The people who were influenced by “anti PC” rhetoric were all going to vote for Trump anyway. Perhaps that rhetoric increased turnout among that segment of the population.

At the presidential level, this election doesn’t tell us nearly as much as people of all stripes are saying. Lichtman + very unpopular Democratic candidate + Republicans more willing to turn out for their unpopular candidate = Dems losing a very close election.

BUT that being said, the more fundamental challenge for Dems is the house/senate/states. There something has to change, but I don’t know what. Certainly possible that 4 years of likely Republican misrule (and perhaps actually following through on some of their less popular proposals – it would be really fun to see the reaction if Ryan passes a bill gutting medicare) may be enough in the short run – and obviously a Dem wave in 2020 would have big consequences in terms of redistricting – but not something to rely upon, and not enough long term.

I think, however, Kling and the reason post are underselling PC as an interpretive framework. PC is a powerplay, as Tyler Cowen would call it. It is the interpretive framework that underlies and reinforces the Oppressor/Oppressed axis that justifies most everything the Progressive coalition stands for. PC says that the only valid arguments and observations are those that identify the out-group (white, straight males (or Western Civ)) as oppressive, and the in-group (POC, women, trans) as oppressed. PC is more than an interpretive framework, it’s a means of pushing other interpretive frameworks beyond the range of permissible discourse.

In other words, a rejection of PC is a Klingian claim to heterodoxy. Rejecting PC involves rejecting a bundle of frameworks, but principally the framework that says there can only be one framework.

I knew there was the general anti-establishment angst, so I,searched out for “but why Trump?” and Scott Adams had a persuasive argument.

Then the 3 professors I saw who have their prediction models based on alternating between incumbent and challenger parties had it for the Republican party based on their various indicators under normal conditions. So, while we weren’t under normal conditions all Trump had to do was not screw it up.

I still wasn’t confident because he almost did.

I do think any of the Reps (even Jeb? ughh, only if he got primary voters) would have won over Clinton in this year, if they could have generated the voting buzz to win the primaries. Maybe without the Donald, the debates would have been won by Carly? (my first choice), with Carly & Ted (second) fighting it out …

What about Allan Lichtman’s 30 year run of predicting election results?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/28/professor-whos-predicted-30-years-of-presidential-elections-correctly-is-doubling-down-on-a-trump-win/

13 True/False questions; if six or more are false, the incumbent Party loses the White House.

This is certainly the “Tide of History” view, as compared to the “Great Man of History” view.

I’m pretty sure his 13 measures will, in the next 28 years, be wrong at least once — and it will be blamed on very much a combined “Great / Terrible” person. But I could be wrong, too. Each time these 13 T/F measures are “correct”, the Bayesian posterior gets stronger. Until there is such effort by the incumbent party to take actions so as to avoid any “False” results, yet with some other unmeasured metrics being more important, that they get 8 or more “True” responses but still lose.

That’s my own hobby horse, by the way: in economics when a “law” or “regularity” is believed enough to allow premium profits by those who apply that law, the changed behavior to get the profits changes and invalidates the regularity.

At the end of Soave’s article:
“There is a cost to depriving people of the freedom (in both the legal and social senses) to speak their mind. The presidency just went to the guy whose main qualification, according to his supporters, is that he isn’t afraid to speak his.”

I’m convinced this is one important factor — and the key factor in how bad the polls did, because PC thought police have taught many to avoid admitting their own anti-PC beliefs.

2. My personal observations:

A. The democrats (as a group) either do not know or not believe why they lost. If they had won they would not believe or grasp the importance of how narrow the margin would have been. They do not seem to understand that a great many people in the US disagree with them.

B. The republicans (as a group) probably do not really quite know why they did so well – and in particular are on the whole surprized at how well they did down ticket in spite of pre-election fears about Trump.

C. The mass media (and many bloggers) are demonstrating that they actually do not understand much of anything. I will not be surprized to see the economic carnage in that industry continue. (Humilty note – don’t understand much except that I don’t understand….)

And I now make a prediction – the notion that demographics will bring the democratic party, particularly in its “progressive” (that is massively statist) form to lasting power, will prove to be of fairly limited predictive value.