SAD! The Full, Long List Of Hillary Excuses For Election Loss https://t.co/fbcFoPFSty @realDailyWire pic.twitter.com/j2w4jJfYNT
— Amanda Prestigiacomo (@AmandaPresto) June 1, 2017
Killing @CIA Informants, China Crippled U.S. Spying Operations, rivaling if not worse than Ames/Hanssen betrayals https://t.co/U22mdiTTvt
— Adam Goldman (@adamgoldmanNYT) May 20, 2017
CIA Incompetence Allowed China To Murder A Dozen CIA Assets: NYT https://t.co/tYmMeSI5NS
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 20, 2017
Steve Bannon Cited Italian Thinker Who Inspired Fascists. @jasondhorowitz via @nytimes https://t.co/FaVVkYi6OT— Michiko Kakutani (@michikokakutani) February 19, 2017
ROME — Those trying to divine the roots of Stephen K. Bannon’s dark and at times apocalyptic worldview have repeatedly combed over a speech that Mr. Bannon, President Trump’s ideological guru, made in 2014 to a Vatican conference, where he expounded on Islam, populism and capitalism.You see, it's very important to document how Trump's key advisers may have been --- or may not have been --- influenced by esoteric fascist thinkers from the 1930s who nobody's even heard about. But when Obama spent a lifetime at the teat of the most radical Marxists, Weather Underground terrorists, and black liberation revolutionaries, to even raise concerns is "racist," gauche, and thus fundamentally lowbrow. You're clinging to guns and religion, bro.
But for all the examination of those remarks, a passing reference by Mr. Bannon to an esoteric Italian philosopher has gone little noticed, except perhaps by scholars and followers of the deeply taboo, Nazi-affiliated thinker, Julius Evola.
“The fact that Bannon even knows Evola is significant,” said Mark Sedgwick, a leading scholar of Traditionalists at Aarhus University in Denmark.
Evola, who died in 1974, wrote on everything from Eastern religions to the metaphysics of sex to alchemy. But he is best known as a leading proponent of Traditionalism, a worldview popular in far-right and alternative religious circles that believes progress and equality are poisonous illusions.
Evola became a darling of Italian Fascists, and Italy’s post-Fascist terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s looked to him as a spiritual and intellectual godfather.
They called themselves Children of the Sun after Evola’s vision of a bourgeoisie-smashing new order that he called the Solar Civilization. Today, the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn includes his works on its suggested reading list, and the leader of Jobbik, the Hungarian nationalist party, admires Evola and wrote an introduction to his works.
More important for the current American administration, Evola also caught on in the United States with leaders of the alt-right movement, which Mr. Bannon nurtured as the head of Breitbart News and then helped harness for Mr. Trump.
“Julius Evola is one of the most fascinating men of the 20th century,” said Richard Spencer, the white nationalist leader who is a top figure in the alt-right movement, which has attracted white supremacists, racists and anti-immigrant elements.
In the days after the election, Mr. Spencer led a Washington alt-right conference in chants of “Hail Trump!” But he also invoked Evola’s idea of a prehistoric and pre-Christian spirituality — referring to the awakening of whites, whom he called the Children of the Sun.
Mr. Spencer said “it means a tremendous amount” that Mr. Bannon was aware of Evola and other Traditionalist thinkers.
“Even if he hasn’t fully imbibed them and been changed by them, he is at least open to them,” he said. “He at least recognizes that they are there. That is a stark difference to the American conservative movement that either was ignorant of them or attempted to suppress them.”
Mr. Bannon, who did not return a request for comment for this article, is an avid and wide-ranging reader. He has spoken enthusiastically about everything from Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” to “The Fourth Turning” by William Strauss and Neil Howe, which sees history in cycles of cataclysmic and order-obliterating change. His awareness of and reference to Evola in itself only reflects that reading. But some on the alt-right consider Mr. Bannon a door through which Evola’s ideas of a hierarchical society run by a spiritually superior caste can enter in a period of crisis.
“Evolists view his ship as coming in,” said Prof. Richard Drake at the University of Montana, who wrote about Evola in his book “The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy.”
For some of them, it has been a long time coming.
“It’s the first time that an adviser to the American president knows Evola, or maybe has a Traditionalist formation,” said Gianfranco De Turris, an Evola biographer and apologist based in Rome who runs the Evola Foundation out of his apartment.
“If Bannon has these ideas, we have to see how he influences the politics of Trump,” he said...
