There’s no ifs ands or buts about it
I’ve got to learn to live without you now
If Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election, there’s a pretty good chance Donald Trump would have won in 2020.
If you’re a Trump supporter, would you have taken that trade-off?
What about you Trump haters? Would you change the outcome of the 2016 election knowing that the 2020 election might have come out differently as a result?
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Before I begin to speculate about what would have happened in the 2020 presidential election if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election instead of Donald Trump, I want to make one think perfectly clear.
You should NOT conclude that if I say that I conclude that Clinton would have won a hypothetical 2020 rematch with Trump that I would have wanted her to win – or vice versa.
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| Déjà vu all over again? |
Let’s imagine that I was writing about who I think will win Super Bowl LV. If I say Tampa Bay will win because Tom Brady is the G.O.A.T. and the Bucs will playing at home, that doesn’t necessarily mean I want Tampa Bay to win – and if I say Kansas City will prevail because Patrick Mahomes is simply unstoppable and the Chiefs are the best team in the NFL from top to bottom, that doesn’t necessarily mean that I want Kansas City to win.
You may think that it’s a waste of time to speculate about whether Clinton would have beaten Trump in 2020 if she had beaten him in 2016.
You may also think that my analysis is less than convincing.
If so, so be it. But don’t reject my conclusion because you think that I wanted it to come out that way, and that what I’ve written is merely a rationalization of my predetermined conclusion.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
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In the last 2 or 3 lines, I did some major speculating about what might have happened if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election. (Scroll down to read that post if you missed it.)
In a nutshell, my conclusions included these:
1. We might have as few as six sitting Supreme Court justices today.
2. We probably would have a Republican-controlled House of Representatives and a Republican-controlled Senate between 2016 and 2020.
3. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 would likely not have become law – no way a President Clinton would have signed such a bill.
4. The 2020 election would have been a rematch of the 2016 election – Clinton vs. Trump, part two.
5. The 2020 election would have almost certainly turned on what voters thought about the incumbent’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
In this 2 or 3 lines, I’m going to address that last question by evaluating the objective and subjective factors that I believe would have had the greatest influence on how the voters perceived Clinton’s response to covid-19.
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The most significant objective marker of whether a strategy for dealing with the pandemic was effective or ineffective is the number of covid-related deaths. (The number of hospitalizations and the number of cases are also important numbers, but I think the number of deaths far outweighs any other measure in significance.)
To date, there have been 400,000-plus deaths attributed to covid-19 in the United States. (Some think that number overstates the actual death toll – others think it’s an understatement. I’m using the official numbers because I don’t know anything else to do.)
That’s a lot of deaths, of course – but even a high number doesn’t necessarily indicate that the government (or a President) has done a bad job. After all, the number could have been much higher.
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Let’s begin by considering whether there likely would have been significantly more, significantly fewer, or about the same number of covid-related deaths if Clinton had been the President instead of Trump.
I’m sure we can agree that she would likely have handled things very differently. For example, I think that she would have pushed mask-wearing much harder than Trump did, and likely would have tried to keep restaurants and schools from reopening – can we agree on that?
Most people would assume that a more pro-mask, stay-at-home approach by the federal government would have resulted in fewer covid cases and fewer deaths. Seems like a reasonable assumption, right?
But it’s interesting to look at one set of facts that is very relevant to the issue – namely, the covid-19 death rates in “blue” vs. “red” states.
Comparing those numbers doesn’t lead to a definitive conclusion, of course. Dividing the states that way is a gross oversimplification – not all blue states are the same, and not all red states are the same.
But generally speaking, the state and local governments in blue states were more insistent when it came to limiting indoor dining and other gatherings, kept schools closed longer, and so on.
And while there are clearly other factors that might have had an effect on covid death rates – everything from the average age of a state’s residents to population density to even the weather – surely most people would expect a state that was tougher when it came to enforcing mask-wearing and social distancing to have fewer covid cases and deaths.
But the four states with the highest number of covid-related deaths were all blue states in the northeastern part of the country – New Jersey (which has had 236 deaths per 100,000 residents), New York (220), Massachusetts (206), and Rhode Island (201).
The next highest-ranking state when it comes to covid-19 death rates is a red state, Mississppi (197 covid deaths per 100,000 residents), which is barely ahead of blue state Connecticut (194).
The next four states are all red ones – South Dakota (193), North Dakota (188), Louisiana (185), and Arizona (171) – followed by blue state Illinois (165) and “purple” state Pennsylvania (163).
I find these numbers very surprising. For example, the South Dakota governor consistently refused to mandate masks even when infection rates shot up dramatically. Yet the residents of her laissez faire state still suffered fewer deaths per capita than the residents of some of the most restrictive states in the country.
Rather than go down the entire list, I’ll just note that Texas and Florida – two states that have a reputation for being pretty loosey-goosey when it comes to wearing masks and maintaining social distancing – rank right in the middle of the pack, with 122 and 120 covid deaths per 100,000 residents, respectively. (That puts them in the same ballpark as my home state of Maryland – where schools remain closed, restaurants allow only outdoor dining, and so on.)
