Why everyone (including your grandma) is writing about the election

Everybody’s got a theory.

In the blue enclave of America where I reside, one of the most striking consequences of Donald Trump’s presidential victory on Nov. 8 has been the propensity of people to write about it.

{mosads}Not just journalists or media pundits, but regular, everyday people. My Facebook feed, which usually includes a variety of shared articles, photos of kids or sports scores, now has several one-to-two-page reflective essays by people on the meaning of the election.

Both my mother and my mother-in-law have written long pieces. The student paper at my university published a full edition of student reflections on the election, including one by a student confessing that the need to write, as therapy, had impeded her ability to go to class.

It would be easy to make fun of this tendency. I think doing so would, however, be a mistake. As a political scientist, I have tried to avoid simple theories about the election results.

I do, however, have a completely unscientific theory about the outpouring of writing (call it “Post-Trumpian Graphomania”) that has followed.

It goes like this.

Throughout the presidential campaign, nervous Democrats feasted on aggregated poll data that many news outlets provided. Many of my acquaintances learned which polling firms tended to overstate or understate Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s support and how often voter screens work.

Some learned a bit about how the odds ratios calculated by Nate Silver and the Upshot columnists work. Some also were reassured by David Plouffe’s discussions of the importance of projection models. They also took comfort in being reminded that in 2012, President Obama’s reelection campaign exceeded the polling aggregates, in part, we were told, because of the campaign’s superior ground game.

Although these people were not statisticians or social scientists, they were elites in some fashion or other, and they felt reassured that other elites were in control.

On election night, when The New York Times’s meter predicting the odds of a Trump victory suddenly spun from 15 percent to more than 90 percent, people were shocked.

They had not, as it turns out, understood things as well as they had thought.

The election does not mean that the numbers were entirely wrong; after all, Clinton’s share of the popular vote was closer to the pre-election polling average than was Obama’s 2012 vote share.

But a palpable sense remains among relatively informed citizens that the experts let them down. The post-election storytelling seems to be an effort to explain politics in a way the numbers cannot, to reclaim the narrative from the campaign professionals.

This sort of urge might explain the popularity of current books like J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” Arlie Russell Hochschild’s “Strangers in Their Own Land” or, in a more academic vein, Katherine Cramer’s “The Politics of Resentment.”

Some of the amateur essays I’ve encountered are quite good. Most share a desire to understand or reconnect with the rest of the country. Many of the people who’ve felt compelled to write come from states that went red; for instance, the election reminded my Ohio high-school friends — many of whom now reside elsewhere — how their home state has changed over the past two decades.

This certainly isn’t the first time in American history that urban progressives have been reminded to pay attention to rural or small-town America, but that doesn’t make these reflections any less authentic.

Other essays, of course, are not that good, or are unduly condescending or combative. There has always been an element of condescension in the ways that reasonably well-educated urbanites think about “fly-over country.” One common feature of these essays has been an emphasis on people’s own circumstances — on their communities, on political things they plan to do over the next few years.

Very few are directly about Trump, or Clinton, or Obama.

This is important. In a year where the alleged populist fervor is all on the right, in the Trump campaign, it is important to remember the perils of investing too much hope in one man (or woman).

I’ve tried to remind my students that the country didn’t become a different place because of an election. For those who are unhappy about Trump’s victory, American institutions will (hopefully) slow down some of his more radical proposals.

For those who want to work toward something different, the answer is more likely to lie in creating a different sort of narrative about who we are than it is in trying to find one politician who can lead the charge against him.

Whatever one’s views about Trump, it is arguably a good thing for democrats (with a small “d”) to think more about who we are as a country than about our president.

Boatright is a professor of political science at Clark University and the director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse Research Network.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.