But Mr. Trump also won over millions of voters who once flocked to President Obama's promise of hope and change, and who on Tuesday saw in Mr. Trump the best chance to soften the most painful blows of globalization and trade, to fight especially interests, and to be heard and protected. 12% of Mr Trump's supporters approved of Mr Obama, according to exit polls.
Mrs. Clinton won by a wider margin than Mr. Obama among affluent whites, particularly those living in the Democratic Party's prosperous coastal strongholds: Washington and Boston, Seattle and New York. In Manhattan, where Mr. Trump lives and works — and where he was booed and jeered by his fellow citizens as he voted Tuesday — Mrs. Clinton won by a record margin, garnering 87 percent of the vote to Mr. Trump's 10 percent. Across the country, he won a majority of voters from all over the country, picking up the country's growing and densely populated megacities and a plethora of suburbs.
But Mr Trump won white, low-income voters for the Republican ticket, reversing a partisan divide along class lines that is as old as the Democratic and Republican parties — a repeat of the “Brexit” vote in June, when old bastions of England The Labor Left voted decisively to leave the European Union. His breakthrough among white working-class voters in the North not only erased the Democratic advantage, it reversed it, giving him a victory in the Electoral College while losing the national popular vote.
Most impressively, Mr. Trump won by the largest margins among middle-income white voters, according to exit polls, a revolt not only of the white working class but also of the country's vast white middle class. He did better than previous Republicans in the sprawling suburbs along Florida's central coast, overwhelming Mrs. Clinton's gains among Hispanic voters. He held Mrs. Clinton's margins in the Philadelphia suburbs, defying expectations that Mrs. Clinton would beat Mr. Obama by a wide margin.
Magnified by the constitutional design of the Electoral College and aided by Republican-led efforts to limit black and Latino voting in states like North Carolina, Mr. Trump's America loomed large on Election Day. He broke through the Democrats' supposed electoral “blue wall” – the 18 states that Democrats have carried in every election since 1992, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, as well as the diverse and well-educated parts of the country that Mr. Obama wooed in the two of tribes, such as New Mexico, Nevada, Virginia and Colorado.
