Michael Barone dissects Donald Trump’s electoral win in a column posted at Human Events.
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 didn’t have anything to offer northern-tier non-college-educated whites this year.
It didn’t 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 Obama’s 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.
Trump’s 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 Colombia’s voters rejected the peace plan with FARC terrorists negotiated by their president.
In both cases, the capital city’s 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.
