Why Trump won--and why the media missed it
James Hohmann with Breanne Deppisch
THE BIG IDEA: President-elect Donald Trump was right all along. He had a silent majority. The media, the pollsters and Republican elites never saw it even though it was right in front of them the whole time.
-- Because his adopted party maintained its majorities in the Senate and the House, Trump can now advance a very ambitious agenda. He gets to pick Antontin Scalias replacement, vindicating Mitch McConnells decision to deny Merrick Garland a hearing and ensuring that the GOP will control all three branches of government. Because Barack Obama has relied so much on executive actions since the 2010 midterms, if he chooses, Trump can roll back many of the presidents signature achievements. The Republican Congress can also use budget reconciliation to eviscerate Obamacare. TPP is definitively dead.
-- The reality TV star will be the first president in American history to take office without prior government or military experience.
As election results rolled in Tuesday, Clinton watched in Manhattan from a suite in the Peninsula Hotels as her would-be electoral advantage disappeared and Trump performed stronger than expected in several upper-Midwestern states that had been Democratic for a generation.
Around 2 a.m., Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta addressed a deflated crowd gathered at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center underneath a sparkling glass ceiling, told them that the race is too close to call, and that Clinton would not appear. Within the hour, however, the race was called for Trump and Clinton conceded.
At nearly 4 a.m., Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook wrote to staff thanking them.
Campaigns are incredibly hard, and sometimes the results dont reflect the merit, work, and commitment that goes into them. This is one of those times, Mook said. But as I disappointed as I am in the results, I remain amazed at the way every person on this campaign stepped up to each challenge and gave their all. You each have earned my respect and gratitude.
Trumps victory was a historic defeat by an outsider of one of the most well-funded and well-known political figures. And for Democrats, it means voters made clear that they wanted a new direction and a dramatic break from the status quo.
It represents a potential seismic change in the way Democrats win election: States like Michigan and Wisconsin, which had been reliably blue, slipped from Clintons grasp. Clinton also lost Pennsylvania, a state Democrats have won since 1992 and a key to her path to the presidency.
We have seen our nation is more deeply divide than we thought, Clinton said. But I still believe in America, and I always will.
Clintons loss also means that the prospect of the countrys first female president will be deferred once again. To all the little girls who are watching this: Never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams, Clinton said.
-- Its going to take some time for this new reality to fully sink in, but the question of the hour is: How the heck did this happen? What follows are several of the most plausible explanations
-- Confirmation bias is the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of ones existing theories. Since he came down that escalator at Trump Tower 17 months ago, many elites could never fully visualize Trump as the president of the United States. That made it very hard to see him winning the nomination until he did or winning the White House until he did. Confirmation bias does not mean one preferred a particular outcome. Rather, it is a condition of psychology: All human beings tend to put a premium on information that validates their existing expectations and downplay new data points that undermine them.
Even many members of the Republican establishment who supported Trump could never envision him prevailing. That meant that some very talented GOP operatives (who have won very big races) were insisting until late last night that the votes were not there for Trump. A Republican who won a statewide race in Florida two years ago texted after polls closed to say Clinton was going to win that state by four points. (Trump won 49 percent to 48 percent.) Another veteran Republican, who has served the Bush family in various roles, emailed in the wee hours of this morning: I no longer need to go to Rome. Going to watch an empire fall right here in the next four years.
-- That said, Trumps own internal models were wrong too. Staffers at the Republican National Committee were telling reporters that Trump would win 240 Electoral College votes. The best data inside the Trump campaign and the RNC had his chances of winning the presidency as a 1 in 5 proposition, Yahoos Jon Ward reports.
-- Looking back, there was so much anecdotal evidence: All those guys at the bar in a hollowed out Ohio steel town who did not know a single Clinton supporter. The two dozen independents at a Pirates-Reds baseball game in Pittsburgh who talked how much they love Bill but loathe Hillary. The conservatives in rural Selma, North Carolina, who said they stayed home four years ago but would vote for Trump.
There were also so many red flags of lagging enthusiasm for Clinton: The paid canvasser for the Clinton campaign at The Ohio State University who could not find a single person to commit to support her during his shift in Columbus. The African Americans in Raleigh this past weekend who wanted to vote early and supported Clinton but gave up because the lines were too long. The North Carolina college students down the road who said they were probably going to vote for her but also described her as a pathological liar. In Richmond, there were no yard signs for Clinton in places that were full of Obama signs four years ago.
All these anecdotes should have received more weight vis--vis the polls, which were themselves based on assumptions about what the electorate would look like.
-- Trumps victory must be viewed as part of a global wave of reaction to immigration, trade and globalization. Donald has been calling himself Mr. Brexit in his stump speech for a while, drawing heavy parallels between the British vote to exit the European Union and his own campaign. Elites in Europe thought it was inconceivable that Brexit would happen until it did. Also look at the rise of nationalists across continental Europe.