The biggest surprise on the list was California, which has suffered 97 covid deaths per 100,000 residents – that’s better than 35 other states, although much worse than its neighbors Oregon and Washington. (There has been so much in the news about how bad things are in California that I would have thought that state’s death rate was much higher).
Click here if you’d like to see an updated ranking of the states in order of the covid death rate.
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PLEASE don’t misunderstand my point here. I am NOT saying that it’s a waste of time to wear masks and practice social distancing – as I’ve said before, I’m consistent when it comes to doing both.
More consistent than the so-called experts have been when it comes to mask-wearing, it would seem.
Last February 27, the director of the CDC told a Congressional committee that healthy people should not wear masks. Two days later, the Surgeon General tweeted “STOP BUYING MASKS!,” and claimed that masks are not effective in preventing the general public from contracting coronavirus.
On March 8, Dr. Anthony Fauci told 60 Minutes that “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.” The CDC did an about-face on April 3 and recommended that Americans wear facial coverings outside of their own households.
But the World Health Organization didn’t recommend the general use of face masks until June 5.
Now some experts are recommending that we wear two masks, or switch to medical-grade N95 masks – although the new CDC director discourages the use of N95 masks, which she believes are too uncomfortable for the average person to tolerate for very long.
It’s no wonder that people’s opinions about masks are all over the place when the experts can’t make up their mind.
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As I said above, I think it’s reasonable to assume that a President Hillary Clinton – like the governors of California, New York, and other blue states – would have favored a stricter stay-at-home policy than President Trump, who pushed to get schools and businesses reopened.
Since the death rates in the blue states appear to be no better than the death rates in the red states, it’s not clear that the nationwide death rate would have been significantly reduced if the government had imposed stricter lockdowns. (Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that stricter lockdowns wouldn’t have had an effect – I’m just saying we don’t know for sure.)
What is clear is that such a move would certainly have been very unpopular among much of the population – because it would have meant that unemployment would have been much higher, many more small businesses would have gone bankrupt, and fewer students would have been back in school.
Can you imagine the mishegas in places like Texas and Idaho if the feds and rolled in and ordered everyone to stay at home or else?
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By the way, I think that most people believe that the U.S. has done a worse job managing the pandemic than other countries. That may not really be the case.
The overall covid death rate in the United States is 127 per 100,000 residents. Several European countries have higher death rates – including the UK (147 deaths per 100,000 residents).
If you average the death rates in four of the largest European democracies – the UK, France, Italy, and Spain – you get a number that is slightly higher than the death rate in the U.S.
Did you ever hear that statistic during the recent campaign? (I didn’t . . . but I was doing my best to avoid all the campaign nonsense last year, so maybe I just missed it.)
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The bottom line is that there’s no way to know whether there would have been a lower covid-19 death rate under our hypothetical President Clinton than there was under our very real President Trump.
I think most people believe that she would have done a better job at controlling the spread of the virus. I certainly don’t doubt that she would have handled things differently – I’m guessing she would have been more activist, and likely would have pushed the stay-at-home approach harder.
You would think that doing that would have lowered the infection and death rates. But the numbers say that things weren’t really any better in the blue states that took that approach. And with the exception of Germany, things weren’t really any better in the large western European democracies either. So who knows if a different approach would have led to a better outcome?
Once again, I’m not saying that she wouldn’t have done a better job. I’m just saying that we don’t know that for sure.
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There’s one other aspect of the Trump Administration’s covid-19 strategy that I want to touch on – Operation Warp Speed, which was the name given to the public-private partnership that coordinated efforts to develop and manufacture vaccines and therapeutics.
At first, the vaccine development aspect of Operation Warp Speed seemed a little chaotic. Nine different companies received billions in either direct or indirect funding, and it was off to the races.
You’ve probably heard that safe and effective viral disease vaccines usually take years to develop. The unprecedented speed with which not one, but multiple highly effective covid-19 vaccines were developed is even more amazing when you consider that there were extensive previous research attempts to produce vaccines against other coronaviruses (including SARS and MERS) that got nowhere.
From the Washington Post:
[Last February and March] government scientists realized covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, was a “catastrophe in the making,” as one senior administration official recalled. But they quickly realized some vaccine manufacturers did not share that sense of urgency.
Unsure of how long the outbreak would last, some executives were reluctant to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars or more to develop a vaccine without knowing whether they would have a market when they finished. Some companies talked about beginning clinical trials in the fall, with the aim of having a vaccine ready by summer 2021.
“The vaccine manufacturers were in a funk,” the senior administration official recalled. “We woke up to that and realized that is not going to fly.”
In early April, [FDA and DHHS officials] began laying the groundwork for what would become Operation Warp Speed. . . .
The thought was that if the government could eliminate most of the financial risk of vaccine development, more companies would be inclined to take on the herculean challenge. The government would also help speed development by footing the bill to manufacture millions of doses of vaccines without knowing whether they worked, so that normally sequential steps could be completed all at once.
