Leftist American Prospect: Trump May Be Sexist and Racist, But That’s Not the Only Reason He Won

The leftist The American Prospect deals with some reality:

Election Day was an ugly victory for racism, sexism, and bigotry over harmony, inclusion, and decency. But the exit polling and electoral returns show that Donald Trump owes his improbable win less to prejudice and intolerance than to visceral populist anger that went unnoticed or unheeded by far too many Democrats.

First, the numbers. Despite Trump’s overt sexism and racism, he managed to win over many women and Latinos. White women, for example, voted for Trump over Clinton by a ten-point margin, according to CNN’s exit polling. Depending on which exit poll you believe, Trump may also have won anywhere from 19 percent to an astonishing 29 percent of the Latino vote, despite his virulently anti-Latino rhetoric. Clinton’s supposed bulwark among college-educated voters also failed: White college graduates backed Trump by a 4-point margin, including 45 percent of college-educated white women.

It shouldn’t surprise us that women voted for Trump as strongly as they did: White women also voted for Romney and McCain by similar margins. But Clinton also underperformed Obama’s 2012 showing among Latino women by eight points. Clinton’s gender-based appeal not only backfired among men, but fell flat among many women. In 2016, the suburban, mostly white women Clinton tried hard to court seemingly made their decisions based on other factors.

And race? Per The New York Times’s exit poll, Trump outperformed Mitt Romney among all racial groups surveyed. Most shockingly, Trump gained fewer percentage points among whites than among other blocs of voters. Trump won only 1 percent more white voters than Romney, but bested him by 7 points among blacks, 8 points among Latinos, and 11 points among Asian Americans. These are not the numbers you would expect from a win driven primarily by white supremacist backlash.

The electoral data also debunk the notion of a purely bigotry-based backlash. Trump won the Rust Belt, and with it the presidency, by carrying huge swaths of rural and small-town America whose voters had twice cast ballots for Barack Hussein Obama. The prevailing theory that Obama’s eight-year presidency generated a racist backlash doesn’t hold up, given that the same white voters who twice elected him this year abandoned Hilary Clinton.

An article, well worth your time.