Trump’s march started in Florida
Florida was meant to be do-or-die for Donald Trump. Instead, it became the first stepping stone in his dramatic hopscotch to the presidency as he found almost the only possible path from the northern half of the Sunshine State through Middle America’s Rust Belt into the White House.
After an almost issue-free campaign that was all push and no pull, between two unsympathetic figures banking on their own sense of entitlement and public hatred of their opponent, the final vote was destined to be volatile.
But the sheer scale of demographic reversal caught the world by surprise, to say nothing of humbled pollsters, who drastically underestimated the Trump constituency.
Trump had help in this improbable journey from the vote-splitting third-party candidates: Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Jill Stein. In Florida, Wisconsin and Michigan, for example, Johnson and Stein combined for greater than the difference between Clinton and Trump. Had they not been on the ballot, Clinton could have won.
But this was not a spoiled vote. It was a solid victory. The final shift saw many Republicans coming home to Trump despite their initial vocal distaste. This may have been boosted by the phenomenon of “shy Republicans,” who overstated their indecision to pollsters.
And despite strong turnout among the key Democratic constituencies of Hispanics and African-Americans, Clinton never managed to woo the working-class whites of Michigan and Pennsylvania, the Reagan Democrats, who were key to the victories of Barack Obama.
She even won the nationwide popular vote, but fully two-thirds of white women voted Republican.
The white vote has traditionally split along class lines, with middle and upper classes going Republican, and the working classes and trade unionists going Democrat. But this was turned on its head, with higher-educated whites preferring Clinton, and the working classes — the people whom President Barack Obama famously insulted for clinging to their guns and religion — going for Trump.
“Trump had a path to victory, but it was a pretty narrow one, and it all started in the northern part of Florida really, and moved up from there,” says veteran polltracker Harold Clarke, a Canadian professor of political economy at the University of Texas at Dallas and editor of the journal Electoral Studies.
The joke in Florida politics is that the farther north you go, the further South you are. Southern Florida is broadly Democratic, thanks to the large immigrant and Hispanic population of Miami and the disproportionately white and Jewish retirement communities. With the exception of some conservative CubanAmericans whose experience of Communism skews them rightward, this was where Clinton could have expected to triumph.
But once you cross the I-4 corridor between Tampa and Orlando, the “golden girdle,” you are into Florida’s suburban north, with Daytona Beach, Jacksonville and the gritty Panhandle, in a place that feels more like Georgia or Alabama.
This was the primary battleground and the wellspring of Trump’s definitive victory.
After that, he needed Ohio and North Carolina, which were clearly his by just after 11 p.m. Tuesday. Then he had to bust through the traditional “Blue Wall” by taking one of the Democratic strongholds of Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin. He appears to have swept them all. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were decided in the early morning. Michigan, with 16 Electoral College votes, was down to the wire, with Trump ahead by less than one point early Wednesday afternoon.
Ideologically, this was exactly what he asked for, a populist revolt against Washington, against the “elites,” almost against politics itself. It was the vote of angry white men, whose angers have diverse origins, but coalesced into a motivational hatred of a woman who seemed to use her three decades in public office for her own gain, who exploited the State Department as a funnel for donations to her family foundation, and who flouted national security to protect the privacy of her emails.
“We’ve seen this in Canada,” Clarke said, referring to the Reform Party’s growth from regional fringe protest party to the foundation of a winning alliance. “We’ve seen it in Britain. We’re seeing it in the United States.”
The British comparison was particularly apt, and it became almost a rallying cry for Trump’s followers, who invoked memories of the Brexit referendum, in which pollsters’ expectations of a win for the Euro-friendly establishment were dashed, like Clinton’s, in the darkest hours of a dramatic night.
As in Brexit, Trump’s victory rode on waves of fear about economy, security and culture.
Nigel Farage, the former head of the United Kingdom Independence Party who saw the Brexit victory as the culmination of his political career, is now due to meet the president-elect in New York Saturday, and has openly speculated about a role in his administration. He advised on debate preparation, and after Trump’s victory was clear, tweeted that he was handing over his “mantle.”
That mantle — as the successful champion of the common man against the scheming elites, a populist, nativist, protectionist, anti-political outsider — could hardly have existed a decade ago.
In America, the last Republican president was the son of the previous one. The key to power for British right-wingers has been a chummy cadre of Oxfordeducated “toffs,” followed by an Oxford-educated financial services executive. Canada’s Conservative party is struggling to find a successor to a cerebral, free-marketeering policy wonk who lost power, in large part, because he tried to fight a culture war against a progressive idealist.
But Trump has fought a culture war and, against the odds, he won.