 Aloha and welcome to Ehana Kako. We're here every week on the Think Tech Hawai'i Broadcast Network. I'm Kei Lee Akii, a president of the Grassroot Institute. One of the most fun things to do after a rousing football game is to do a little bit of Monday morning quarterbacking. Well, with regard to the recent elections, we're going to do some December quarterbacking right now with one of my favorite, one of my two favorite political pundits in the state of Hawai'i because there are really only two. Mr. Neil Milder. Neil Milder is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawai'i. He retired a few years ago, but everybody sees him on election night as he gives his wisdom and his analysis. Neil, welcome to the program today. Thanks. Thanks. Good to be here. We're having too much fun. Well, yeah, the Monday morning quarterbacking is kind of interesting because my Sunday was so bad. There you go. We'll talk about that. Well, I wonder how your November the 8th was this year. That's what I mean. How did the pundits do on the prediction level in terms of the tea leaves and the crystal wall? Well, most pundits didn't do very well because most pundits were following the best data that was around and the people who predicted Trump's victory did so either because they had a gut feeling or because they relied on some unconventional ways of doing it. It's sort of like the big short if you saw the movie. That's right. So what exactly happened in terms of the high level of confidence that Secretary Clinton was going to sweep this and then the eventual outcome, President-elect Trump won? Well, unless you're in Wisconsin right now. Well, my home state, we'll get to that in a minute. To make it as simple as possible, it's a conflict that there are a whole lot of things that were a factor there. But one thing for sure is that the turnout for people that she needed to turn out was lower than expected. Young people, there's always a low turnout for young people, was lower than expected. That's why we should be able to vote on Instagram. Well, that's right. Although, whether that would make a difference or not, it made a difference in terms of how many people registered because they made it impossible to register on Facebook. But the other thing is that the percentage of voters who supported her heavily didn't support her heavily enough, African-Americans. The other side of it is that for reasons that we don't quite understand, and this is where the state polls fell down, voters made either some last minute changes in key states, and not even away from Hillary, agreed to vote and were voting for Trump. And that was the fundamental thing that the pollsters missed and that the pundits missed. Everybody knew, we were writing about this for the entire campaign, that if there was a large number of untapped white working class voters that would come into this, and there was some demographic evidence that there was, that that would be a big advantage for Trump, the trouble is it didn't show up in the polls. How did we do in our assumptions about demographics, especially ethnicities as well as gender in terms of voting for or against? Well, ethnicities, first of all, the Republican Party is a very white party, and the percentage of white people voted Republican. Women voted less Republican than men did, but Clinton didn't do as well with college-educated women as she needed to do in order to win. She was able to pick up some higher educated votes that would maybe normally vote somewhere else. Ethnically, it was about the same as it has been in other elections, but there's little pockets here that are very interesting. In areas where she needed to carry as it turns out, in certain areas of Pennsylvania, in areas like that, Hispanics voted less for her than anticipated. Even though Trump was saying all these things about Mexicans and immigrants, it turns out that in certain areas of Pennsylvania, Hispanics, the majority didn't vote for him, but more than anticipated. So you have these little pockets going on that suggest that the demographic certainty that Democrats had over time, that as the country becomes more less white, it'll change. But remember there's a kind of very strong white pushback. Now, Secretary Clinton took the popular vote. Mr. Trump took the electoral college, and yet the races were very, very close. Would you characterize them as close or decidedly different? No, the races in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin were all pretty close races. What's significant about them is that at least two of those, and well, all three of those seem to be leaning toward Clinton for most of the race, including at the last minute. And they're pretty heavily Democratic states. Wisconsin is a competitive state, but it's voted for a Democratic president for a long period of time. Michigan, same way, competitive, and Pennsylvania. So that's where the real difference was. Let's talk about the campaigns for a little bit. Was there anything in Secretary Clinton's campaign that utterly hurt her in the long run? Well, you know, it's easy to say those kinds of things now. It's in some ways... Because we have perfect hindsight. Well, you have perfect hindsight, and you also have people that come up with self-serving arguments and blaming, you know, and playing the blame game that makes it very hard to sort through this. And so it really does take some time for somebody who's objective to be able to step