by Kitty Testa
If you’re experiencing shock and awe this morning while realizing that Donald Trump has won the presidency with 276 electoral votes, garnering surprising wins in places like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, it’s a good idea to gather your assumptions about the electorate and examine them.
Whether you’re jumping for joy or crying in your coffee, realize that it’s unlikely that we will experience great changes based on the outcome of this election. What we must acknowledge is that the pundits got this one wrong, and they need to stop shaking their heads for a moment and figure out why.
1. Donald Trump isn’t a Republican
He may have won the GOP nomination, but recall that Donald Trump slaughtered the Republican establishment, besting a slew of candidates with more money and more support within the establishment. He walked in and stole half of the duopoly that has been running the United States for over a century. All of the #nevertrumps within the GOP are having humble pie for breakfast today.
Where did their influence go? Why did the conservative electorate reject them?
The Republican Party lost the 2008 and 2012 elections, they made a whole lot of noise in the meantime, promising to repeal Obamacare, an issue that directly affected many Americans. They came up with nothing to appease conservative voters, who watched John Boehner chased from his position as Speaker of the House in a revolt by the alleged Freedom Caucus. Once the primaries were underway, it was clear that the GOP establishment had no idea what was going on in their own party. For better or worse, the GOP is now Trump’s party, and the establishment has been rendered irrelevant.
2. Trump’s voters had more passion
If you didn’t take the time to watch the candidates’ rallies during this election, you can still find them on YouTube. The contrast was striking. Trump filled stadiums with thousands of people at every single appearance, with tens of thousands more watching the rallies as they were live-streamed. Clinton did very few rallies, and those she did were sparsely attended, with very few live-stream viewers. Her anemic public appearances during the election did more to convince people that she was deathly ill than that she was the woman to beat for the office of President of the United States.
Also, if you watched Trump’s speeches, he didn’t come off as a complete idiot with no policy ideas. Despite the drumbeat of the “homophobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic” mantra, Trump didn’t come off that way during these rallies over the past few months. He focused on jobs and trade deals, staying on message.
Clinton’s only message to independents seemed to be, “I’m a woman and I’m not Donald Trump.” She refused to hold press conferences. She seemed to be hiding from the electorate. She didn’t go out and earn the confidence of swing voters.
3. Wikileaks
The contents of the Podesta emails revealed the inner workings of Clinton’s campaign, and while many were moved by the email server scandal, the emails also showed that Clinton’s own people did not have faith in her.
Clinton’s die-hard supporters didn’t believe a word of it, but elections are won by independents, not the base.
The fact that Wikileaks presented their content directly to the public, bypassing the great filter of the Mainstream Media, worked against Clinton. Americans are still binary in their political thinking, and the great majority will choose a Republican or a Democrat.
America loves a winner, and if you can’t even convince your own campaign that you are deserving of the office you seek, you’re in trouble.
4. The Mainstream Media has lost its reputation
The major news organizations have denied “being in the tank” for Hillary Clinton, but that defense was blown out of the water by Wikileaks. We learned that CNN was leaking questions to be asked of Clinton, and soliciting Clinton’s campaign for tough questions to trip up Trump. We learned that reporters were submitting their stories to Clinton’s communications director for review. We learned that reporters were actively discrediting Clinton’s opposition.
Meanwhile, voters were consulting online media, which has swelled with new readers and new viewership during this election cycle. Alex Jones’ InfoWars, for better or worse, claims to have more viewers than CNN. With almost 1.8 million subscribers to his YouTube channel, this is not a hollow boast. Mark Dice has nearly 650,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel. The pro-Trump online media is a force, while the mainstream media, its hubris intact, dismisses the phenomenon along with its own lack of objectivity.
5. Polls don’t measure what they claim to measure
Last night, nearly the entire country was convinced that Hillary Clinton would handily win this election because of the polls.
Is polling science due for an autopsy this morning? Maybe. Maybe not. It’s been evident that Trump’s internal polls were telling him that he was competitive in states that haven’t gone Republican in decades. But again, he’s not really a Republican, and so assumptions about red and blue states should go right out the window.
But were the polls that were reported really honest? There were examples of polls that excluded millennials, polls that over-sampled Democrats, polls that identified likely voters simply as people who voted in previous elections, ignoring those who were re-entering the electorate or voting for the first time. Given that the mainstream media pays for most of these polls, were they designed to provide confirmation bias? Was there an attempt to create a Hillary bandwagon that just didn’t prove successful?
Joe Scarborough noted this morning that there were many professionals he personally interviewed that would take him aside and tell him that they were supporting Trump, although they would not admit to such “in polite company.” Clinton did not do as well among college educated whites as was predicted, so either people were lying to pollsters, or pollsters weren’t reporting results fairly.
Surely, there will be many articles this morning discussing the postmortem of our political establishment, but Clinton may still narrowly win the popular vote. Still, as we often remind ourselves, the United States is a republic, not a democracy.