 My name is Lakana. I'm a doctoral researcher at LMU. I've been following US politics on and off for most of the 21st century. In particular, I followed the last US presidential election from early 2015 until November 2016. So, why is this topic relevant to the general public? The US is still the biggest economic and military power in the world and the actions of its president have global ramifications. Trump is a deeply polarizing figure both within the US and internationally. He is very popular in some countries such as Israel. He's deeply unpopular in some countries such as Mexico. Trump's victory was a seismic shock to the global political order. It was shocking to both his supporters and his opponents because the majority, certainly most of the opinion polls predicted a Hillary Clinton presidency. So, this is an actual magazine cover from Newsweek. They printed this before the election results were known and after the election results became apparent, they pulled, they had to withdraw thousands of magazines from circulation. So, let's look at some predictions. According to the New York Times, Hillary Clinton had an 85% chance of winning. 538. So, 538 is a website run by a guy called Nate Silver. He is a statistician and a journalist. He predicted Hillary had a 71.4% chance of winning. This is what actually happened. Trump won comfortably. As you can see, he won the South, most of the Midwest and most of the Great Lakes area. I'll first talk about the U.S. Electoral College system and then I'll talk about factors that contributed to Trump's success. First, I'll address the U.S. Electoral College system. The U.S. has a presidential system unlike the parliamentary system they have here in Germany. So, the people elect a president directly. In countries which have a presidential system such as France, they have two or more candidates. People vote for these two candidates and the person who gets the most votes becomes the president. This is not how it works in the U.S. the so this is the U.S. Electoral College and first of all the term Electoral College is a misnomer. It doesn't refer to any actual college. It's actually a process. So, first of all, what do these numbers stand for? Each number is the number of members of Congress from each state. How do you come up with these numbers? These numbers are roughly based on population and the most important thing about the Electoral College is even if you win a state by the slightest margin, you will win all the electoral votes for that state. You have a couple of exceptions like Nebraska and Maine up here, but in 48 out of 50 states, if you basically win the majority of the votes for that state, you win all the electoral votes for that state. So, if you add up all the numbers you see up here, it comes to 538 and you need 270 to win. In the U.S. you have two major political parties, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. The Republican Party is represented on the right by the elephant symbol and the Democrats are represented by the donkey. On political maps, the Republicans are shown by the color red and the Democrats are shown by the color blue. So, they have blue states in the U.S. which are heavily Democrat and Republicans have no chance of winning these states. So, as you can see, the West Coast and most of the Northeast are heavily Democrat. The biggest blue state is California, which has 55 electoral votes. There are red states which are heavily Republican and the Democrats have no chance of winning these states. As you can see, the South and most of the Midwest are heavily Republican. The biggest red state is Texas with 38 electoral votes. Then you have swing states, which are also known as purple states or battleground states. So, the biggest purple state is Florida with 29 electoral votes. These states have roughly equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats. So, they could go either way. So, politicians spend most of their time, money and resources campaigning in these states because they could easily go either way. So, one key factor about the electoral college is even if you win by the tiniest margins, you will win all the electoral votes for that state. So, let's look at two states won by Hillary and two states won by Trump. So, if you look at the states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, which were won by Trump, he won them by 0.23 percent and 0.72 percent respectively, and he won all the electoral votes for those two states. With New Hampshire and Minnesota, Hillary won them by 0.37 percent and 1.52 percent respectively, and she won all the electoral votes for those two states. I'll now look at factors that contributed to Trump's success. To win the presidency, you have to win most of these purple states. And Trump had two parts to win the presidency. He could either concentrate on winning the states of Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico, which these states used to be swing states, but in recent years, they've become increasingly Democrat-leaning because the Hispanic population in these states have been increasing. And Trump's tough rhetoric on building a border wall and deporting illegal immigrants wasn't looked at favorably by Hispanic immigrants, so it would be really tough for him to win those states. So he then concentrated on winning the Rust Belt, and by the Rust Belt, I mean the states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. And the Rust Belt used to be the economic heartland of the U.S. There used to be a lot of factories, coal mines, steelworks, but in the past few decades, the Rust Belt had been steadily losing manufacturing jobs. So Trump came to the Rust Belt, and he promised to bring back jobs to the Rust Belt. He blamed both legal and illegal immigration for the steady erosion of jobs. He promised to end illegal immigration and restrict legal immigration. He also promised to get rid of unfair trade deals, such as NAFTA. NAFTA stands for North American Free Trade Agreement. And he also promised to get rid of environmental regulations, which would restrict, according to him, economic growth. So why were the predictions wrong? The opinion polls underestimated support for Trump. They also heavily overestimated democratic turnout. They thought democratic turnout in 2016 was going to be the same as 2012. African American turnout in particular was much lower than four years ago, because most African American voters were reluctant to vote for Hillary Clinton. And meanwhile, there was certainly a lot of hidden support for Trump as well, especially amongst women. So it seemed like Trump didn't have much female support. But in the end, he got a significant amount of female support. So he won 43 percent of the female vote and 53 percent of the white female vote. Trump had a lot of name recognition, because he used to run a TV show called... He used to host a TV show called The Apprentice for seven years. He also hosted seven years of Celebrity Apprentice. So he capitalized on his name recognition. He would phone into a morning show like Fox and Friends, and he would speak for five minutes