There's a great story – possibly apocryphal – about the former Illinois governor, senator and diplomat Adlai Stevenson, drawn from one of his historic electoral whuppings by Dwight Eisenhower, against whom Stevenson twice ran for president in the 1950s.
"Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!" an admiring voter is said to have called out to Stevenson after a particularly stirring speech.
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Donald Trump meets Barack Obama in White House
President Obama greets president-elect Trump at the White House on Thursday to begin a transfer of power.
"That's wonderful. But I need a majority!" Stevenson shot back.
Campaigning in America isn't a straight numbers game. First you've got to get your voter mad or scared enough just to come and vote at all. Second, you've got to try and make sure that when they do so, they're voting for you.
(There's a spectacular amount of wastage in this arrangement. On Tuesday, for example, of the 231 million Americans eligible to vote, about 60 million voted for Donald Trump, 60 million for Hillary Clinton, and about 100 million didn't show up. The Australian system would call this a mistrial. The American system calls it a normal day at the office).
There are two types of campaigners in this environment: the Promoter, and the Emoter.
The Promoter is selling a course of action. The Emoter articulates the hopes, fears, disappointment or rage of voters right back to them, in the most powerful way possible.
Barack Obama – a brilliant Emoter – did it with hope.
Donald Trump did it with fear and rage.
Comparing Trump to Obama may seem deranged, but the two men have a few things in common; both of them beat Hillary Clinton despite having less experience in government, and both ran on a promise to change the way Washington works.
Both sold simplicity.
Obama's? The audacity of hope. Yes we can. An evocation of America's belief in itself as a land of opportunity and optimism, hotted-up with some seriously lyrical oratory.
Trump's simplicity? Pitched to the ears of a white electorate that feels itself ignored, his campaign shouted the sentiments his target audience felt itself hitherto entitled only to whisper: I'm scared of Muslims. The new economy isn't doing anything for me. Why can't we go back to the industrial economy we used to have. There are too many immigrants. Can't we just build a wall?
Hillary Clinton's campaign ran hard on the fact that she was vastly more experienced than Donald Trump. A sensible approach. But it turns out that for the Emoter, genuine lack of experience is not a shortcoming; it's an asset. It means there's nothing on your record to interfere with the perfect relationship of empathy you are building with your audience; nothing to suggest that once elected you might turn out to be subject to the same plodding inevitabilities (a vast, clanking bureaucratic infrastructure, a Constitution springloaded for multidirectional impasse, the resultant grim slog of compromise) as all the other politicians.
The difficulty comes, for the Emoter, when he or she is elected.
It's the point at which complexity arrives, with its bags.
Simplicity – so devastating and effective in a campaign – is expensive once converted from hypothesis to reality.
In the first US presidential debate, when the candidates were asked about jobs, Hillary Clinton – a classic Promoter – reeled off several head-prefectly minutes on the new economy.
Donald Trump's opening remarks, on the other hand, were a brutally simple articulation of the problem. "Our jobs are fleeing the country. They're going to Mexico … We have to stop our jobs from being stolen from us."
His approach was simple enough to win a slew of rust-belt states from the Democrats – and the presidency.
But Trump's victory also creates – in the hearts of those voters – a faithful and reasonable expectation that the solution will be as simple as the problem.
That a man who seemed invincible on his reality TV show will also be able to bring back automotive jobs to Detroit.
Even overlooking for a second the grotesquery of a nation voting to deport a whole class of immigrants while retaining as its icon a 46-metre tall copper lady enjoining all and sundry to "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free", does anyone think a return to a less diverse population could be that simple?
Tuesday's election was shocking in that it presented a brutal triage of American priorities, in which blowing up the existing political system proved more important to a decisive proportion of voters that a whole lot of other stuff, like respecting women or religious freedom or sending a non-jerk to the White House.
But blowing up a system – the ultimate achievement of an Emoter faithfully reflecting voters' frustrations with that system back to them – is only the beginning.
The hard bit is building something to replace it. And dealing with the possibility that what you build might by necessity be forced to resemble what you destroyed.
Annabel Crabb is an ABC writer and broadcaster.
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