After all the punditry in favour of Clinton, after the main-stream media ganged up against Trump, after the GOP repudiated Trump, and after the world media ridiculed Trump, the story of the US election reduces down to this little phrase:
“Not enough blacks for Clinton, too many whites for Trump”
I can’t quite say “I told you so”, but I found both his winning the Republican nomination and then the election were not too surprising. The wins fitted my theory that there is a global anti-establishment, anti-political-correctness wave going on right now. Part of my theory is also that science in general, and political “science” in particular, has lost its skepticism and has become “consensus science” where confirmation bias reigns. Punditry of all kinds is given far too much weight and far too much respect and there is now a global push-back against the “consensus of experts” where the “experts” are appointed (and anointed) by newspapers and TV channels.
Nate Cohn in the NYT:
But the electoral trends that put Donald J. Trump within striking distance of victory were clear long before Mr. Comey sent his letter. They were clear before WikiLeaks published hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee. They were even clear back in early July, before Mr. Comey excoriated Mrs. Clinton for using a private email server. It was clear from the start that Mrs. Clinton was struggling to reassemble the Obama coalition.
At every point of the race, Mr. Trump was doing better among white voters without a college degree than Mitt Romney did in 2012 — by a wide margin. Mrs. Clinton was also not matching Mr. Obama’s support among black voters. ………
…… Campaign lore has it that President Obama won thanks to a young, diverse, well-educated and metropolitan “coalition of the ascendant” — an emerging Democratic majority anchored in the new economy. Hispanic voters, in particular, were credited with Mr. Obama’s victory. But Mr. Obama would have won re-election even if he hadn’t won the Hispanic vote at all. He would have won even if the electorate had been as old and as white as it had been in 2004.
….. In 2016, Mr. Trump made huge gains among white working-class voters. It wasn’t just in the places where Democratic strength had been eroding for a long time, like western Pennsylvania. It was often in the places where Democrats had seemed resilient or even strong, like Scranton, Pa., and eastern Iowa.
It was a decisive break from recent trends. White voters without college degrees, for the first time, deviated from the national trend and swung decidedly toward the Republicans. No bastion of white, working-class Democratic strength was immune to the trend.
For the first time in the history of the two parties, the Republican candidate did better among low-income whites than among affluent whites, according to exit poll data and a compilation of New York Times/CBS News surveys.
According to exit polls, Mr. Trump did better than Mr. Romney by 24 points among white voters without a degree making less than $30,000 a year. He won these voters by a margin of 62 to 30 percent, compared with Mr. Romney’s narrow win of 52 percent to 45 percent. ………
…….. The turnout probably increased among all major groups of voters — Hispanics, white Democrats, white Republicans — except black voters.
The conclusive data is available in the Southern states where voters indicate their race on their voter registration forms, and they point toward a considerable decline in black turnout.
In Georgia, the black share of the electorate fell to 27.6 percent from 29.9 percent, and in Louisiana it fell to 28.5 percent from 30.1 percent, according to the completed state turnout data. …….. Turnout dropped by 8 percent in the majority black wards of Philadelphia, while rising everywhere else in the city. …… The turnout in Detroit fell by 14 percent. Turnout fell in other industrial centers with a large black population, like Milwaukee and Flint, Mich. …….. Taken in totality, it appears that black turnout dropped somewhere between 5 percent and 10 percent — with few exceptions.
Hispanic and Asian and female voters were, in the event, not the key to this election. The huge disappointment among women, not just in the US but all over the world, was entirely gender based and did not reflect the lack of any Clinton message. “Make America Great Again” resonated with whites but did not scare blacks too much. And Clinton had no real message for blacks except the continuation of the status quo – and that inspired nobody.
Trump over-performed with whites and Clinton badly under-performed with blacks.
Democrats (this was a Democrat primary after all — so that is the only well you needed to poison a month before a primary).
The k2p blog 