Two Americas collided in the presidential race, and the side that was truly passionate about its champion walked away a narrow winner.
Donald Trump, the billionaire populist, has mobilized fervent support from the groups most concerned about the economic, cultural and demographic trends reshaping America. Hillary Clinton, in turn, posted solid, but not resounding, margins among the groups that most welcomed those changes. That slight imbalance allowed him to breach the Democratic blue wall at its weakest point—the Rustbelt—and roar to victory. A political scientist might say it was a victim of asymmetric mobilization.
Trump's victory was fragile and deeply contested. Trump beat her well in the states that each side saw as the biggest battlegrounds: Florida, North Carolina and Ohio. But as I write, Clinton has passed him in the national popular vote and looks likely to remain ahead, given that most of the remaining votes are in the West Coast states she won. Key to his victory were breakthroughs in Rustbelt states that Clinton had thought safely in her corner: Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and perhaps Michigan, depending on the final tally. At best, he'll win each of those states by about a percentage point or less. (He held Minnesota by a similarly narrow margin.)
Still, all that and a dime, as people said, would bring Clinton to the subway. To the surprise of old-school journalists, new-age data journalists, pollsters of both parties, and pretty much every campaign, Trump will be sworn in next January. I count myself among those not smart enough to see this coming.
As I wrote last week, there were some rumblings that the Clinton team had taken too much for granted by putting so much effort into Ohio, Florida and North Carolina, three states she didn't need to win — and ultimately didn't. The price of that emphasis was extremely little attention to Michigan and Wisconsin, which he needed to win, and also didn't. The science award may go to Brent McGoldrick, co-founder of the Republican polling firm Deep Root Analytics, who told me days before the vote: “This strategy leaves her exposed, particularly in Wisconsin.”
However, this explanation does not fully explain the result. Clinton also lost in Pennsylvania, which she pursued with huge resources, including an unprecedented weekend barrage that extended the state to the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Katy Perry and the President and Michelle Obama. More than tactics drove this result.
The trigger was genuine social unrest: a mass revolt by the GOP's “restoration coalition.” These are the older whites, evangelical Christians, and non-urban voters who in polls have consistently expressed both the most economic pessimism and cultural discomfort with a changing America. Although other data sources may ultimately differ, Tuesday's exit polls did not find those voters storming the ballot box in unusually large numbers. In fact, the exits showed the white share of the overall vote continuing its decades-long decline as America diversifies.
Instead, those who voted were stamped on Trump in overwhelming numbers. Notably, Trump beat Clinton among white voters without a college education by a staggering 39 percentage points—a margin larger than Ronald Reagan's over Walter Modale in his 1984 landslide. Trump not only beat her by nearly 50 points among among white blue-collar men, but by nearly 30 points among white women who did not have a college education. (Trump is president in large part because working-class white women gave him double-digit margins in key states—a development that may preoccupy gender scholars for years.) Likewise, Trump captured more than three-fifths of rural voters in national level. in the decisive Rustbelt states—Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and possibly Michigan—Clinton suffered death by a thousand cuts, as Trump improved on Mitt Romney's 2012 performance almost everywhere but the biggest cities.
Clinton could not offset this surge with a countermobilization of the competing Democratic “transformation coalition” that revolves around minority voters, Millennials and college-educated white women, most of whom live in major metropolitan areas. With all of these groups, Clinton posted advantages that were consistent, but not as large as pre-election polls predicted. Similarly, in most metropolitan areas, it gave completely respectable margins. But in swing states, it didn't grow enough to offset Trump's surge outside the metros. In the places that mattered most, one side was simply more determined to win.
By sweeping Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and possibly Michigan, Trump broke the blue wall — the 18 states (plus the District of Columbia) with 242 Electoral College votes that had gone Democratic in at least every election since 1992. If Clinton had defend the blue wall through the Rustbelt, she would have won because the four different Sunbelt battlegrounds (Virginia, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada) she captured would have pushed her over the Electoral College majority. But even with her wins in those four states, Clinton ultimately stumbled between the party's past and future: While Trump heavily flipped Rustbelt states that are the last vestiges of the Democrats' former working-class coalition, on Tuesday it became clear the party's new coalition of minorities and whites has not yet grown enough to hold reliable battlegrounds in Sunbelt behemoths like Florida and North Carolina (much less Arizona or Georgia), especially against an upstart of Republicans in these states' important blue collar and non-urban populations.
The result is a genuine pivot point in American history, both consequential and unpredictable. If Clinton had won and swept a Democratic Senate, the party would have taken a majority of the Supreme Court for the first time since 1971. Instead, Republicans can now bolster the Court's conservative majority for years to come.
In effect, the GOP will now control all the major levers of power in Washington. It will have the ability to uproot many of Obama's signature achievements, including his health care and climate change plans and the Iran nuclear deal. The Democrats will be shut out of office altogether, even though they look likely to have won the popular vote for the sixth time in the past seven presidential elections, a streak unmatched since the modern party system began in 1828.
On issues from immigration to criminal justice reform and gay rights, both Obama and Clinton have strongly aligned their party with the priorities of an increasingly diverse and urbanized America. But that coalition couldn't match the rise from an older, predominantly white America that seemed to many (myself included) too narrow to win the White House anymore. A narrow Trump victory driven by voters who feared that America's best days were in the past has now plunged the nation into a very uncertain future.
