A Celebrity, Not a Candidate

As I attended the first national academic political science conference after the election of Donald Trump I could not escape the reality that the discipline had come to no consensus about how so many academics and political prognosticators were so wrong about Trump’s victory. Each panel I observed had some form of asterisking the 2016 election. Scholars consistently uttered a form of, “Trump’s victory does not follow from past expectations”. One presenter even described how she taught theories of presidential elections during the Fall 2016 semester with the hashtag #exceptfor2016 overlaid on the central theories of why some candidates are more likely to win than others in order to better appeal to millennials and to provide the necessary caveats that secure a 50+ year history of study.

This is not to say there is a lack of excuses about how we could be so wrong. Perhaps it was just due to problematic survey techniques and measurement error: “Well, we all know survey response rates are far lower than they used to be.” “We all know there are social biases that resulted in under-reporting of Trump support.” Perhaps it was a lopsided failure of strategy: “Clinton just didn’t have the ground game she thought she did.” “Donald spoke to the needs of white working class voters, Hillary didn’t.” Perhaps the media bears responsibility: “Trump had so much more free media than paid media.” “The media really hammered Clinton on emails and gave Trump a pass on issues like tax returns”. Maybe the culprit was fake news aided by voracious social media consumption: “Those Moldavan teens really pulled a fast one here.” “The echo-chamber political bubbles of American politics are inescapable given the prevalence of Twitter and Facebook.” Or maybe the public appetite for certain candidate characteristics provides a base for the unexpected outcome: “The public is not ready for a female leader.” “Voters really just want an outsider right now.” “Levels of public trust in government are so low, and Clinton had been around for too long.” The list goes on.

Empirical research on presidential elections suffers it’s own particular sorts of problems in the sense that the sample size is low — we’ve only have 56 presidential elections — and every race exists in a unique historical reality that can hard to compare. Yet, our work on elections and understandings of electoral competition based on the thousands of other federal elections in addition to presidential races does provide guidance as to which candidate we can expect to win a given race.

But Donald Trump is not a candidate; he is a celebrity.

But Donald Trump is not a candidate; he is a celebrity.

One reason we didn’t have Joe the Plumber win the presidency in 2012 — even though his views are quite close to Trump and his favorability is presumably greater — is because he is not a name and a brand that everyone under 50 has had a lifetime of awareness about.

One may argue that Hillary Clinton had just as much name recognition as Donald Trump as this Gallup poll write up describes with the headline, “Clinton Is Best Known, Best Liked Potential 2016 Candidate”. Yet the graph included within that description of the presidential field ranks 16 potential 2016 candidates and keen readers will note Donald Trump is not among them.

He is different; he is a publicly known person, but not a candidate. Of course, Trump has been flirting with political ambition at least since the 1980s, but he never made the jump in a way that other celebrity presidential hopefuls like Ronald Reagan, Bill Bradley, and Al Franken did by committing to become candidates in more standard ways via elected office at lower levels.

Even if the public was just as able to identify Hillary Clinton as they were Donald Trump, her notoriety of being in the public eye is very different than his form of celebrity. Being a real estate tycoon featured in the worlds rich and famous and cameo actor in over 60 movies and shows, as well as host of a reality television show for 14 years is not the same as rising in the political ranks in the way she did. This is not to say the Apprentice or the Reality Apprentice were widely successful — many analyses indicate otherwise — but it is to say they were widely known and the resultant cultural spill over are undeniable.

So what is none of the accounts offered by political academics or pundits are fully explained in our models of presidential elections? Looking for comprehensive scholarly explanations of candidate competition that suit the 2016 presidential election is a goose chase. We should stop looking for answers or attempting to augment our theories of candidate competition in light of 2016, and we should instead embark on a new agenda focused on how celebrity status impacts electoral competition.

For this election does not prove our theories are broken or wrong, it proves a relative blind spot of our system — the entrance of a non-experienced celebrity rather than a standard candidate — ought be focused on as a phenomenon unto itself.