Nigel Farage, the U.K. Independence Party member known for his strong support for Brexit, even came to the U.S. to campaign with Trump. 2016 is going to be the year of two great political revolutions, Farage said on London television overnight.
-- 2016 truly was THE YEAR OF THE OUTSIDER even more so than even 2008. Few elites in December 2014 believed that neither a Clinton nor Bush would be president in 2017. But there has been a ravenous hunger and deep thirst for change, even if that change agent is imperfect. (Only 38 percent of voters in the exit polls said Trump is qualified to be president which means about one-fifth of Trumps voters did not think he was qualified but supported him anyway.)
Exactly one year ago, Republican Matt Bevin won the Kentucky governors race despite every single poll showing him down. Two of the top people on his campaign, Jason Miller and Jessica Ditto, worked for Trump this fall. Bevin had quixotically challenged Mitch McConnell in a 2014 primary and been crushed. But he prevailed in a three-way GOP primary just one year later, and then the millionaire businessman tapped into a coalition very similar to Trumps with a message that sounded a lot like his.
A few months later, Jebs shock and awe strategy failed. Money could not buy him the love of the voters.
Hillary, who has been in the public eye over four decades and who has had a Secret Service detail for almost 25 years now, insisted during the primaries that she was not part of the Democratic establishment. No one, even her, actually believed that. The fact that a septuagenarian socialist from Vermont kept her sweating through the California primary in June should have set off even louder alarm bells than it did. The fact that Bernie won so many primaries in states dominated by conservative Democrats, such as West Virginia, also underscored the extent to which his appeal was really more about tapping into disaffection with the status quo than his far-left ideology.
Evan Bayh led by more than 20 points in public and private polls when he first jumped into the Indiana Senate race this summer. The son of a onetime presidential candidate thought his surname and huge war chest held over from 2010 would allow him to easily get his old seat back. But Republicans defined him as a consummate D.C. insider who made millions as an influence peddler after leaving office. He lost by 10 points, a margin no one expected.
Republican Sen. Roy Blunt narrowly survived after getting hammered for his fancy house in Washington and the fact that his wife and all his kids are lobbyists. Trump won Missouri by 19 points. Blunt won by just three points, underperforming the top of the ticket by 215,000 votes. If Trump had not fared quite so well, even Blunt advisers agree he would have gone down.
Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson won a shocking upset against challenger Russ Feingold by successfully presenting himself as the outsider in the race despite being the incumbent. It was a rematch of 2010, when the political neophyte had knocked off the three-termer. Obviously something is happening in this country, Feingold said in his concession speech. Ill be honest. I dont understand it completely.
John Mica, the 12-term Republican congressman, fell in the Orlando suburbs. He based his campaign on his ability to bring home the bacon, highlighting earmarks and road projects that he facilitated as chairman of the House Transportation Committee. That did not resonate with voters in this environment.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who like Mica has been in office since 1992, went down in Phoenix. Trump won his county by four points, but Arpaio despite being one of his most prominent early supporters -- lost by 10 points. Why? Voters were exhausted by all the drama associated with him and wanted a fresh face. Theres a new sheriff in town, his challenger, Paul Penzone, said at his victory party.
North Carolina Republican Gov. Pat McCrory apparently went down, even as Trump carried his state and Sen. Richard Burr survived, because voters were angry about the so-called bathroom bill that he signed into law earlier this year.
-- James Comey deserves a significant share of credit/blame/responsibility, whichever word you want to use, for Clintons loss. The percentage of likely voters who saw the former secretary of state as untrustworthy rose after the FBI directors bombshell announcement only 11 days before the election. Comey undercut Democratic enthusiasm, and his suggestion that the investigation into her would reopen motivated Republicans to fall in line.
Democrats will forever more hate Comey, who contributed financially to John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012, even though he tried to clean up the mess he created this past Sunday. But by then it was too late. Tens of millions of early votes had been cast, and his walk back received a fraction of the attention.
-- Recalcitrant Republicans definitely came home in the final days. Trump won 88 percent of self-identified Republicans. He wound up doing better than expected in places like the Milwaukee suburbs, where there had been strong pockets of Never Trump resistance. He wound up garnering 60 percent of white men and 52 percent of white women, according to the exit polls. He even won college-educated whites!
White evangelicals supported Trump by an 81 percent to 16 percent margin in the exit polls. Compare that to 2004, when George W. Bush pandered to this group by endorsing a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and still only got 78 percent among this group. Maintaining control of the Supreme Court with the long-term goal of overturning Roe v. Wade was definitely one motivator. Trumps list of potential justices reassured many in this bloc who feared him.