aside. Generally, campaigns work like this. There isn't any one moment that's decisive, and that it's a series of things that happen back and forth. And generally, campaigns are pretty competently run on both sides. What's very weird about this one is that Trump ran an unorthodox campaign that everybody said was not going to work at every stage of this race, and in fact it did. So it's harder to make sense of all of this. How much would you say some of the things that Republicans ran against her, Benghazi, the emails and so forth, affected her ultimate results? I would say a little bit. I would say what affected the ultimate results more than anything just over the long term is a kind of that were definitive in states like Wisconsin with the rural world was a sense of resentment among people who aren't doing very well economically that the Democratic Party does not have an answer for us and that even though we voted for Obama, we're not going to vote for her. And remember, there's been a kind of reservoir of hate and distaste that's built up for Hillary Clinton over a long period of time. The Republicans have been doing this. Standard Republican stuff has been doing this for 20 years. So you combine those two things, not any aloha for her at all, in a sense that she was just another elite who was going to dump on our heads. I think that was more that in a kind of general sweep that has more of an explanation. Well, a great deal was made about Mr. Trump's lack of conventionality and in particular his proclivity to tweet, his rhetoric and so forth. And there were things that at times seemed to damage him and so forth. But on balance, how much did the Trump rhetoric factor, the Trump the performer factor impact his campaign? Did it actually help him? Well, it didn't hurt him for sure. I'm one of these people that kept watching and saying, although I didn't react as abruptly as the pressers, he did, oh my God, he said that now he's going right down into the toilet. I think that all of those things tended to be much more of a wash and much more mitigated and less serious, including the kind of sexual shenanigans by the fact that there was a sense that he was able to create that I'm with you, that I'm going to do something for you, that I listen to you and understand your needs. Now it's kind of odd because I don't think Trump is really a good listener. I mean, I think his advisors would be the first to tell you if they could say it in private. But he's able to project this image out there that I, to use an old, I don't know, 60s things. I feel your pain. I understand you. And they believed it and that was enough to mitigate that and a real sense of distaste for Hillary Clinton. That was enough to mitigate all of these little kind of things that at best were unconventional and at worst seemed pretty predatory. Are these elections in some way a reflection of who we are as Americans? Or let me put it this way, what do we learn about who we are from this campaign and the results that ensued? Well, I think we learned a few things. Maybe it's better if I say what I learned. I've learned that I don't think either party has a very hopeful message for the marginalized working class who are not as well-off as their parents were. Now, we heard a lot about that in terms of the white working class and that's where it gets automatically reflected. But the kind of way that we've approached poverty, the way that we've approached education, whatever it is, it's a hard go and people are not very well-off. So I think it certainly showed that. It certainly also shows and I'm afraid to admit that there is a strong counter sense of white identity that has mobilized a lot of people and that has made it more acceptable to take racist and even anti-Semitic positions. I want to be real careful here. That doesn't mean that Trump voters as a whole do that. But I think that what you see coming out, some of the alt-right stuff, some of the Ku Klux Klan stuff and some of the other things, because there's been an uptick in racial incidents and anti-Semitic incidents is a sense that it's more okay to talk in those terms now than it was before. But I think fundamentally, I still think about economics. Neil, let me play devil's advocate with you for a moment because I could say you sure sound like you're on CNN rather than Fox in terms of your characterization. I really am not taking a stand at you. I'm talking about the differing characterizations of what took place and they seem to be very vast. For example, if we do watch CNN, we're going to be hearing quite a bit about the racism of Mr. Trump's comments and the audacity of what he had to say. If we watch Fox News, we're going to hear an opposite message, one affirming mom's apple pie, American values and so forth. How much of our assessment of the candidates is filtered through the media? And here I'm asking you that question. Let me start by saying that I watch no cable news regularly and try to discourage others from it. And it's not simply about bias. That's not even my thing. It's about the fact that you get a ton of information with little assessment. I mean, and you just absorb all this information and take it all in uncritically and then you kind of choose sides on the basis of your partisanship. To go back to the CNN versus Fox, if those are the caricatures of both sides, I would say I would put myself in neither one of those positions. The notion that race played no role in this