HIS VOTERS WANTED IT MORE

Huge parts of Clinton base stay home

For Election Day, Mark Craig, founder of “Flint 4 Bernie (Sanders),” had 200 barf bags printed out with the slogan “I voted 2016.”

For months, the former autoworker and Flint, Mich., native had vowed he would never vote for Hillary Clinton. In emails and conversations he calls her “Shillary” or “Billary,” or sometimes just “The Witch.”

But by October, he said, he had begun to feel as if he had no other choice. The threat of Donald Trump was just too real. So he held his nose and he did what he once vowed he would never do.

“I passed (the barf bags) out to all my people with Flint 4 Bernie and we all went in and voted Hillary,” he said. “But it wasn’t enough here in Michigan.”

Donald Trump carried the state Tuesday by just 13,000 votes. It was one in a string of upset wins in the Rust Belt and the Great Lakes states that helped send him to the White House.

There are many reasons Trump was able pull it off. But the biggest one might be this: amid low turnout and little national joy, his voters wanted it more. The coalition he always claimed didn’t just turn out, it turned out in force in precisely the places he needed it most, while huge parts of Clinton’s base stayed home.

According to the exit polls, Trump rode a white, rural wave. He flipped traditionally Democratic states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and likely Michigan by dominating outside the cities and keeping it closer than expected in places where Clinton should have romped.

Compared with the 2012 vote, Trump picked up gains from the Midwest through the Rust Belt in the whitest, least-educated counties, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

He won white voters overall 58 per cent, to Clinton’s 37 per cent. He won white women 53 per cent, to 43 per cent. He won white voters without a college degree by a massive 67 per cent, to 28 per cent.

Today, the electoral map of the United States looks overwhelmingly red, a reflection of Trump’s dominance outside dense urban cores.

He won rural voters 62 per cent, to 34 cent. He carried the suburbs 50 per cent, to 45 per cent.

Clinton did pick up gains in the big cities — she won those 59 per cent, to 35 per cent — but it wasn’t enough to stem Trump’s tide in the states that mattered most.

That’s the other half of this story. As much as Trump won, Clinton lost. She failed to record the margins she needed among Hispanics, blacks and women. It’s likely she won a smaller share of the Latino vote than Barack Obama did in 2012, despite facing an avowed nativist who opened his campaign with a screed against Mexican “rapists.”

She lost college educated white women to a man who boasted on tape about grabbing women “by the p----.” Facing an opponent condemned by centrists and even some on the right as a demagogue and a threat to American democracy, she failed to turn out her vote, or much of any vote at all.

For every Mark Craig who held his nose and voted Clinton, in other words, it seems there was a swing-state Democrat who just didn’t bother.

Even among the 1,400 members of Craig’s diehard left-wing group, there were scores who sat on their hands.

“Four hundred of them voted every down-ticket initiative that they could and did not vote for president,” Craig said. “And if that happened in Flint, then it happened in Grand Rapids and Detroit, in Ann Arbor and Lansing, in Kalamazoo and the other big cities of Michigan.”

In that sense, Clinton lost in the intangible ways pollsters have long dismissed — on enthusiasm and hidden support. She won the popular vote, but she did it with million fewer votes than Barack Obama in 2012, and barely more than John Kerry in 2004.

Clinton didn’t need a great performance to beat Trump. She didn’t even need a good one. She just needed to be OK and she couldn’t manage that.

There is much we don’t know yet about what happened Tuesday night and why. The gutting of the Voting Rights Act may have depressed turnout substantially, especially among black and other historically disenfranchised groups.

The signs, in retrospect, were there all along. The passion at Trump rallies, the massive lines to get in and the fever his supporters long showed were all relevant.

Trump’s people, his core, loved him in a way Clinton’s never did. So his base turned out and her’s didn’t, and that was enough — by a few thousands votes — to make him President of the United States.