How She Could Win

Musket

Oprah.

Hollywood is a complete ideological ash heap. It always has been, and it always will be. We have only just begun to understand the depths (and width) of the depravity found within the soft, rotted underbelly that is the primary source of the world’s popular culture. And yet, somehow, the Democrats took a speech that essentially condemned Democrats’ treatment of women and turned it into a rallying cry for Oprah to topple….Republicans.

Ignore this threat at your peril. I am not saying she will run, and I am not necessarily even saying she would win her own party’s nomination; but I do seem to recall back in 2015 when a billionaire businessman who had started his own companies announced he was going to run for president. He was mocked, laughed at, and to the left’s greatest detriment: dismissed. Do not fall into the greatest political trap one can find, complacency.

The reasons that Oprah Winfrey’s candidacy should not be dismissed out of hand lie far beyond the conjecture and abject silliness of it all. By silly, I am referring to the setting of precedent whereby every four years some kind of beloved public figure is thrust into political leadership because people like what they see of them on television. The parallels are actually quite striking.

• Entertainment figure.
• Built his or her own business empires, some of which succeeded, some of which did not.
• Little in the way of substantive political history, which create rich fodder during a rational political primary season.

Beyond these basic, superficial comparisons, there are some reasons within the election data that would make her a far more formidable opponent than people may wish to admit.

     1. She’s black.

Donald Trump won the presidency by breaking through that infamous “blue wall.” Within that blue wall are three notoriously fickle purple states: Wisconsin (perhaps not so purple anymore), Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Let us first take a glimpse into the bluest of those three states: Michigan. Donald Trump won Michigan by a mere 10,704 votes, a state Barack Obama won by around 400,000 votes. More critically, Hillary Clinton received 300,000 fewer votes than Barack Obama did in 2012. Take it down now to a more narrow view. Wayne County, home to Detroit, produced 75,000 fewer votes for Hillary than they did for Barack Obama. One would only need to see a 13 percent increase in the black vote to secure Wayne County, Michigan, and thus 16 votes away from Trump and to Oprah Winfrey (D) - IL.

​288-248

Pennsylvanians voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by a margin of just 40,000 votes. If we repeat the above exercise, looking at the city of Philadelphia alone, Hillary Clinton failed to capture 35,000 votes in 2016 that Barack Obama received in 2012. One of the things I learned by watching election night coverage is that if you are doing poorly with one class of voters in one place, then you will do poorly with them in others as well. For example, the Wisconsin vote all but predicted what would happen in Pennsylvania and Michigan. Carry out this same exercise with Pittsburgh, and you have Oprah Winfrey winning Pennsylvania.

​268-268

Nervous yet? You should be. If not, apply the same standard for low black voter turnout in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Even more alarming, look at North Carolina.

I am aware and appreciate that elections do not occur in a vacuum. There are factors that would lend, and have lent!, themselves to black voters voting for Donald Trump versus Oprah Winfrey, but I certainly would not bet my campaign on that.

   2. She’s a woman

Not just any woman, mind you. She’s OPRAH. The woman who dominated daytime television for almost all of the 1990s and beyond. Now think for a moment about the demographic that watched Oprah in the 1990s (twenty-two years ago). The only subset of white voters Trump did not win was white, college-educated women. The battering Hillary took at the hands of white non-college educated women was one of the key stories of the election, losing them 62-34. Now, I do not know what time Oprah came on in most parts of the country, but it came on at 4pm Central Time where I grew up. While I was listening to Rush Limbaugh in my car at lunch, women my age were going home to watch Oprah. For an entire generation, Oprah told women what to wear, what to read, what to drive, how to raise their kids; they revered her on a level bordering on worship. When you are talking about an electoral win that came by the slimmest of margins in three states, you don’t have a lot of white votes you can afford to give away.

     3. She’s not Hillary

Hillary Clinton could put a meth addict with a full supply of Mountain Dew to sleep; that is not Oprah. She made her fortune captivating and holding audiences. Now, I do have reservations about Oprah’s stamina, and her ability to sustain a campaign over the course of two or three years against a man almost known for his rigor and endless enthusiasm. But she is not Hillary. There is no toilet email server, no mishandled classified documents, no Benghazi, no uranium deal, no Huma, no Anthony Weiner.

BUT SHE LOVED HARVEY WEINSTEIN, YOU SHOUT!

And my response to that is that her pictures with Weinstein will matter as much to her voters as Trump’s Access Hollywood tapes mattered to his. Besides, there were Democrats, feminists!, who were asking Al Franken to reconsider his resignation (and there were pictures)!

I am not advocating for Oprah Winfrey to run for president, and I am certainly not hoping that she would run and then win. What I am warning, however, is not to dismiss her in such a way that would easily be painted as racist, sexist, or ignorant of the power she would potentially wield amongst a wildly swayable electorate.

HA! Oprah as president?! What a joke!

That’s what the left said about Trump in the summer of 2015.

Long live the Republic.