Donald Trumps Astounding Victory: How and Why

By Michael Barone Astounding. Thats the best word to describe the tumultuous election night and the (to most people) surprise victory of Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton hoped to win with votes of Northeasterners including those who have moved south along Interstate 95 to North Carolina and Florida (44 electoral votes). Instead Trump won with votes along the I-94 and I-80 corridors from Pennsylvania through Ohio and Michigan to Wisconsin and Iowa (70 electoral votes). This approach was foreseen by RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende in his Case of the Missing White Voters article series in 2013. Non-college-educated whites in this northern tier once strong for Ross Perot gave Barack Obama relatively high percentages in 2008 and 2012. Many grew up in Democratic union households and were willing to vote for the first black president. Now they seem to have sloughed off their ancestral Democratic allegiance much as white Southerners did in 1980s presidential and 1990s congressional elections. National Democrats no longer had anything to offer them then. Hillary Clinton didnt have anything to offer northern-tier non-college-educated whites this year. It didnt help that Clinton called half of Trump supporters irredeemable and deplorables and infected with implicit racism. They may have been shy in responding to telephone or exit polls but they voted in unanticipatedly large numbers at a time when turnout generally sagged. At the same time Clinton was unable to reassemble Obamas 2012 51 percent coalition. Turnout fell in heavily black Philadelphia Cleveland Detroit and Milwaukee. Millennial generation turnout was tepid and Trump carried white millennials by 5 points. Unexpectedly Trump won higher percentages of Hispanics and Asians than Mitt Romney did in 2012. Trumps surprise victory owing much to differential turnout resembles the surprise defeats defying most polls of establishment positions in 2016 referendums in Britain and Colombia. In June 52 percent of Britons voted to leave the European Union -- the so-called Brexit opposed by most major-party leaders and financial elites. In October 50.2 percent of Colombias voters rejected the peace plan with FARC terrorists negotiated by their president. In both cases the capital citys metro area and distinctive peripheries -- Scotland the Caribbean coast -- voted with the establishment. But the historical and cultural hearts of these nations -- England outside London the central Andes cordillera in Colombia -- rejected and defeated the establishment position. Something like that seems to have happened here. If you take the pro-establishment coasts -- the Northeast except Pennsylvania the West Coast -- the vote as currently tabulated was 58-38 percent for Clinton. Thats similar to Obamas 60-38 percent margin in these states in 2012. But the heartland -- roughly the area from the Appalachian ridges to the Rocky Mountains with about two-thirds of the national vote -- went 52-44 percent for Trump. Trump didnt do much better than Romney who got 51 percent there. But Clinton got only 44 percent of heartland votes down from Obamas 47 percent. The Republican margin doubled from 4 to 8 percent. British elites responded to Brexit with scorn for their heartlands voters. Those voting for Brexit were poorly educated nativist unsophisticated racist and unfashionable. You can hear similar invective hurled by American coastal elites (though not to their credit Clinton and Obama) at their fellow citizens beyond the Hudson River and the Capital Beltway. Deplorable is the least of their insults. They take glee in noting that Trump ran behind previous Republican nominees among college graduates but well ahead among non-college-educated whites. Theres an echo here of Rush Limbaughs scorn for low-information voters. But the people who complain about less educated whites voting as a bloc have no complaints about the even larger percentages received by the candidates they favor from black voters. The better approach is to show respect for each voters decision however unenlightened you may consider it. Trumps victory undercuts crude projections based on the sophisticated analysis of journalist Ron Brownstein and Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg -- namely that increasing percentages of nonwhites and millennial generation voters will result in an ascendant majority producing inevitably Democratic victories. In a closely divided country election victories are contingent on issues events and candidates characteristics. It would be a mistake also to suppose that Trumps Electoral College victory means that Democrats are doomed to defeat because they lost their hold on non-college-educated whites this year. That depends on decisions and events that have not yet occurred.