-- Trumps Rust Belt and rural strategies were smarter than he got credit for. He really ran up the score outside of urban areas everywhere. Florida, his second home, was always a pretty good fit. He wound up outperforming Romney in 51 counties. Clinton outperformed Obama in just seven.
-- The Clinton campaign blew it. Top officials on the campaign became way too overconfident and complacent. They believed their own spin. They were measuring the drapes. They had too much confidence in their models, and they chastised anyone who doubted them as bedwetters. Hillary lost the primaries in Wisconsin and Michigan, but she invested little in shoring up her support there until the 11th hour. Her team clearly failed to see the race tightening in both places.
-- Trump was helped in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by Republican Senate candidates running great campaigns. Ron Johnson campaigned with Trump. Pat Toomey avoided ever saying whether hed vote for him or not. But both first-term incumbents invested heavily in get-out-the-vote efforts that wound up benefitting Trump. The Koch political network steered clear of the presidential but also invested massively in field programs to boost these down-ballot Republicans. Trump certainly helped both senators at the end of the day, but they also helped him.
-- Misogyny also remains alive and well in America. It would be intellectually dishonest to pretend that Clintons gender did not work against her as she sought to break the ultimate glass ceiling. Women have never been elected to the top jobs in Ohio and Pennsylvania (governor or senator), and you cannot discount the reality that at least some voters in those places were uncomfortable with a woman as president. Especially in Pennsylvania, where Katie McGinty narrowly lost to Toomey. (Until 2014, Iowa another Trump state was also in this ignominious category.)
-- History was actually always on Trumps side. One American University professor predicted a GOP victory this way.
The pendulum swings. America has a long history of replacing its presidents with someone who is temperamentally the opposite. The hot-headed and brash Trump is the un-Obama in almost every way. Obama, outwardly intellectual and cerebral, was perceived as the opposite of Bush 43, who went with his gut. He was seen as a reaction to Clinton, who was seen as a reaction to his father. Reagan was the un-Jimmy Carter. Nixon was the un-LBJ. Kennedy was the un-Eisenhower. Historian Arthur Schlesinger called this cyclical theory.
-- Just like in the 1930s, many Americans want to turn inward. The Republican coalition is not as hawkish as the neocons who have controlled the party. Elites freaked out about Trump saying the U.S. might not fulfill its obligations under the NATO charter. Its hard to imagine that cost him a single vote.
-- Some number of Americans were ashamed to tell pollsters that they supported Trump. Pollsters will have a lot of explaining to do. Speaking to reporters last night, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway (a pollster by training) said the undercover Trump vote was real. Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, both actors when they ran for governor of California, outperformed polls on Election Day for similar reasons.
There was evidence during the cycle that Trump fared better in online polls and robopolls than live-caller polls because people felt more anonymous when disclosing their preference. Call it the reverse Bradley Effect.
IT IS TRUMPS WASHINGTON NOW WHATS NEXT?
-- The Democratic Party is about to descend into full-scale civil war. Its going to get very ugly. Who is the head of The Democratic Party come Jan. 21? Just like Bush leaving office in 2009 created a vacuum that allowed for the rise of the tea party movement, Obama leaving office will do the same. Many supporters of Sanders who very reluctantly got onboard the Clinton bandwagon are going to take from yesterdays results that the Democratic Party must nominate an unapologetic and unabashed liberal in 2020. Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are going to have a whole lot more juice than they would have had Clinton won. There is also no obvious frontrunner for the nomination four years from now which could mean an especially nasty primary contest.
The grassroots of the party will clamor for someone that really excites the left. Indeed, Clintons palpable enthusiasm problem cannot be overlooked. Her public image has taken a beating for years, and the protracted attacks took a toll. Its not the same as Obama, a 55-year old Clinton supporter told the Boston Globes Annie Linskey while he waited around at Clintons party last night. Obama was like a new car coming off the boat. This year youre buying a used car where you know all the problems. Again, this quote comes from someone who was at Clintons own party
-- But Trumps victory may also be Pyrrhic. If he governs as hes campaigned if he tries to build the wall, if he blocks Muslims from entering the country, etc., etc., etc. he may relegate Republicans to long-term minority status. People talk a lot about the lessons of Proposition 187 in California in 1994, which denied public services to undocumented immigrants and which Republican Gov.
Pete Wilson latched onto to boost his reelection bid. What people forget is that Prop 187 passed and Wilson won. The Republican Party has just never recovered in the Golden State. On the other hand, Trump has no clear ideology only a belief in his own ability to solve problems. He could surprise a lot of people by being a pragmatist who cuts deals with fellow New Yorker Chuck Schumer, to the great chagrin of his base. The Washington Post