election is nuts. It certainly did. And you can see it in the polls. You can see how the country is polarized over race. But I wanted to be very careful here. I wanted to say two other things, that there's a whole issue of economics and class that's going on and a kind of sense of resentment that's based on your economic situation also. But I'm also saying that whatever Trump did, whether you want to think about him making racist statements or characterizing it or not, he said things that created an atmosphere that is more permissive for people who are more racial extremists. Well, let's go to Hawaii for a moment now. We've got a minute left in this segment. What does the Hawaii result tell us? We knew that, of course, it would be a Democrat sweep. But what do we learn? Nothing much. You learn that Hawaii is pretty much the same way as it is. You also learn that people are not all that interested in digging in to find out a little bit more. How did Bernie Sanders do so well in the primary here? He actually beat Clinton quite by quite a bit. Because they did a good job of organizing. And remember that a primary election has a more limited and more committed electorate than a general election and a caucus, which is what the Democratic thing is, is even smaller. The sampling group is not that great. Right, it's not that great. They're atypical and that's fine. Good for those people who are promoting Bernie Sanders. Oh, yeah. And even Gary Johnson, to some extent, here in the state of Hawaii, well, we'll come back right after a break. And when we do come back with Professor Neil Milner from the University of Hawaii retired, emeritus, I'm going to ask him a bit about the local elections and what we learn about Hawaii as well as the condition of competitive parties in the state of Hawaii. You're watching Ahana Kako here every week on the Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network. We'll be right back after this. Hello, my name is Crystal. Let me tell you, my talk show, I'm all about health. It's healthy to talk about sex. It's healthy to talk about things that people don't talk about. It's healthy to discuss things that you think are unhealthy because you need to talk about it. So I welcome you to watch Quok Talk and engage in some provocative discussions on things that do relate to healthy issues and have a well-balanced attitude in life. Join me. Aloha. My name is Carl Kampania and I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers, and Reformers, the Politics in Hawaii series. Join us each week as we have guest after guest talking about the policy and the politics of our state, of our islands, and of what really matters to each of us. So please join us each week and engage in that conversation. Mahalo. Aloha, everyone. I hope you've been watching Think Tech Hawaii, but I'm here to invite you to watch me on Viva Hawaii every Monday at 3 p.m. I'm waiting for you. Mahalo. Well, welcome back to the final portion of today's show, Ehana Kako, on the Think Tech Hawaii Godcast Network. We say Ehana Kako at the Grassroot Institute. It sounds like a Pule Kako. Everybody knows that. It means let's pray together. We like to say let's work together, Ehana Kako, because think of all that doesn't get done if we don't work together. Let's work together to build a better government, economy, and society. And somebody who's been commentating on exactly how our political leaders are doing that is with me today, Neil Milner, political scientist who had been with the University of Hawaii many years, but is well known for his punditry on Hawaii's election nights. Neil, let's talk local for a bit here. The big race, of course, was the mayoral race in Honolulu, which some would have liked to have been a referendum on the rail, but somehow that train stayed in the station. It didn't really become like all the trains. What station? There's no station. There will be a station. That's right. There are a few of them. So tell us a bit about Charles DeJu's campaign. Well, I think his campaign became doomed very early on, certainly after the primary, when he didn't do nearly as well as he thought. And I think two things doomed it. One is the fact that whatever else, even though it says nonpartisan here, these are partisan elections. So he couldn't lose the R label. He couldn't lose the R label. What was the implication of that? Well, the main implication is a numerical implication. There are not enough Rs out there. This is what Ben Cayetano said his problem was going to be after he had a decisive primary victory and then went into the general. He said the general electorate is altogether different. So he was characterized as a Republican. We're like in those commercials. Well, it isn't just being characterized as Republicans. It's that there are not enough Republicans out there who didn't vote before. That's right. And so, okay, that's one thing. And what was the second thing? The second thing is rail itself. Rail turned into such a disaster with no immediate answers possible that as an honest person, you couldn't make up some kind of malarkey plan to solve it. I mean, he found himself in the same position that the mayor was in, in a sense of saying this thing is awful. So the issue didn't fit on a bumper sticker. It didn't fit on a bumper sticker. And we didn't know where the street was going to end up. Because he couldn't be a rail... Well, yes. He couldn't be a rail candidate, an anti-rail candidate. He