US president-elect Donald Trump’s US flowered through the old union strongholds of the Midwest, along rivers and rail lines that once moved coal from southern Ohio and the hollows of West Virginia to the smelters of Pennsylvania.
It flowed south along the Mississippi River, through the rural Iowa counties that gave US president Barack Obama more votes than any Democrat in decades, and to the northeast, through a corner of Connecticut and deep into Maine.
And it extended through the suburbs of Cleveland and Minneapolis, of Manchester, New Hampshire, and the sprawl north of Tampa, Florida, where middle-class white voters chose Trump over Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton.
One of the biggest upsets in US political history was built on a coalition of white voters unlike that of any other previous Republican candidate, according to election results, and interviews with voters and demographic experts.
Trump’s coalition comprised not just staunchly conservative Republicans in the south and west. They were joined by millions of voters in the one-time heartlands of 20th-century liberal populism — the upper and lower Midwest — where white Americans without a college degree voted decisively to reject the more diverse, educated and cosmopolitan Democratic Party of the 21st century.
Trump spoke to their aspirations and fears more directly than any Republican candidate in decades, attacking illegal immigrants and Muslims, and promising early on Wednesday morning to return “the forgotten men and women of our country” to the symbolic and political forefront of US life.
He electrified the country’s white majority and mustered its full strength against long-term demographic decay.
“A lot of stuff he’s talking about is just God-given common sense, which I think both parties have lost,” said Tom Kirkpatrick, 51, a Trump supporter who used to work in an industrial laundry plant and is now on disability.
He stood near the Florida State Capitol on Tuesday, holding a US flag.
“Let’s put him in. And if he doesn’t do what he says, I’ll help you vote him out,” he said.
However, Trump also won over millions of voters who had once flocked to Obama’s promise of hope and change, and who on Tuesday saw in Trump their best chance to dampen the most painful blows of globalization and trade, to fight special interests, and to be heard and protected.
Clinton won by a greater margin than Obama among affluent whites, particularly those living in the Democratic Party’s prosperous coastal strongholds: Washington and Boston, Seattle and New York. In Manhattan, where Trump lives and works — and where his fellow citizens mocked and jeered him as he voted on Tuesday — Clinton won by a record margin of 87 percent to Trump’s 10 percent. Around the country, she won a majority of voters overall, harvesting the country’s growing and densely packed big cities, and a plurality of the suburbs.
However, Trump won low-
income white voters to the Republican ticket, reversing a partisan divide along class lines that is as old as the Democratic and Republican parties — a replay of the Brexit vote in June, when the old bastions of Britain’s Labor-left voted decisively to leave the EU. His breakthrough among white working-class voters in the north not only erased the Democratic advantage, but reversed it, giving him a victory in the electoral college while losing the national popular vote.
Most strikingly, Trump won his largest margins among middle-
income white voters, according to exit polls, a revolt not only of the white working class, but of the country’s vast white middle class.
He did better than past Republicans in the sprawling suburbs along Florida’s central coasts, countering and reversing Clinton’s gains among Hispanic voters. He held down Clinton’s margins in the Philadelphia suburbs, defying expectations that Clinton would outperform Obama by a wide margin.
Clinton won the US of big, racially diverse cities and centers of the new economy, from Silicon Valley to the Silicon Slopes of Utah, where many traditional Republican voters rejected Trump.
However, lining up for Trump was a parallel urban US of smaller cities — places like Scranton, Pennsylvania; Youngstown, Ohio; and Dubuque, Iowa — that boomed during the industrial era, and are still connected by the arteries of the old US economy.
By Wednesday, the notion of a Democratic electoral map advantage bolstered by rising Hispanic power seemed distant.
Even if Clinton had won Florida, Trump would have powered to victory through the new Republican heartland in the Midwest, in states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, where Hispanic voters represent just a fraction of the electorate.
Nor was the growing Hispanic vote — and Clinton’s strength among well-educated voters — enough to pull her especially close in either Arizona or Texas, the only two heavily Hispanic states that could have plausibly joined Florida to put her over the top.
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