How Did This Happen?

I was hanging out with some friends this past weekend. We were talking about the election, and one of them asked, “How did this happen?”

He couldn’t understand how the Democrats came so close to picking socialist Bernie Sanders and why the Republican nominated Donald Trump.

He didn’t seem satisfied with the answer that Trump got lucky and won in a crowded field. Afterward, I came to realize that I wasn’t satisfied with the usual answers as well.

Then I was looking through YouTube and found an interesting video with Pat Caddell. It shows him speaking at Hillsdale College earlier this month.

Mr. Caddell was chief pollster and senior advisor for George McGovern, in 1972, and Jimmy Carter in 1976. Both candidates were insurgents who defeated their party’s establishment.

After Carter won, Caddell was his adviser in the White House from 1977 to 1981. In the speech, Caddell told the audience that his party has lost its soul. He then talked about how the elites in both parties have failed the American people.

Caddell suggests that the country is entering a new political paradigm. The electorate has risen in revolt against elites that don’t care about them.

This revolt is what fueled the candidacies of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Caddell disagrees with the conventional wisdom that the country is deeply divided. He thinks most Americans are united on the issue that our elites have failed us and that we have to stop them.

Here are some polls taken by Pat Caddell in February 2016. This was when Donald Trump was already on track to win the Republican primary and Hillary was facing a very strong challenge from Bernie Sanders. Caddell believes if not for the DNC helping Clinton, Bernie would have won.

According to Caddell’s research, 72 percent of Americans agree that “The U.S. has a two-track economy, where most Americans struggle every day, where good jobs are hard to find, and where the huge corporations get all the rewards. We need fundamental changes to fix the inequality in our economic system.”

There’s much more:

• 66 percent of Americans believe their country is in a state of decline. Only 23 percent of Americans believe that most American children today will have it better than their parents.
• 78 percent of Americans believe that, “The two main political partiesare too beholden to special and corporate interest to create any meaningful change.”
• 72 percent agree that “A major reason that the middle class has not seen their economic condition really improve for decades and that the nation does not have the economic growth it needsis because of the corruption and crony capitalism in Washington that puts special interests ahead of the nation and the majority of Americans.”
• 71 percent agree that “Every week we seem to have more new stories about government incompetence, overspending and mismanagement. The federal government is not only dysfunctional, but it seemsto be collapsing right before our eyes.”
• 74 percent of the people believe that “The biased and slanted coverage of the media and press area fundamental part of the problem with our politicalsystem.”
• 79 percent believe that the solution is for an ordinary citizen to run and not a professional politician. Also 56 percent of Americans would vote for an independent over the two major parties if they thought he/she had a chance to win.
• 76 percent of people believe that the political class has rigged the system in favor of special interests and that “America cannot succeed unless we take onand defeat this corruption.”

A majority of this country believes the political class must be displaced for any real change to happen. It doesn’t believe real change can come any other way.

Most people are angry at the elite who have not been held accountable for the failures of recent years including the mismanagement of the Iraq War, the financial crisis, illegal immigration, slow growth, and the collapse of the manufacturing sector, to name a few of them.

Is there any question who the elites in both parties favor? Even many Republican elites are endorsing Hillary Clinton. Not a single Democrat will condemn the corruption of the Clinton Foundation. Not even Bernie Sanders.

If you elect Hillary Clinton, she will continue the kind of pay-for-play schemes in the White House that she did in the State Department.

As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton treated the State Department like a garage sale. She approved a merger that gave 20 percent of American uranium reserves to the Russians and then she had the audacity to call Trump a puppet of Putin. It’s no accident that this deal benefited Clinton Foundation donors.

Even if Trump loses, there are too many Americans who are fed up with the elite. Eventually, an outsider will get elected to clean up this mess, and he probably won’t be as nice a guy as Donald Trump has been.