couldn't be... And he would really have had to fib in order to say, I really have a plan here. Was there a lack of clarity on what he had to say about rail and or a lack of differentiation from Mr. Aldwell's position? Well, it certainly isn't a lack of clarity. A lack of differentiation. What I'm trying to say is there is simply no way he could differentiate himself in any realistic manner to say that I had an answer. This is not like when rail was... When you really had a referendum on rail, when, in effect, Ben Cayetano was an anti-rail candidate. Okay. Well, then let's switch sides then. Yes. In light of those weaknesses that you saw in the campaign, what did you see in Aldwell's campaign? Well, he did what you have to... Well, first of all, you start with a large lead. I mean, you're, you know... He starts with the D whether he's running the party. He starts with the D. Right. And the D gives you, I don't know, let's say 60-40, just to start with as... I mean, not the actual... That sounds generous. Well, 60-40, it is generous. I'm being generous here. The other thing he had going for him is that he knew how to run a campaign that emphasized these kind of partisan issues. There is a third thing you always have. You can never underestimate the power of incumbency. Incumbents start with a big jump ahead. Now, there are ways to overcome that, obviously. It doesn't happen very often. One of the ways is if there is a sufficiently big scandal. Does you try that with the... That was the extracurricular employment too. Yeah, the extracurricular employment. By the board of a bank. Right. Tell us a bit about that. How did that go over to the people of Hawaii? Well, not enough. I mean, it didn't seem to affect very many people. And I wasn't surprised because that never became a big issue. That issue always intrigued me because he was... Caldwell is getting about $200,000 to sit on the board of directors of a bank. And his defense wise, I don't have to do anything to get the $200,000. So it's not a conflict of interest. I thought that was the charge. No. So he was defending himself by saying, I'm not at all imposing your city stuff on it because I'm not basically doing anything. But the more serious point is that if you think about partisanship, if you think about how the average voter doesn't pay attention to a lot of these things, and we know that's the case, he really did start with a hefty advantage and he had enough money to pull it off. Plus the fact that you could see by his primary victory, which kind of came... He did much better than he ever thought he was, that the handwriting was really on the wall. Well, let's go back to the first thing you pointed out. They're party affiliations. Can anyone but a Democrat win an election like the mayoral race or the gubernatorial race? The answer is yes, but it's very hard. If there's not an incumbent, if you have a defining issue that you can use to separate yourself from the Democratic candidate and if essentially you are perhaps a kind of non-partisan businessman, if there was some business person, there would be some influential person in Hawaii, somebody working for a large company, someone who has a lot of respect, whatever, who would decide to run your confinesc that, but you know what, that doesn't happen. You know, I don't know if you were there or not at the anniversary dinner of the Democratic Party, but one of the most well-known lobbyists in the state of Hawaii gave a keynote address in which he basically said, we Democrats own everything. We own the legislature. We own the governorship. We own the industry. We own and so forth. What is your assessment of the Republican Party in Hawaii? Where it's at and what challenges it's facing as well as what it needs to do? Well, as I wrote in a column about this, the Hawaii Republican Assembly, which is a really... That's a splinter group also. A splinter group that is a notorious pain in the neck for the regular Republican Party. And they refer to most of the regular Republicans as rhinos, Republicans in name only. I call the party pinos. It's a party in name only. They don't have candidates. They don't have much money. There is no intellectual ferment. There's no ideas. Remember the conservative movement developed in the United States? Bill Butler. Well, you had two things going on. You had an enormous amount of intellectual activity and you also had an enormous amount of grassroots activity. That's how Pre-Ragan began in Southern California. That's how a lot of the evangelical movement into politics began. You don't have either... You don't have any of those things here. And I don't think, frankly, that the Republican leadership is very astute here. I thought that when Nanaka was the chair, you know, a very astute guy, young guy, had good ideas. There was some hope for turning things around. I don't want to be too... I don't want to say it's just for incompetence. It's much more than incompetence. You're up against what's become a historical imperative, which is this kind of structural pattern of people voting Democrats. So it's very hard. But the Republicans here are getting worse at it. Now, the Republicans lost the seat in the House and the seat in the Senate, rendering us in Hawaii with another first, the only all-Democrat state Senate with the loss of the seat by Senator Sam Sloan. Your thoughts? Well, I think it's... I think that the interesting thing is that you had in one district two really