One week after the most unpredictable presidential election in history, the question remains; how did Hillary Clinton lose what was perceived as a sure thing among most national polls and half the American people? These are the reasons for our American Political Revolution. The first answer is the most obvious in that the supposed Hillary voters stayed home to the tune of 4.5 million. She under-performed Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election numbers in dramatic fashion.
Ironically Donald Trump was about one million votes short of Mitt Romney’s totals that same year. Was it the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, who made the difference? He received almost three million more votes this time around, but was that disaffected Democrats? His platform had more in common with the GOP than the Democratic Party.
It couldn’t have been Green Party candidate Jill Stein. She only improved her 2012 showing by about 700,000 votes. Most likely the real answer was a big part of the Obama base stayed home and that was the Rust Belt states that proved decisive.
The rundown state by state in that region:
Ohio – Clinton got half a million fewer votes than Obama did. Trump scored about 100,000 more than Romney. Clinton lost to Trump by about 450,000 votes there.
Wisconsin – Trump ran close to equal what Romney did with 1.4 million votes. Clinton came up about 240,000 votes short of Obama’s 1.6 million in 2012, leaving her just over 27,000 votes shy of Trump.
It was the same story in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Hillary presented nothing of substance among “the deplorables” she described in a speech in early October. That one word may have sealed her fate there.
Where was the Latino uprising predicted by the mainstream media and the polls? It didn’t materialize. Exit polls indicated Trump drew the support of 29 percent of Hispanic voters, a showing that actually improved on Romney’s 2012 performance, though only by 2 points. Furthermore, Clinton was neutralized by the fact that the share of all votes cast by African-Americans declined from 13 percent to 12 percent.
The fact is, Romney’s performance with the demographics was seen as so bad that it helped spark the Republican National Committee’s “autopsy” report in the wake of his loss. But from the inflammatory rhetoric Trump spewed out about Mexican criminals and rapists, it’s remarkable he did no worse than the 2012 nominee given the tone of his campaign.
It will always be a mystery how FBI Director James Comey’s announcement about new evidence in the Hillary criminal investigation affected her numbers so late in the campaign. Comey announced only 11 days before Election Day that agents were looking at newly discovered emails.
But the FBI director had cleared Clinton in the new probe before Election Day, and it is tough to make the case that his intervention was determinative of the outcome. Her polling by RealClearPolitics on Election Day had dropped only slightly, to 3.2 points, or so they thought.
The biased media was so shameful in their coverage of the campaign that even the New York Times has apologized through their editorial Monday. They were blamed by Democrats for raising fresh doubts about her trustworthiness in voters’ minds.
Diehard Hillary supporters blamed the outcome on racism and the so-called “Bradley Effect.” The phenomenon holds that black candidates often do worse in actual results than in polls, presumably because white voters are reluctant to back a black candidate but do not want to reveal this tendency to pollsters.
Give me a break!
They even said it was comments about her hairstyle and voice, and widespread doubts about her trustworthiness. There was also no evidence of obvious parallels against which her performance can be compared being a woman; debunked.
Many in the Republican hierarchy, senators and House candidates, feared Trump could hurt their re-election chances. But, in the end, the GOP had a good night in the Senate, retaining its majority and losing only two seats, in New Hampshire and Illinois. They also easily held the House.
What many bitter losers must face is, after all the speculation in the opposite direction, Trump at the top of the ticket was a bonus, not a liability. It was truly this century’s American political revolution.
