Two years on the campaign trail revealed an America forgotten in the bicoastal media bubble, leaving our writer unsurprised when Hillary Clinton was beaten
Sixty million Americans voted for Donald Trump, each for their own reasons. Some were simply angry or afraid. Others were bored, indifferent to all the outrage directed at their candidate, eager for change above all else. Many, undoubtedly, welcomed permission to vent dark feelings of resentment towards people not like them. All were alien to a coastal cognoscenti which decided long ago that this election was a foregone conclusion.
Under the commonly agreed rules by which presidential races are decided, it wasnt even close. Democrats clung to a consolation prize that although they lost almost all the key electoral battleground states on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton received 600,000 more votes overall because her supporters were concentrated in more populous cities. A less reassuring way of thinking about this is that Trumps supporters were more evenly distributed in the places that most closely reflected the nations diverse political reality while Clintons were huddled together in like-minded bubbles.
The new American swing states became more familiar to me over the course of two years, at least 100 rallies and tens of thousands of miles on the campaign trail. The primary and general elections took me to 24 states, including a year embedded with Bernie Sanders campaign, and then, once he lost, non-stop travel with Clinton and Trump. It meant I lived and worked for much of this time in 10 states that determined the eventual result: Iowa, Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Colorado, Michigan, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Airports in Des Moines, Cleveland, Miami, Milwaukee, Charlotte, Manchester, Denver and Detroit, the roads to Richmond or Pittsburgh: all became almost as familiar as Reagan National Airport and the Beltway were back home. In Washington and New York, I rarely met anyone who thought Clinton could possibly lose. Out on the trail, I rarely met anyone beyond the campaigns often sparsely attended official events who was enthusiastic about her.
I gave up looking for explanation among DCs identikit army of pundits and academics. At first it was embarrassing to be constantly told I was naive to question the Clinton coronation; eventually it was just annoying that they seemed incapable of understanding what voters saw in Sanders or Trump when I had just come back from rallies packed to the rafters with adoring fans.
Talking to reporters on other newspapers was sometimes difficult too, if you wanted to conform to the required savvy nonchalance of the modern profession. On the Clinton plane, where we helped take turns as pool reporters, it was heresy to contemplate her loss out loud. Even at the back of the Bernie bus, there was open contempt for his quixotic tilt at the Democratic nomination.
Incredulous editors and columnists were more easily persuaded something was up when the primary results for both parties started coming in: 22 wins in total for a 74-year-old Jewish democratic socialist from Vermont, a near clean sweep for a reality TV host who hadnt met a demographic he couldnt insult.
In the end, there was no new surge of Hispanic or women voters coming out for Clinton in disgust of Trump, just a shortfall of several million white (and black) working class voters who had turned out for Obama but chose to stay at home this time; lots of Republicans who proved far less appalled by their candidate than they were willing to tell the pollsters.
This supposedly hidden minority proved impervious to sophisticated sampling techniques and poll modeling. Yet finding Trump supporters outside the Beltway was never difficult. One reporting trick was to go to the car park of a home improvement chainstore on a midweek morning: a guaranteed place to find underemployed white men with time on their hands to talk and nothing to lose.
In a Lowes at Steubenville, a depressed former steel town near the border between Ohio and Pennsylvania, one retired carpenter summed up the cavalier mood as he stacked lumber into the back of his pick-up truck, for a deck his wife had requested.
I think Trump is nuts, but Id love to have him as a president to see what happens, said 68-year-old Edward Tucker earlier this year. I wouldnt want to end up in some kind of war or anything, he added hastily, pointing out he had no regrets about twice voting for Barack Obama. But something is going to change if [Trump] is president. We just dont know what.
For men of a certain age, who had watched the certainties of small town prosperity vanish in a generation, it was hard to conceive that things could get any worse, short of nuclear armageddon. Even then, little that Trump had to say would shock them. But plenty of women felt the same way too.
Christy Cranston, a young professional I met with her husband outside a Trump rally in Charlotte, was mainly frustrated that the Republican candidate chose not to defend his aggressive, loud-mouthed outbursts more aggressively.
I would like him to say, Yes, Im a smartass and Yes, I say whats on my mind but I hope what comes out of my mouth doesnt take away what Im really fighting for, she said. I have never heard him say anything that was directly racist or against women. They were like comebacks for someone attacking him first.
Whether Trump intended to be as racist and sexist as he sounded is a separate question that deserves more scrutiny, but many are now reassessing the recent remarks on the subject of another controversial supporter, Facebook investor Peter Thiel.
I think one thing that should be distinguished here is that the media is always taking Trump literally, Thiel told the National Press Club shortly before the election. It never takes him seriously, but it always takes him literally.
I think a lot of voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously but not literally, so when they hear things like the Muslim comment or the wall comment, their question is not, Are you going to build a wall like the Great Wall of China? or, you know, How exactly are you going to enforce these tests? What they hear is were going to have a saner, more sensible immigration policy.
There is little doubt that Trump can be both crudely inarticulate and a consummate communicator at the same time. During his awkward first meeting with Obama on Thursday, he provided a textbook display for watching journalists.
If you followed the remarks as they are written in the official transcript, the president elect was talking gibberish. We discussed a lot of different situations, some wonderful and some difficulties, he said of his meeting with Obama. I very much look forward to dealing with the president in the future, including counsel. He explained some of the difficulties, some of the high-flying assets and some of the really great things that have been achieved.
If you watch and listen to the event, Trump seems much more in control. Like George W Bush before him, his syntax is all over the place, but the meaning is clear. In contrast to the cerebral Obama or the mannered Hillary Clinton, middle America can perhaps see a reflection of itself loud and inarticulate perhaps, but not stupid.
It would also be naive to pretend there is not a deeply cynical intent behind the gaffes too. Where other politicians might be accused of dog-whistle politics, Trump was broadcasting at a frequency accessible to all, exploiting the nations three biggest weaknesses: rust, race and ignorance.
Putting aside a handful of fickle Floridians, Trump won on Tuesday almost entirely because he changed the political landscape of the industrial midwest, aka the Rust Belt.
The 70 electoral votes accumulated in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa and Pennsylvania were a bigger electoral prize than Texas and New York combined. Throw in New Hampshire and Minnesota where only 50,000 similar voters kept Clinton from even worse defeat and most of these states were ones she also lost in the Democratic primary election.
Not all of these places are struggling with globalisation, by any means. Minneapolis has a thriving medical industry. Cleveland showed the world what urban renewal can look like during the Republican convention. Every time I went to Des Moines I was told it had come on a long way.
There is strong local pride too, often manifested in regional junk food that delights in its rejection of the Whole Foods aesthetic: chili in Cincinnati, cheese curds in Wisconsin, loose meat burgers in Iowa and, everywhere, BBQ.
But the combination of closed factories, stagnant disposable incomes and a wealthy countrys remarkable resistance to infrastructure investment leaves an indelible feeling of decay too. Even downtown Philadelphia, a vibrant Democratic stronghold, boasts an impressive display of rust. Empty downtown streets in mid-size cities in eastern Iowa or the Mahoning Valley of Ohio provided an awkward backdrop to a Clinton machine determined to accentuate the positive but fertile territory for Trumps unshackled warnings on trade and the rigged economy.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/13/donald-trump-president-rust-belt-white-house