A divided US: The unexpected electoral victory of Trump

November 2016

On November 8th, the whole world watched in disbelief the election of Donald Trump to the White House. The surprise was even greater in the face of the contestation that the opinion polls failed and that Hilary Clinton won the popular vote.

How did a businessman with no political experience and xenophobic discourse manage to defeat a candidate with a solid political career? What happened with the vote of Latinos and African-Americans? What might progressive political forces in the US do?

In order to shed some light on these questions, we have invited Theodore M. Brown, Professor of History and of Public Health and Policy at the University of Rochester.

Why the unexpected electoral victory of Trump?

Trump’s victory was unexpected because many Americans including the leadership of the Democratic Party and major national commentators and media spokesmen for too long dismissed his campaign as too far beyond the norms of U.S. presidential politics to be taken seriously. They saw Trump as an extreme, obviously flawed candidate with a woeful lack of knowledge and political experience, a deeply narcissistic personality, and a seemingly complete absence of morality that allowed him to lie incessantly and to deliberately stir up violent emotions, behaviors and uncensored expressions of xenophobia, racism, and misogyny. As one writer put it, the pundits took him literally but not seriously and ridiculed what he said as demonstrably hateful and absurd, then found confirmation when many Republican leaders similarly rebuked his candidacy. National polls and academic experts seemed to verify this widespread consensus about Mr. Trump’s campaign, and this fed political projections of an almost certain electoral victory for Hillary Clinton as the first woman President of the United States.

Theodore M. Brown is the editor of Public Health Then and Now of the American Journal of Public Health

What this shared paradigm insulated against was understanding Trump’s grassroots popularity with followers who saw him as an agent of disruption of the status quo. Among those followers were large numbers of white working class men and women made poor and powerless by global economic changes and the impact of neoliberal policies. These white communities felt cast aside, dismissed and victim-blamed by arrogant political and economic elites who failed to feel their pain, marginalization, loss of status, and fear of the future. They enthusiastically responded to Trump’s populist rhetoric and crude nationalism and with equal vehemence rejected Clinton as a quintessentially Establishment, unlikable elitist. Clinton was also a poor, inauthentic and transparently calculating political performer with what seemed an uncertain and passionless message, and she was never able to distance herself from suspicions about her reckless handling of personal emails while Secretary of State, the murky and sometimes questionable dealings of the Clinton Foundation, and her own often ill-disguised sense of entitlement.

The repudiation of supercilious elitist Hillary Clinton and the embrace of demagogic populist Donald Trump were sufficiently strong to win him the majority of votes in the Electoral College and thus the presidency. They were not strong enough to give him the popular majority, which while absentee ballots are still being counted is currently running in Clinton’s favor by about two million votes. But Clinton lost key states she was counting on: Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Trump’s margin of victory in these states was not large but it was decisive and mostly unpredicted by pollsters who did better at the national than the state level.

It appears that the results present a divided US. Do you agree?

Yes, the United States is profoundly divided. On November 16, a New York Times article by Tim Wallace included visually striking maps of “The Two Americas of 2016,” Trump’s America and Clinton’s America. Trump’s consists of 85% of the U.S. land area and contains 80% of the nation’s counties. But “while Trump country is vast, its edges have been eroded by coastal Democrats, and is riddled with large inland lakes of Clinton voters who were generally concentrated in dense urban areas.” The article continues: “Hillary Clinton overwhelmingly won the cities, like Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, but Mr. Trump won many of the suburbs, isolating the cities in a sea of Republican voters. Mrs. Clinton’s island nation has large atolls and small island chains with liberal cores, like college towns, Native American reservations and areas with black and Hispanic majorities. While the land area is small, the residents here voted for Mrs. Clinton in large enough numbers to make her the winner of the overall popular vote.”