The risky strategy paid off in a big way when Pfizer and Moderna announced shortly after the 2020 election that their vaccines were both highly effective and safe. (Today we learned that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is also highly effective.)
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It’s hard to believe that any alternative vaccine-development strategy would have born fruit more quickly than Operation Warp Speed did.
Would our hypothetical Clinton Administration have pursued a similar strategy? Perhaps – but it’s also possible that a less pro-business and more risk-averse President would have insisted on the government having more control over the process.
That approach would have been at loggerheads with the wishes of Pfizer, the first company to develop an effective vaccine, which had largely been allowed to go its own way by the Operation Warp Speed czar.
From the Washington Post:
Pfizer made a point of not accepting government research funding, a decision its chief executive Albert Bourla said last month on ABC’s “Good Morning America” was “to liberate our scientists from any bureaucracy that could come by accepting money.” But the company did benefit from the government’s zeal for a vaccine in other ways: it agreed to sell nearly $2 billion worth of vaccines to Warp Speed and was bolstered separately by a strong working relationship with federal regulators.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that a President who was more willing to issue stay-at-home orders and insist on mask-wearing by all might prevented a significant number of covid-caused deaths.
But if that President had kept a tighter grip on the reins of the vaccine development program, we might not have had those vaccines fas soon – which might have led to a worse net outcome.
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This is all rank speculation, of course. I happen to believe it is reasonable speculation, but you may disagree – and who knows which of us is right?
Anyway, let’s cut to the chase. If Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election, who do I believe would have won a 2020 Clinton-Trump rematch?
Based on the previous discussion, I could assume that there would have roughly the same number of covid deaths under a Clinton administration as there was under a Trump administration.
You may disagree with that assumption – and you might be right.
Do you think we might have had 350,000 deaths under a Clinton Administration instead of 400,000? I’ll give you that without really arguing.
What about 300,000 deaths instead of 400,000? That’s certainly possible – although I’m not sure what basis there is for assuming that large an effect.
Let’s go ahead and say 300,000 is the number. Do you think that the majority of voters would have concluded that President Clinton had done a bang-up job in controlling the pandemic if that had been the number, and therefore deserved to be re-elected?
One problem with that line of argument is that I’m not sure people would have seen 300,000 as a great number. It’s great compared to 400,000 – I’ll give you that.
But we would have had no way of knowing that her number was 100,000 deaths lower than what it would have been otherwise. It’s only with 200/20 hindsight that we would say that 300,000 was a good number.
I have a funny feeling that candidate Trump would have tried to make 300,000 deaths the greatest failure by a President in the history of the United States. (Say what you will about Trump as a President, but he is one hell of a campaigner – as he proved in 2016.)
Not only that, but if you assume that a President Clinton would have battled the pandemic more aggressively, you also have to assume that the economy would have taken an even bigger hit – unemployment would have been higher, more small businesses would have gone kaput, and fewer children would have gone back to school. (Given that the economy likely wouldn’t have been as strong a year ago under Clinton as it was under Trump, we would have been in the position of needing to dig out of an even bigger hole than it might first appear.)
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I think it would have been close.
After all, no matter how bad things were after four years of a President Clinton, a lot of voters would have never voted for Trump. So Clinton probably starts with 48% or so of the vote.
But an equal number would likely have never voted for Clinton. (Surely you haven’t forgotten that she was just as polarizing a figure as Trump was – very different from nice-guy Joe Biden.)
I think the odds are that Trump would have won a 2020 rematch. Under our hypothetical scenario, he lost in 2016 but came very, very close to winning. There’s no reason to think he wouldn’t have at least come close in 2020.
They say close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. But if the challenger was close when the 2020 race began, I think that would have been enough to win. Because I think that the incumbent – whether it was Clinton or Trump – was doomed by the covid-19 pandemic (and the resulting economic downturn) to failure in 2020.
After all, given the year we just lived through, why in the world would we want to give another four years to whoever was in charge when all hell broke loose?
Which brings us back to the question I asked at the beginning of this long and tedious post. Assuming that I’m correct – that if Clinton had won the 2016 election, Trump would have won in 2020 – would you have been happier with that hypothetical outcome than with the actual outcome?
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Tell me the truth, boys and girls. Did you enjoy speculating about what might have been if what actually was wasn’t? Or did you find the whole exercise a big waste of time?
I’m reminded of the following exchange between Howard Cosell and “Dandy” Don Meredith during a 1970 Monday Night Football broadcast:
Cosell: “If Los Angeles wins, it’s a big one, but San Francisco is still very much in it.”
Meredith: “If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we’d all have a merry Christmas.”
I think that sums it up perfectly – don’t you?
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According to Grammarist.com, “The correct spelling of ifs, ands, [or] buts does not involve apostrophes, as these words are plural forms and not possessives or contractions.”
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Black Ivory, an oh-so-smooth soul/R&B group that formed in Harlem in 1969, didn’t have access to Grammarist.com, so they used apostrophes in the title of their 1972 song, “No If’s And’s, or But's.”
But they deserve credit for not eschewing the use of an Oxford comma in that song title.
Click here to listen to “No If’s And’s, or But's.”
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