Commentary

JOHN BRUMMETT: How it happened

A Republican man--well, he's a pal of Sen. Jason Rapert of Conway--came up to me after our panel discussion at noon Tuesday at the Political Animals Club. He requested that I write as clearly in a column the explanation I had given the club moments before for Donald Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton.

I told him I already had written it crystal clear. He said I hadn't, not that way, consolidated in one place.

If a friend of Jason Rapert thinks I have something worth writing, then, by golly, I ought to write it.

Here it is, point by point:

• Presidential races are about prevailing national moods. The prevailing national mood this year was anger and disaffection about the state of everything, and for disruptive change. That was an overpoweringly Trump-electing mood.

• But Hillary Clinton's campaign strategized--I thought at the time smartly--that the prevailing mood could be changed. It believed voters, or a decisive portion of them, could be frightened out of that general mood by introducing the specific concern that the Republicans had nominated a candidate temperamentally unfit, and thus too risky.

• Polling suggested Clinton's strategy was working with suburban, upscale, college-educated Republican women, thus denying Trump the natural GOP vote, thus keeping him in the low 40s and behind Clinton in polls.

• But then exit polls on Election Day showed that, in the end, those suburban Republican women went home. They voted for Trump in essentially the same percentages and amounts by which they'd voted for John McCain and Mitt Romney.

• Meantime, the Obama coalition turned out to exist only for Obama, or at least a candidate similarly inspiring, which Clinton wasn't. She did not get the number or share of black votes that Obama received in 2008 and 2012.

• For those reasons--meaning the return to the fold and to Romney-McCain voting levels by suburban Republican women, and the underperformance by Clinton in black support compared to Obama--the race was turned basically into a tie. And that tie was broken in the national popular vote for Clinton, mainly by New York and California. But in the Electoral College that counts, it was broken in three Rust Belt states thought to be firmly in the Clinton column--Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

• The tie-breaking votes in those three states for Trump were cast by white working-class voters--white voters without college educations, as they are defined in the demographic groupings by exit polls. They were the ones most angrily disaffected, generally and specifically by trade issues and job losses. They came out in numbers and percentages sufficient--in Pennsylvania and Michigan overwhelmingly--to give Trump an uncommonly narrow but decisive 120,000-vote cumulative advantage in those three states.

Who, then, delivered victory to Trump? Three groups did. White college-educated suburban Republican women and stay-home black voters forged a tie. Then Rust Belt white working-class voters broke the tie in Trump's favor.

Clinton is said to believe that James Comey's strange announcement 11 days out--that there were new email questions about her--motivated those Republican suburban women and persuaded them to come home. That's either because yet more email trouble was their last straw with Hillary, or they thought Trump had a new chance to win so that maybe they could wind up with the kind of U.S. Supreme Court they wanted.

Clinton also is said to believe that Comey's reclosing the email matter on Sunday before the election did her no good. She is said to believe it sent a fresh and compounding signal to those angry working-class voters that she was being protected by the elitist establishment.

Remember that Pennsylvania and Michigan had no early voting other than absentee. While early votes were cast in many states before the Comey factor arose, those states cast all their votes on Election Day.

If it was Comey's fault, in part or in whole, then it was Clinton's fault. It was her paranoid obsession with a personal zone of privacy that caused her to lather herself in the email controversy in the first place.

Reports are beginning to trickle out that Democrats blame Hillary for failing to campaign among the white working-class voters of those decisive states--she never even went to Wisconsin--and that husband Bill, who knows how to relate to the working class, pleaded for more attention to Rust Belt working-class voters and got dismissed by Hillary's new-age strategizers with their algorithms.

One final point: It occurred to me in the middle of the Political Animals Club program that we'd flirted with this Trump phenomenon for a couple of decades.

In 1992, Bill Clinton became president with 43 percent of the vote because the standard Republican, George H.W. Bush, and the original Trumpian outsider, Ross Perot, split the rest.

What Trump did in the end was fuse Bush the elder and Perot.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 11/17/2016

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