and get nationwide coverage at virtually no cost. And meanwhile, most of his presidential opponents, with the exception of Hillary Clinton, they didn't have name recognition. Most people had no idea who these people were, what their policies were. And this was because the media was obsessed with covering Trump. And Twitter is a medium which perfectly suited Trump. Trump was actually quite skillful in using social media, especially Twitter. It suited his rhetorical style, because he could send a short message. It he could reach directly to his supporters without going through the media, because if he tried to go through the media, they would try to filter his message. So his message, he could directly deliver a short, sharp message to his supporters, or anyone who was following him on Twitter. And what he would do is he would send a controversial tweet, and CNN and MSNBC, they would pick up on this tweet, he would usually tweet something controversial, so they would be appalled and outraged. They would hold a six or eight-person panel, and they would discuss this issue intensely for the whole day. So Trump could dominate any political cycle he wanted to. So if he wanted to change the topic a couple of days later, he'll send another tweet. And then the anchors at CNN and MSNBC, they would be predictably outraged. They will hold another six or eight-person panel, they'll discuss the issue intensely. And what this meant was, with the exception of Hillary Clinton, most of his political opponents didn't get any media coverage. Voters didn't know who these people were, what they stood for, what their policies were. And Hillary Clinton was partially able to overcome this problem, because she had twice as much campaign funds as Trump, so she could afford to run these expensive TV ads. But with the other presidential candidates, they didn't have that kind of money, so they simply weren't able to get their message across. In conclusion, Trump recognized that the working class people, especially in the Rust Belt, felt aggrieved. He promised to bring jobs back that have been lost over the past few decades. And he promised to stop illegal immigration and restrict legal immigration. There is a military quote that generals have a tendency to fight the last war. In the context of the 2016 presidential election, what that means is, according to conventional wisdom, politicians are supposed to spend a lot of money on TV, print and radio ads, and Trump proved you don't necessarily have to do that. If you say something controversial, the media will pick up on it, they'll give you a lot of courage, and by skillfully using Twitter, he could reach his supporters directly without going through the media. I'm happy to take any questions you have. There's no such thing as a silly question. Even if you have something really simple, I'm happy to answer it. So we have some time for questions. I'm a highly polarizing figure here, probably. Hi. Well, during the campaign for now President Trump went on the platform and made America, made Indiana America first. And last year during the Ministry of Conference, first of all, Minister Segeman called for a call to the West World. And we've been seeing China increasingly taking every chance to show that they're taking everything back into their own pocket. So do you think in 2020, or post-2020, this damage of isolationism, protectionism, can somehow be controlled or will be facing a completely Chinese overtaken world, an East World, a West World? This is one hell of a question, actually. So it's more about what's your prediction 2020 and what's about international politics with China and this rhetoric of make America great again, probably, right? So China will overtake the U.S. as the biggest economy sometime in the next 20 or 30 years. So that's inevitable regarding military power. The U.S. will remain the predominant military power for at least another 50 years. Regarding isolationism, Trump wants to win the next election, so he has to win the Rust Belt again. So by putting tariff barriers, for example, it will help the Rust Belt and it will help the steelworks, the coal miners, for example, and it'll increase manufacturing drops in the Rust Belt. So he's only thinking about the next four years. He's not thinking that long term. So yeah, I think he has a very high chance of winning the Rust Belt again. We have time for questions. Please. You said that the Trump had developed a coverage because it was putting controversial stuff. So it would have a lot of coverage. I don't know for Germany, but I expect the same. In France, there is a rush of coverage. So the media cannot just talk about a single candidate. So whatever we see, our controversy will spread on Twitter. They will have to spend the equivalent time on the other candidates. But did this happen? Is there this rule actually? So the question is essentially about the rules of amount of media coverage per candidate and if it can be extended to Twitter. So it's estimated that Trump had five, he got $5 billion of free advertising during the presidential campaign. That's more than all the other presidential candidates combined. In the US, there is no rule on giving equal media time for presidential candidates. I think I forgot to mention this during my presentation. But there is no rule about giving candidates equal time. At one stage, the media, they were so obsessed with covering Trump that they would cover an empty podium like this for one hour before he spoke. So they were anticipating, they were just waiting for him to come and speak. And they didn't want to miss a second office speech because he was usually going to say something controversial. So they would film an empty podium like this for one hour. And all the major channels gave cover just like this. And even channels that disliked Trump like CNN, MSNBC, they did the same thing. And the result was the minor candidates, they got no media coverage and they were not able to get their points across. We have time for one more question. So the question is what's the prediction for 2020 for him to win again? So I'm happy to have a very detailed comment. I can give you a very detailed breakdown of that during the break or at the end. So due to lack of time, I'll give you a very quick answer, which is yes. I believe he has a very high chance of winning the presidency in 2020. The short answer is that he will be financially so much better off than he was last time. So he as the incumbent president, he's not running against a primary candidate. So he can save that money. Meanwhile, so during the last election, all the banks gave money to Hillary, especially Goldman Sachs. Now there are four Goldman Sachs executives working in the Trump administration. Most of the money from the banks will go to Trump. Another reason is Hillary Clinton is the strongest candidate he could have faced. She will not be running next time. Bernie Sanders will be 79 in 2020. There could be some Democratic candidate who is probably capable of taking him on, but at the moment they don't have much national name recognition. So thank you, LaKanna.