PRESIDENT TRUMP: U.S. TURNS IN
Public turned off by legacy of scandals Fears over loss of jobs and immigrants Voters fed up with out-of-touch elite
THE story of this election was not just that Donald Trump won. Hillary Clinton lost it as well. The “Clinton coalition” of women, Latinos, AfricanAmericans and college-educated liberals simply melted away.
Firstly Clinton’s win among female voters was not as large as she expected – exit polls suggesting a 12-point lead that was little better than that achieved by Barack Obama.
She also did not win nearly as big in Latino areas as she had hoped – allowing Trump to sweep key states like Florida.
And African-Americans and young people simply did not turn out in the droves that voted for Obama. The outgoing President won 60% of under-30s’ votes in 2012, compared to Clinton’s 55% this week.
Finally, the white working-class voters who backed Obama in the Northern rust belt states decided Donald Trump would do a better job of improving their lives.
Clinton has been in the limelight so long she is now tainted by 30 years of scandals and mistakes – most recently the use of a private email address while she was Secretary of State.
Right across America, I met people who should have been natural Democrat supporters – but who were not prepared to come out and vote for her.
“I despise both candidates equally,” said Michael Morse, 24, an Obama supporter from WilkesBarre, Pennsylvania.
Oneitha Flamer, a 49-year-old black woman who works for a glass firm, took a similar view.
“It’s a toss-up,” she says. “I really don’t like either of them.”
Bill Baker, a 64-year-old fund manager who has voted both Republican and Democrat in the past, said for the first time in his life he would not be casting his vote in Virginia at all.
“I physically can’t tick either box and live with my conscience,” he told me, shaking his head.
IT started the moment I stepped off the plane.
The guy at US border control glanced at my journalist’s visa and told me he was voting Trump.
“Honestly, I’d vote for anyone over her,” he said. “If I’d have done anything like that with my emails, I would be in jail.
“And she gets off scot free? Forget about it.
“Let’s give the other guy a chance.”
He was the first Trump voter I had ever met. He was certainly not stupid, nor even particularly angry at the world. He had a decent job, he was friendly and happy to chat. But he saw Hillary Clinton as part of a distant, privileged and crooked establishment – and there was no way he was voting for that.
The parallels with Brexit were immediately obvious. And it was a pattern that would be repeated again and again as I criss-crossed America over the next 10 days. “He’s not part of the Washington establishment,” an elderly Trump supporter called Dave Anderson told me in Williams County, Ohio, a few days later. They have their own way of doing things – but it’s all done for themselves.” Watching from Britain, the rise and rise of Donald Trump had seemed incomprehensible. How could this guy who kept saying these horrendous things – banning Muslims, branding Mexicans rapists, bragging about sexual assault – be neck-and-neck in the polls? Who on Earth were these crazy people who were voting for him? The answer, I quickly discovered, is that they are ordinary men and women. Yes they are white, almost exclusively among those I met. But most are not swivel-eyed racists or filled with hatred and fury, or too stupid to understand what they were voting for. How could they be? There are 59 million of them. Just as with Brexit, they were angry with the status quo. Just as with Brexit, many were deeply worried about immigration and fearful about the direction their country was headed.
And just as with Brexit, the groundswell of support came from the white working and lower-middle classes.
So I drove first to the northern state of Michigan, once the bedrock of America’s proud industrial heartland, but now trapped in a long, slow decline.
It had voted Democrat every year since 1992. Trump insisted it was set to swing back his way. He was right. I sneaked into a Trump rally, nervous that his supposedly rabid, journalist-hating supporters might turn on me. What I found was shocking – but only because everyone was so friendly and happy to chat.
There were the hicks and the oddballs, of course. But I met an artist, a mom with her three children, a local businessman in an expensive suit.
And, time and again, those same Brexit-y issues came up. Immigration – in this case linked to the threat of Islamic terrorism. A fear that globalisation was costing jobs – though in this case, they