A select group of top Dem strategists know why Clinton lost. Will the rest of the party listen to them? https://t.co/QnHAeYwdnw— Alex Roarty (@Alex_Roarty) May 1, 2017
A select group of top Democratic Party strategists have used new data about last year’s presidential election to reach a startling conclusion about why Hillary Clinton lost. Now they just need to persuade the rest of the party they’re right.More.
Many Democrats have a shorthand explanation for Clinton’s defeat: Her base didn’t turn out, Donald Trump’s did and the difference was too much to overcome.
But new information shows that Clinton had a much bigger problem with voters who had supported President Barack Obama in 2012 but backed Trump four years later.
Those Obama-Trump voters, in fact, effectively accounted for more than two-thirds of the reason Clinton lost, according to Matt Canter, a senior vice president of the Democratic political firm Global Strategy Group. In his group’s analysis, about 70 percent of Clinton’s failure to reach Obama’s vote total in 2012 was because she lost these voters.
In recent months, Canter and other members of Global Strategy Group have delivered a detailed report of their findings to senators, congressmen, fellow operatives and think tank wonks – all part of an ongoing effort to educate party leaders about what the data says really happened in last year’s election.
“We have to make sure we learn the right lesson from 2016, that we don’t just draw the lesson that makes us feel good at night, make us sleep well at night,” Canter said.
His firm’s conclusion is shared broadly by other Democrats who have examined the data, including senior members of Clinton’s campaign and officials at the Democratic data and analytics firm Catalist. (The New York Times, doing its own analysis, reached a similar conclusion.)
The Democrats have committed to overthrowing our government.Still more.
What does #Resistance really mean? It means the overthrow of our government.
In this century, Democrats rejected the outcomes of two presidential elections won by Republicans. After Bush won, they settled for accusing him of being a thief, an idiot, a liar, a draft dodger and a mass murderer. They fantasized about his assassination and there was talk of impeachment. But elected officials gritted their teeth and tried to get things done.
This time around it’s “radically” different.
The official position, from the Senate to the streets, is “Resistance.” Leftist media outlets are feeding the faithful a fantasy that President Trump will be brought down. There is fevered speculation about the 25th Amendment, a coup or impeachment due to whatever scandal has been manufactured last.
This fantasy is part clickbait. Leftist media outlets are feeding the worst impulses of their readers. But there is a bigger and more disturbing radical endgame.
The left can be roughly divided into moderates and radicals. The distinction doesn’t refer to outcome; both want very similar totalitarian societies with very little personal freedom and a great deal of government control. Instead it’s about the tactics that they use to get to that totalitarian system.
The “moderates” believe in working from within the system to transform the country into a leftist tyranny. The “radicals” believe that the system is so bad that it cannot even be employed for progressive ends. Instead it needs to be discredited and overthrown by radicalizing a revolutionary base.
Radicals radicalize moderates by discrediting the system they want to be a part of. Where moderates seek to impose a false consensus from within the system, radicals attack the system through violent protests and terrorism. Their goal is to set off a chain of confrontations that make it impossible to maintain civil society and polarize the backlash and chaos into consolidating the left for total war.
That is what “Resistance” actually means.
A similar program implemented in Europe, with a covert alliance between Communists and Nazis, led to the deaths of millions, the destruction of much of Europe and the temporary triumph of the left.
The radical left’s efforts in America caused death and destruction but, despite the sympathy of many liberals for terrorist groups such as the Weathermen and the Black Panthers, failed to escalate because the majority of Democrats and even liberals did not accept the premise that our system was illegitimate.
That began to change this century.
64% of Democrats insisted that President Bush had not been legitimately elected. 49% declared that he was not a legitimate president. 22% vowed never to accept him no matter what he might do.
After 9/11, over half of Democrats believed that Bush had known about or been involved in the attacks.
Anywhere from two-thirds to a quarter of the Democrats rejected the results of a presidential election, rejected the president and suspected him of conspiring to murder thousands of Americans.
The left was winning. Much of its natural “moderate” base viewed our government as illegitimate.
The left has declared that President Trump’s victory is illegitimate. The response is “Resistance.” That covers violent anti-government protesters, states declaring that they are no longer bound to follow Federal immigration law and Senators obstructing for the sake of obstruction.
It’s easy to get lost in the partisan turmoil of the moment, but it’s important to understand the implications. If two presidential elections were illegitimate, then our entire system of elections might be illegitimate. And indeed the left made exactly that case with its attack on the Electoral College.
