BBC on why Trump won: A protest against a corrupt establishment

Nick Bryant
BBC
Wed, 09 Nov 2016 19:23 UTC

© Jabin Botsford /The Washington Post

Donald Trump addresses supporters early this morning at the New York Hilton Midtown.

This election, surely the most extraordinary in American history, was a revolt against the political establishment.

And few people personify the political establishment more than Hillary Clinton. During this campaign, for millions of angry voters, she became the face of America's broken politics.

Donald Trump managed to persuade enough voters in enough states that he offered a fix. The billionaire cast himself successfully as the ultimate outsider against the ultimate insider. He was the protest candidate. She represented the status quo.

Constantly, Hillary Clinton claimed that she was the most qualified candidate. Constantly, she recited her curriculum vitae - her experience as first lady, a US senator for New York, a secretary of state.

But in this mad-as-hell election, where there was so much rage and discontent, Donald Trump's supporters saw experience and qualifications as huge negatives. So many people I spoke to during this campaign - especially in the old steel towns of the Rust Belt - wanted a businessman in the White House rather than a career politician. Their hatred of Washington was palpable.

So, too, was their hatred of her. It was visceral. I vividly remember talking to a middle-aged woman in Tennessee, who oozed southern charm, who could not have been more polite. But when the subject of Hillary Clinton came up her whole demeanour changed.

Hillary Clinton has long had a trust problem, which is why the email scandal loomed so large. She had an authenticity problem. She was seen as the high priestess of an east coast elite that looked down, sneeringly, on working people.

The vast riches that the Clintons accumulated since leaving the White House did not help. The former first couple were seen not just as limousine liberals but Lear Jet liberals. Again, their wealth exacerbated her problems with working class voters, even though they happily voted for a property tycoon.

In a country where millions more women vote than men, it was thought that her gender would give her a major advantage. But what became clear in the primaries against her rival Bernie Sanders was how hard she found it to enthuse young women voters especially about electing the country's first female president, and shattering the most resilient glass ceiling in global politics.

Many women never warmed to her. Some remembered what were interpreted as disparaging remarks made when she was first lady about not wanting to stay at home making cookies. When Donald Trump accused her of enabling her husband's affairs, and of attacking the women who accused Bill Clinton of molesting them, many women nodded in agreement.

Doubtless, old-fashioned, unreconstructed sexism played a part too: the refusal of many male voters to countenance a female president.

In a year when so many Americans wanted change, she appeared to offer more of the same. It's always hard for a party to win three successive terms in the White House. The Democrats have not done it since the 1940s. But that problem was exacerbated by the fact that so many voters were bored with the Clintons.

Hillary Clinton is not a natural campaigner. Her speeches are often flat and somewhat robotic. Her sound-bites sound like sound-bites - prefabricated and, to some ears, insincere. The re-emergence of the email scandal was a huge distraction, and meant that she ended her campaign on a negative message.

She struggled always to neatly encapsulate her vision of America again. "Stronger together" was never as snappy as "Make America great again." Indeed, the Clinton campaign went through dozens of possible slogans, which spoke of her difficulties in crafting a message.

Her campaign also made tactical errors. It focused resources and time on states she didn't need to win, such as North Carolina and Ohio, rather than spending time shoring up the famed blue wall, those 18 states that have voted Democrat for the past six elections.

Mr Trump, with the help of white working class voters, partly demolished that wall by taking Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, a state that hasn't gone Republican since 1984.

This was not just a rejection of Hillary Clinton but also a rejection by half of the country of Barack Obama's America, but that is a piece for another day.

Comment: Here are several of the Washington Post's reasons for the Trumptober Surprise:

President-elect Donald Trump was right all along. He had a silent majority. The media, the pollsters and Republican elites never saw it - even though it was right in front of them the whole time.
...
-- "Confirmation bias" is the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing theories. Since he came down that escalator at Trump Tower 17 months ago, many elites could never fully visualize Trump as the president of the United States. That made it very hard to see him winning the nomination - until he did - or winning the White House - until he did. Confirmation bias does not mean one preferred a particular outcome. Rather, it is a condition of psychology: All human beings tend to put a premium on information that validates their existing expectations and downplay new data points that undermine them.
...
-- That said, Trump's own internal models were wrong too. Staffers at the Republican National Committee were telling reporters that Trump would win 240 Electoral College votes. "The best data inside the Trump campaign and the RNC had his chances of winning the presidency as a 1 in 5 proposition," Yahoo's Jon Ward reports.

-- Looking back, there was so much anecdotal evidence: All those guys at the bar in a hollowed out Ohio steel town who did not know a single Clinton supporter. The two dozen independents at a Pirates-Reds baseball game in Pittsburgh who talked how much they love Bill but loathe Hillary. The conservatives in rural Selma, North Carolina, who said they stayed home four years ago but would vote for Trump.

There were also so many red flags of lagging enthusiasm for Clinton: The paid canvasser for the Clinton campaign at The Ohio State University who could not find a single person to commit to support her during his shift in Columbus. The African Americans in Raleigh this past weekend who wanted to vote early and supported Clinton but gave up because the lines were too long. The North Carolina college students down the road who said they were probably going to vote for her - but also described her as a pathological liar. In Richmond, there were no yard signs for Clinton in places that were full of Obama signs four years ago.
...
-- Recalcitrant Republicans definitely came home in the final days. Trump won 88 percent of self-identified Republicans. He wound up doing better than expected in places like the Milwaukee suburbs, where there had been strong pockets of Never Trump resistance. He wound up garnering 60 percent of white men and 52 percent of white women, according to the exit polls. He even won college-educated whites!
...
-- Trump's Rust Belt and rural strategies were smarter than he got credit for. He really ran up the score outside of urban areas everywhere. ...

-- The Clinton campaign blew it. Top officials on the campaign became way too overconfident and complacent. They believed their own spin. They were measuring the drapes. They had too much confidence in their models, and they chastised anyone who doubted them as bedwetters. Hillary lost the primaries in Wisconsin and Michigan, but she invested little in shoring up her support there until the 11th hour. Her team clearly failed to see the race tightening in both places.

Add one more to the list: media collusion with the Hillary campaign in order to create the false impression that she was more popular than she was in reality. Social conformity is a powerful thing, just like confirmation bias.