asked about how Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party could have won what appeared to be an easy race.
Trump was massively unpopular with voters. According to CNN’s Exit Poll, 60% of voters had an unfavourable view of Donald Trump. Unfortunately for Clinton, her negatives weren’t too far behind with an unfavourable view among voters of 54%.
During the primaries, Hillary Clinton faced stiff competition against Independent-turned-Democrat, Bernie Sanders. Sanders was able to win 23 states in the democratic primary and more than 13 million votes.
However, the hard-fought primary campaign left deep divides within the Democratic party. After Wikileaks released a batch of Democratic National Committee e-mails appearing to show that the DNC leadership was supportive of Clinton, many Sanders supporters accused the DNC and Clinton of rigging the election against their candidate.
Ultimately, those accusations turned out to be false — while the e-mails did show a bias among several DNC employees towards the Clinton campaign, no concrete steps to limit Sanders’ success were ever undertaken. That fact did not stop many Sanders supporters from breaking from the Democratic Party and vowing to support a far-left, third party option. For the most part, these individuals backed Jill Stein, the Green Party’s two-time presidential nominee.
Stein also ran in 2012 against President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. In that race she won 469,628 votes. This election season (with some votes still being counted at the time of writing), the Green Party has increased its vote total to 1,209,758 — more than double what it received last cycle. Undoubtedly this increase was brought on in part by a significant number of Sanders supporters who publicly backed Stein.
American voters may hear echoes of the 2000 presidential election in all this, when Ralph Nader, while also running for the Green Party, was accused of pulling left-wing votes away from the more moderate Democrat, Al Gore. Ultimately, Nader’s opponents claim these votes cost Gore Florida and, as a result, the election.
But is this the case for Clinton and Stein?
In order to have won the election, Clinton would have needed to win a combination of three of the following states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida.
Michigan: Trump — 2,279,210; Clinton — 2,267,373; Difference — 11,837; Stein — 50,686
Wisconsin: Trump — 1,409,467; Clinton — 1,382,210; Difference — 27,257; Stein — 30,980
Pennsylvania: Trump — 2,912,941; Clinton — 2,844,705; Difference — 68,236; Stein — 48,912
Florida: Trump — 4,605,515; Clinton — 4,485,745; Difference — 119,770; Stein — 64,019
In only two of those states — Michigan and Wisconsin, which also happen to be the smallest of the states — is the Green Party vote large enough to make up the gap between Clinton and Trump. Even if she had won those two states, Clinton would have lost the election to Trump 280 electoral votes to her 258. Trump’s support in Pennsylvania and Florida was so great that even a unified centre-left and left-wing voter coalition would not have displaced him.
It is always difficult to assume how voters, if given different candidates, in what would be a different race, would have voted. Were Bernie Sanders the nominee, it is possible he could have lost just as definitively as Clinton had — or won in a landslide. Likewise, we cannot assume the Green Party would not have been a factor in a race between Bernie Sanders and Trump. However, given the fact that Jill Stein offered the top spot of the Green Party ticket to Sanders after her nomination, it is reasonable to assume that a Sanders-led Democratic presidential ticket would have won a significant number of Green votes. At the end of the day, though, all we have are the votes as they stand now, and the numbers clearly show that Jill Stein and the Green Party are not responsible for Clinton’s loss to Trump via vote splitting — certainly not in the states that decided the election. There are many arguments to be made about why Clinton lost, but vote splitting among left-wing candidates does not appear to be a meaningful one.
The prime minister’s governing style assumes one crucial thing — voters are willing to overlook large deficits. But for voters to happily stomach deficits, they must see results.
According to the Polimeter, an online application created by political scientists at Laval University, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has kept 24 per cent of the 353 campaign promises the Liberal Party made during the 2015 federal election campaign. He has broken five promises, which is about one per cent.
The Liberals pledged they would run short-term deficits of less than $10 billion in each of the next two fiscal years to fund investments in infrastructure and the middle class.
This week, in Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s fiscal update, the government doubled down. In its first year in office, the Trudeau government has racked up a deficit of nearly $31.8 billion.
The Laval analysis has highlighted that the number of promises kept entirely or in part (56 per cent) by this government far outweighs its predecessors’ average after one year (33 per cent).
The conscious decision to break the promise of ‘modest’ deficits has allowed the Trudeau government to remain on track with its other foundational promises. Simply put, the Trudeau government has broken one foundational promise to facilitate the progress of 348 others.
In the 2015 election, a plurality of voters was willing to accept that the new government would increase the debt.
On Tuesday, Morneau talked about the long term, announcing his plans for attracting foreign investment and creating an independent infrastructure bank. Strategically, the government eliminated the $6 billion annual contingency fund, making the government’s figures appear less overwhelming.
It is too early to tell if Canadians will remain as comfortable with this approach as they have been in the past. For now, the Liberals are still riding high in polls.
According to Nanos Research, one in two Canadians say they prefer Trudeau as Prime Minister, 16 per cent prefer interim Conservative Leader Rona Ambrose, and eight per cent prefer lame-duck NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair.
Political wisdom holds that to govern effectively, prime ministers have to make hard decisions, including ones that divide voters, shift governing philosophies and diminish voter goodwill.
Trudeau’s governing style may challenge this model.
Trudeau has positioned himself as a consensus-building, fiscally liberal politician who employs fact-based policy-making. As opposed to picking winners and losers, Trudeau tends avoid decisions that upset or let down large swaths of the population. Instead, he spends money to solve his policy problems and fulfil campaign promises.
This governing style assumes one crucial thing — that voters are willing to overlook large deficits. But for voters to happily stomach deficits, they must see results.
In its first year in office, the Trudeau government has approved a pipeline, increased funding for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, created 40,000 jobs for youth, taken in more than 30,000 refugees and cut the rate for the middle income tax bracket to 20.5 per cent from 22 per cent, addressing issues that spoke to the urban, young and educated voters who swung the election in the Liberals’ favour in 2015.
Moreover, people who cite the deficit as a determining factor when they vote are firmly within the Conservative Party tent and will likely never consider voting for Justin Trudeau.
The current government in Ontario is a case study in how deficits don’t necessarily affect a party’s electoral fortunes. The provincial Liberals have accumulated a significant amount of debt, leaving Ontario, astoundingly, as the world’s most indebted subnational government.
Yet, it’s not Ontario’s fiscal situation that is hurting the Liberal government. It is issues like high hydro prices — which seem to be a conversation topic around every dinner table these days — that seem to be threatening the Ontario Liberals’ long reign.
Ontario’s sky-high debt has been around for decades; it has yet to facilitate a changing of the guard.
Prime Minister Trudeau will continue to spend, and to give Canadians what they want and what he promised them. It would not be surprising to learn that his team has a comprehensive plan to execute, at least partially, on the remaining 152 promises before election 2019.
Stephen Harper’s government constantly warned voters that deficits would have dire consequences. The message fell on deaf ears.
Everything we’ve learned in Canadian politics in the last two decades has demonstrated voters do not care about the deficit, and our prime minister knows this better than anyone.
Jaime Watt is the executive chairman of Navigator Ltd. and a Conservative strategist.
When Obama was elected the first time around there was a sense of history being made, and I feel like that isn’t quite here this time around
—Travis Kann
Allie and David are joined by Travis Kann to talk about the fall economic update, CETA (again), the Liberal government’s pay-to-play scandal, and of course, the American election.
