Tuesday night was an evening of mistakes across and around the country.
Pollsters blew this like no race at least since Harry Truman defeated Tom Dewey in 1948, and it might have been a bigger mistake. The political establishment on both sides and the punditocracy collectively misread the direction and mood of the country. (And at the most trivial but personal level: I could not have been more wrong in my confident predictions of a Clinton win.)
But let’s be clear, and with all due respect to the wisdom of the democratic process: The United States made an enormous, potentially catastrophic mistake in electing Donald Trump the 45th president of the United States.
First the polls: The final RealClearPolitics had Clinton ahead 3.3 percentage points. She led in 10 of the last 11 polls. She led in the Rasmussen poll, for Pete’s sake! Brexit was seen as a major polling miss and that was only a 2 percentage point gap the wrong way. She led in Michigan by 3.4 percentage points according to the average of the polls, of which only one in the entire RCP record didn’t have her ahead, and that one was a GOP firm. He never led in any polls in Wisconsin, where her polling average was 6.5 percent.
This wasn’t like Trump’s march through the primaries. The political elite and the pundits (myself included) roundly denied any chance that Trump could win until his tipping point moment was well passed. But that was denial in the face of data — Sure the polls say he’s leading but you see … This time Trump genuinely defied the odds and the data.
But polls and pollsters are ultimately an irrelevancy. As the saying goes, the only poll that matters is the one that occurs on Election Day. The experts said Republicans couldn’t run a “Reagan Democrat” campaign — it wasn’t possible, people said, to run up the score among white voters in sufficient numbers if for no other reason than it would bring a giant nonwhite counter backlash. Well according to the exit polls as of this writing, he won non-college graduate whites by nearly 50 percentage points, 72-23 percent. He had no ground game; he didn’t bother with ads; and he never modulated. He never pivoted.
We were all wrong.
Donald Trump is a xenophobe, a racist, a misogynist; he’s someone who bragged about being able to sexually assault women; he is without a clue on policy (he couldn’t even maintain a consistent position on most policies — “141 shifts on 23 major issues,” according to NBC News’ Jane Timm); he has a dangerously cavalier attitude toward nuclear weapons; he has a scary affinity for Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and who knows what sorts of entanglements with Russia; he wears his thin skin as a badge of honor, reveling in his need to hit back at people who have assailed him; did I mention his treatment of women and his disdain for minorities? He closed his campaign invoking a country worshipping one god, for heaven’s sake.
And he campaigned this way. He campaigned as an outsized figure that ebbed and flowed between ludicrous and cringe-inducing. And the country voted for him.
And in many cases the country did it knowing full well the awfulness it was embracing. So according to exit polls, while 70 percent of voters support legal status for workers here without documentation, 34 percent of those voters supported Trump; he won nearly 1 in 5 of the 54 percent of voters who oppose building his precious wall; he won almost 1 in 5 of the 30 percent of voters who thought Obamacare didn’t go far enough; he won almost a quarter of the 17 percent who feel that the next president should be “more liberal” than Barack Obama; he won nearly 1 in 5 of the 60 percent who don’t think he’s qualified for the presidency; he won exactly 1 in 5 of the 63 percent who don’t think he has the temperament to be president; he won a third of the 20 percent of voters who would be “concerned” by a Trump victory; he won nearly 3 in 10 of the 70 percent of voters bothered by his treatment of women. It boggles the mind.
Tuesday evening was deeply depressing and deeply scary.
The country made an enormous mistake and we’re going to have to live with it for at least the next four years and probably much longer.
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Donald Trump Wins the Presidency, a Historic National Mistake originally appeared on usnews.com