The left pressed Dems to oppose President Trump for the sake of opposition. The goal wasn’t just spite. It was to break the government. When the left forced Senate Dems to filibuster President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, the filibuster became the first casualty of the fight. The goal of the radicals was to make bipartisan legislative activity impossible. Senate Democrats adopted the position of the radical left that their mission was wrecking institutions to deny them to Republicans rather than governing.
Once that was done, the radical left could unveil arguments such as, “The United States Senate is a Failed Institution”. Much like our system of elections and every other part of our government.
The radical left’s goal is to convince its natural base that our system of government is illegitimate. It knows that this can’t be limited to the theoretical level of ideology. Instead it must radicalize by demonstrating it. It does not seriously believe that President Trump will be removed from office by the 25th Amendment or any other aspect of the system. Instead it is feeding these fantasies so that when they fall through those on the left who believed in them will be further radicalized by their failure.
And Democrats have become complicit in the radical left’s program to bring down the government.
They have normalized the radical leftist position that our system is illegitimate. They have moved into the second phase of the left’s program of demonstrating that illegitimacy through confrontation. The final phase is to overthrow the system through actions ranging from protests to terrorism.
This is Cloward-Piven institutional sabotage on a whole other scale. The goal is to collapse our entire system of government. And the Democrats have climbed on board with it using President Trump as a pretext. But regardless of which Republican had won, the end result would have been the same.
The left makes its opposition to the Constitution, the election process and the rule of law into a crisis. And then it uses that crisis to demand a new system. It has pursued this approach successfully in local areas and in narrower causes. This is not the first time that it has embarked on such a project on the national level. But this is the first time that it has the full support of a major national political party.
And that is the true crisis that we face.
The left’s endgame is a totalitarian state. Its “moderates” pursue one by peaceful means only so long as they are allowed to hijack the system. When an election fails to go their way, the radicals brandish it as proof that the system has failed and that violent revolution is the only answer.
But what was once the obscure behavior of a deranged political fringe has become the mainstream politics of the Democrats. The Resistance theme shows that the radicals have won. The Democrats haven’t just fallen to the left. They have fallen to the radical left which believes in overthrowing our system of government through conflict and confrontation rather than covertly engineering change.
The Democrats have become a terrorist party. And their commitment to a radical revolution has plunged our political system into chaos. The left is now exactly where it wanted to be.
And a civil war has begun...
This is why @SalenaZito was so effective this cycle when few other journos were: https://t.co/gbQfUfcis0— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) April 25, 2017
How did big media miss the Donald Trump swell? News organizations old and new, large and small, print and online, broadcast and cable assigned phalanxes of reporters armed with the most sophisticated polling data and analysis to cover the presidential campaign. The overwhelming assumption was that the race was Hillary Clinton’s for the taking, and the real question wasn’t how sweeping her November victory would be, but how far out to sea her wave would send political parvenu Trump. Today, it’s Trump who occupies the White House and Clinton who’s drifting out to sea—an outcome that arrived not just as an embarrassment for the press but as an indictment. In some profound way, the election made clear, the national media just doesn’t get the nation it purportedly covers.Pretty interesting.
What went so wrong? What’s still wrong? To some conservatives, Trump’s surprise win on November 8 simply bore out what they had suspected, that the Democrat-infested press was knowingly in the tank for Clinton all along. The media, in this view, was guilty not just of confirmation bias but of complicity. But the knowing-bias charge never added up: No news organization ignored the Clinton emails story, and everybody feasted on the damaging John Podesta email cache that WikiLeaks served up buffet-style. Practically speaking, you’re not pushing Clinton to victory if you’re pantsing her and her party to voters almost daily.
The answer to the press’ myopia lies elsewhere, and nobody has produced a better argument for how the national media missed the Trump story than FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, who pointed out that the ideological clustering in top newsrooms led to groupthink. “As of 2013, only 7 percent of [journalists] identified as Republicans,” Silver wrote in March, chiding the press for its political homogeneity. Just after the election, presidential strategist Steve Bannon savaged the press on the same point but with a heartier vocabulary. “The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what’s wrong with this country,” Bannon said. “It’s just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no fucking idea what’s going on.”
But journalistic groupthink is a symptom, not a cause. And when it comes to the cause, there’s another, blunter way to think about the question than screaming “bias” and “conspiracy,” or counting D’s and R’s. That’s to ask a simple question about the map. Where do journalists work, and how much has that changed in recent years? To determine this, my colleague Tucker Doherty excavated labor statistics and cross-referenced them against voting patterns and Census data to figure out just what the American media landscape looks like, and how much it has changed.