Beneath these broad patterns are important demographic and geographic subtleties. For example, Clinton improved on Obama’s 2012 performance in the state of California, the city of Atlanta, and the borough of Manhattan, but whereas Obama won the state of Iowa by 10 percentage points in 2008, Clinton lost it by 10%. Moreover, the working class whites Trump carried by large margins were heavily concentrated in the “rust belt” states of Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania which were all won by Obama in 2012 but voted majority Republican in 2016. This was due, in part, to Clinton’s weaker performance among “millennial” voters (those aged 18-29) particularly in the battleground states she lost to Trump, receiving 55 percent of their votes compared to Obama’s 60 percent in 2012.Trump had a 39-point lead among male and female whites without a college education and a 4-point lead among whites (including women) with a college education. Moreover, white Republican voting turnout surged in 2016 while more pluralistic Democratic turnout stagnated. In Pennsylvania, votes cast in a largely white rural and suburban areas rose 10% compared to 2012 while those in multiracial cities rose only a few percent.

Most important, however, are the lingering disaffection of Bernie Sanders supporters from the mainstream Democratic party and the philosophical and cultural differences that clearly separate Trump supporters from Clinton supporters. Some disgruntled Sanders supporters voted for Trump rather than Clinton because they were convinced that the Democratic Party leadership had unfairly rigged the nominating process in her favor in the face of polling evidence indicating that Sanders would perform better against Trump in a direct contest. It is not clear that they will come back to the Democratic Party unless major changes are made. Regarding the powerful philosophical and cultural differences between Trump and Clinton supporters, in the former group are many a Stanford University political scientist describes as “authoritarian nationalists” who strongly agree with the statements that “people living in the U.S. should follow American customs and learn English” and that “patriotism and protecting our national identity are important.” He also found that only 15 percent of Trump supporters said that the country should offer a path of citizenship for undocumented immigrants whereas 81 percent of Clinton supporters held that belief. Despite a far from full enthusiasm for her candidacy, the large majority of Clinton voters endorsed her campaign pledge to strive for a country of diversity, tolerance and inclusion, whereas Trump voters overwhelmingly wished to turn the clock back because they believe that American culture and way of life have changed for the worse since 1950.

What happened with the vote of Latinos and African-Americans?

There was a large Latino and African-American turnout for Clinton but she significantly underperformed if measured by Obama’s performance in 2012. Clinton had an 80 percent advantage over Trump among African-Americans yet did not match Obama’s 87 point advantage in 2012. She also won 65 percent of the Latino vote but that was 6 percentage points lower than Obama’s margin in 2012. Overall minority Democratic voter turnout appeared to be lower in this presidential election than was projected, very likely due to the lack of enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton as a candidate as compared to the young and charismatic Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Also likely at play although as yet undocumented were successful Republican efforts in several states to suppress African-American voter turnout and a widespread alienation from what they regarded as the useless voting process among young disaffected African-Americans committed to the “Black Lives Matter” movement.

What might progressive political forces in the US do?

Progressive political forces are already mobilizing and doing so with increasing urgency as the alarming news of Trump’s early choices for key administration positions becomes public. The president-elect’s choices of Steve Bannon (former chairman of a propagandizing proto-fascist news organization) as chief strategist, Army Lieutenant-General Michael Flynn (a rabidly Islamophobic former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency fired by President Obama in 2014 after clashing with senior intelligence officials) as national security advisor, and Senator Jeff Sessions (Republican from Alabama well known for his racist, anti-immigrant, and anti-LGBTQ views) as Attorney General have drawn particular fire. These choices have mobilized strong opposition from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, People for the American Way, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and many other organizations. The ACLU reports that its volunteers and donations have dramatically increased and similar support is growing for Planned Parenthood, the Children’s Defense Fund, and a wide variety of other progressive political organizations.

Senator Bernie Sanders remains active, having just published a new book entitled Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In, which outlines a progressive economic, environmental, racial, and social justice agenda and which claims that the political revolution Sanders launched with his Democratic primary campaign has just really started while the struggle goes on. Sanders has given several speeches and made television appearances before enthusiastically cheering audiences. He is among a growing group of progressive politicians who are pushing to change the leadership of the Democratic National Committee, specifically supporting the candidacy of Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota, an African-American progressive Democrat who is a convert to Islam. This is part of Sander’s agenda to align the Democratic Party more closely with the U.S. working class, students, minorities, and left-leaning academics and professionals. Senator Elizabeth Warren has also been very active and outspoken, and she and her many followers have contributed energy to the rapidly growing anti-Trump resistance. Demonstrations drawing thousands have already occurred on university campuses around the country and in several major cities, with their number and size very likely to grow over the coming months.

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