What the Hell Just Happened?! Clinton, Trump and the Death of the Party

Computer hackers, Kremlin conspiracies, dynastic restorations, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a socialist revolution, the Ku Klux Klan, Twitter trolls, a lascivious ex-congressman with a suspect last name and an egomaniacal reality TV tycoon with a lust for power and molesting women—if that sounds like a U.S. presidential election to you, congratulations! You’re alive on planet Earth in the year 2016.

Yes, if you’re reading this right now, you survived political doomsday and are here among the rest of us to pick through the ruins.

Somewhere amid the wreckage of smashed conventions and exploded institutions, you might find the tattered remains of predictions made just 18 months ago. All the experts then foresaw a contest between Hillary Clinton, the unchallenged heir apparent, and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, whose family suffered from an apparent hereditary disorder that forced them to return to the White House every eight years.

It seemed to promise a bloodless competition like the 2000 race between George W. Bush and Al Gore: two bland candidates with roughly the same worldview and cocktail party financiers, bickering their way to the Oval Office over tax cuts and abortion and who loved their mothers and America more.

How did such a massaged, polished, temperature-controlled affair morph into a colossal snowball with odd limbs and debris sticking out at all angles, hurtling toward D.C.? And how did it finally stop at this once unthinkable phrase: “President Donald Trump?”

Journalists and pundits, staring in transfixed terror at the shapeless mass gathering speed and size, have spewed all kinds of explanations—deindustrialization, demographic change, Twitter, talk radio, resistance to globalization, plain old anger and prejudice—as if guessing the problem’s name could make it miraculously evaporate at the last second.

And many, and possibly all, of these factors played some part. But the real answer to how the downhill momentum got started is much simpler.

The Republicans, flush with ambitious up-and-comers elected in the 2010 and 2014 midterms, had a crowded, competitive primary. The Democrats, with their depleted bench and the prohibitive Clinton candidacy, didn’t. And the twin processes that churned out these two deeply unpopular, baggage-laden nominees each illustrated the atrophy of the America’s political parties.

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http://observer.com/2016/11/what-the-hell-just-happened-a-look-back-at-the-2016-election-cycle/