good candidates and a contested race. And certainly Sam is a conservative and a spoke conservative. Just putting aside partisanship for a second, I think it's a shame. It's a shame for the Republican Party and they should be ashamed because they didn't put much work into this campaign. It's a shame because even having one voice there, if you know how Sam Sloan works, someone once described this kind of situation as being able to be an outsider watching a Jerry Seinfeldt show. You get to see all these goofy things going on and then you can talk about them. And so that was a useful sort of thing. And he also was... he was on all the committees because he was the only Republican. He landed some kind of a counter there. So I think it's really a big loss that... it was a very hard race for him to win because Stanley Chang is a very sophisticated and a Republican campaigner. And he'd gained a constituency with the City Council races he'd run for and that was a follow-up for him. That's right because he'd won and that time when he won his City Council seat, that was an upset. I'd love your views on another race. It's kind of a sleeper race, but let me make a disclaimer to my audience. Sure, isn't it? I ran for the position of trustee at large in the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and the good people of Hawaii saw a fit to cast votes for me, 164,000. So I will be sworn in in just a few days as a trustee at large in OHA. But I wanted to ask Neil a bit about that. That really is a sleeper race. And I remember we've had between 40 and 50% of the population voting in these trustee at large races. In fact, the usual winner was a gentleman named Blank Votes. Yeah, yeah. Well, 40 or 50% is 40 or 50% of the people who voted. That's right. It's the smallest voter turnout. This year, I'm thrilled that I won, but I'm even more thrilled that we saw a shift in voter behavior. 73.1% of all the people who cast ballots actually voted in that race. What are your thoughts? Well, that's pretty amazing because this always has been a kind of sleeper race and we don't understand exactly what happened. Part of it is that you and Milly Lonnie Trask who didn't win both had some name recognition. You've been around before and so there was some visibility there for people who don't pay much attention because lots of times it's either a network of friends and neighbors or you'll see a sign coming out of nowhere advertising some kind of charity. But what we don't know is whether this increase was among whether the votes you got, how much of them were among people who voted before in Ohio and how many of them are people who have now decided that Ohio is part of the scheme of things that we should think about voting for. Sure. Do you think it's possible that it's both? I know from our campaign a lot of anecdotal information and the intensity of our campaigning in Native Hawaiian highly populated areas like Waianae and so forth but we also knew that the general population voted as well. Did you find, this is just a quick question for you, did you find people saying no one ever has come out here to talk to us before about this? Did you run into that? Well, I frequently did and that's not because Ohio was not known in many regions but I don't think that Ohio has required incumbents to get go everywhere in the past because of the strength of the incumbency platform. So new candidates like Mililani Trask and myself at least new in this race did quite a bit of work that incumbents didn't do. We flew to neighbor islands. We spoke at community gatherings. We went to the far reaches of the west coast of Hawaii and so west coast of Oahu. So it may be that the way to campaign for these offices are changing and that incumbents now have more things to worry about. It's a mystery and what we know in any systematic way, we being analysts, especially analysts who want to look at real data, what we know about Ohio elections is basically zilch. We know much more about the activities that go on within Ohio because they're reported but it's probably worth looking at just as it's worth looking at who voted for Trump so that we learn something about ourselves that we don't always assume. But we knew that going into this election Hawaii had garnered the title of the lowest voter turnout in the nation. How do we do this year? Same. So we still have our title. Why is that? Because we're very satisfied with our incumbents. I don't think... Well, remember that we used to be very high turnout and it's changing. I think there's a couple of things that happen. One of which is that... We'll close up on this. One thing that happened is that you don't have competitive elections. That seems to be a social part of this. The other is that important elections like the presidential election are far less visible and personal here. The candidates never come out here to campaign. I mean, you didn't... Because it's one party Democrat, it's only four electoral... Well, the results are being announced while our polls are... Well, there is. Yeah, but that's even... Yeah, there just isn't any reason to come out here if you're... So that there's a kind of distance and I feel the distance if you've ever gone back to the mainland during a presidential campaign, it's like day and night. Well, I've gone back to Wisconsin during that time which is extremely... Well, folks like you and me are trying to bridge that gap between here and the mainland in places before.