The left, mainstream media, pundits and even most polls were certain Hillary Clinton was going to win the election. Republicans were in a civil war over Donald Trump winning the nomination — which is why the left had secretly pushed for him to win the nomination. Ultimately, a “Chinese monkey king” ended up doing a better job predicting the election results than the biased media.
There were a few signs toward the end of the election that Trump was going to win. IDB/TIPP had the most accurate presidential polling record of pollsters, and showed Trump pulling ahead during the last week. This was no doubt in part due to FBI Director James Comey’s announcement that he was renewing the investigation into Clinton’s emails, as a result of the discovery of over a thousand emails on a laptop shared by scandal-plagued Anthony Weiner and his wife, Clinton adviser Huma Abedin. At that point, I changed my position on whether or not Trump could win for the first time.
Another sign was two college professors with excellent records at predicting presidential elections called it for Trump. Allan Lichtman, a professor at American University, correctly predicted the last eight presidential elections. Helmut Norpoth, a Stonybrook University political science professor, correctly predicted the last five. They looked at factors such as the party which just held the presidency for two consecutive terms is less likely to win a third term and Clinton’s lack of charisma. Laugh about her colorful pantsuits all you want, but an unpleasant appearance does influence some undecided voters in the middle.
With possibly a couple million votes still left to count, it appears Trump received about the same or slightly fewer votes than Mitt Romney in 2012. The left-leaning media spin that Trump won because more white voters showed up to vote for him is not true, in fact, he received a smaller share of the white vote than Romney. Exit polls reveal that Clinton lost because key Democratic constituencies failed to show up to vote for her — blacks, Latinos, Asians, women, Millennials and lower income voters.
A larger share of blacks and Latinos voted for Trump than Romney, evidence the attempts to portray Trump as a racist failed. Similarly, since Clinton lost votes with women, the last-ditch attempt to portray previous off-the-cuff remarks Trump made about women as sexual assault backfired.
Younger blacks didn’t think Clinton indicated enough support for Black Lives Matter or criminal justice reforms. Additionally, she didn’t have the star power Obama had as the first black president.
Only 52 percent of voters making $50,000 or less annually voted for her, down from 60 percent for Obama. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) recognized during the race that Clinton was in trouble in Michigan. She observed that middle class voters were discouraged that their economic situation had gotten worse, not better, under Obama.
Millennials, who favored Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary, were disgruntled by Clinton’s lack of ethics, especially the way her campaign created the caricature of “Bernie Bros” as racist and sexist. They disliked her ties to Wall Street and her interventionist foreign policy.
Some Millennials voted instead for third-party candidates, bolstering Libertarian Gary Johnson to 3 percent of the vote, an increase from his 1 percent in 2012. Johnson and the other third-party candidate, Green Party’s Jill Stein, took enough of the vote away from Clinton in four swing states to tip the race to Trump. Ironically, Clinton’s husband won election as president in 1992 due to third-party candidate Ross Perot taking away enough votes from George H.W. Bush.
The left clings to the mantra that Clinton lost due to voter suppression of minority voters — despite the millions George Soros funneled into organizations to combat this allegedly occurring. A writer for Salon wrote a lengthy piece rambling on and on about how the GOP kept minorities from voting and what do about it in the future. As long as the left ignores the real reasons Clinton lost, they can expect another loss in 2020. The voters clearly demonstrated they don’t buy into fake stories of racism.
Equally ironic is that Clinton lost some of the black vote because she didn’t embrace the radical Black Lives Matter agenda enough. The left has manufactured such absurd levels of racist accusations that it’s backfiring on them, hurting Democrats who don’t breathlessly push the spin.