The results read like a revelation. The national media really does work in a bubble, something that wasn’t true as recently as 2008. And the bubble is growing more extreme. Concentrated heavily along the coasts, the bubble is both geographic and political. If you’re a working journalist, odds aren’t just that you work in a pro-Clinton county—odds are that you reside in one of the nation’s most pro-Clinton counties. And you’ve got company: If you’re a typical reader of Politico, chances are you’re a citizen of bubbleville, too.
The “media bubble” trope might feel overused by critics of journalism who want to sneer at reporters who live in Brooklyn or California and don’t get the “real America” of southern Ohio or rural Kansas. But these numbers suggest it’s no exaggeration: Not only is the bubble real, but it’s more extreme than you might realize. And it’s driven by deep industry trends...
What's next for the women's movement after a historic march in January? A return to some of its broader issues: https://t.co/saIYyyqD1g
— Tina Brown (@TinaBrownLM) March 31, 2017
Hillary Clinton's loss was a "wake up call for feminism," says @WomenintheWorld founder, Tina Brown https://t.co/P1aK4nCe3b pic.twitter.com/YBN319q8Ul
— CNN (@CNN) April 2, 2017
Last week, we were treated to a news photo that will live in infamy: two dozen white male Republican congressmen (and zero women) around a White House conference table talking about dumping maternity and newborn care as part of their replacement for the Obama health care law.Oh boy, where to begin?
It instantly went viral: “A rare look inside the GOP’s women’s health caucus,” tweeted Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington State.
Seven days later, the infamy was compounded when Vice President Mike Pence broke a 50-50 tie in the Senate that would allow states to defund Planned Parenthood.
Since the heyday of the women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s, American women have assumed they were on a rocket to a future of assured gender equality. But even as individual women continued to break records and barriers in recent years, the engine began to stall.
Pay inequity festers. The rolling scandals at Uber remind us that the frat clubs of Silicon Valley are often rife with sexual harassment.
Women in the military are beleaguered by so-called revenge porn and sexual assault.
The United States still ranks with Swaziland, Lesotho and Papua New Guinea as the last countries on earth, “advanced” or not, that don’t mandate paid maternity leave.
In corporations, it’s turned out that the trouble isn’t the glass ceiling; it’s the sticky floor.
Male chief executives of Fortune 500 companies brag at Davos, Switzerland, about their healthy pipeline of women headed for the C-suite. (But the boast is undermined by statistics that show a paltry 4 percent of Fortune 500 companies have women in the top job.)
And a woman who commanded nearly three million more votes than her opponent did not become president...
YOU'RE FIRED: Donald Trump just told all 46 Obama-era US Attorneys to resign and Dems are LOSING IT https://t.co/OO3M34Nz6u— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) March 10, 2017
This is gratuitously cruel. She was brought here when she was 7. They're making an example of her. https://t.co/mu4VMoIZiT
— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) March 3, 2017
The utter lack of empathy in some of the responses to this story is depressing. https://t.co/b8vDsZkFnn
— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) March 3, 2017
Read @Edsall: The Democrats’ Immigration Problem. https://t.co/NRlduSAdJf
— Byron York (@ByronYork) February 16, 2017
Why is immigration such a problem for the Democratic Party?More.
The issue splits traditional Democratic constituencies. It pits groups with competing material interests against each other, but it also brings those with vested psychological interests into conflict as Hispanics, African-Americans, labor and liberal advocacy groups clash over their conception of territoriality, political ownership and cultural identity.
In the fall of 2015, as the presidential campaign began to heat up, Hillary Clinton broke with the Obama administration over its ongoing deportation of undocumented immigrants.
During an appearance on Telemundo on Oct. 5, Clinton told María Celeste Arrarás that Obama’s policies were too punitive:
I think we have to go back to being a much less harsh and aggressive enforcer. We need to, of course, take care of felons and violent people. I mean, that goes without saying. But I have met too many people in our country who were upright, productive people who maybe had some, you know, minor offense. Like, you know, maybe they were — arrested for speeding or they had some kind of — you know, one incident of drunk driving, something like that 25 years ago.Clearly, Clinton’s attack on Obama’s relatively stringent deportation policy was devised to maximize Hispanic turnout in the 2016 election.
Did the strategy work? The evidence is mixed.
A comparison of national exit polls from 2008, 2012 and 2016 shows that Hispanic turnout grew slightly, from 9 percent of the total vote in 2008 to 10 percent in 2012 to 11 percent in 2016. But any gain that might have accrued to Clinton from the increase was eliminated by the fact that her margin of victory among Latinos, 66 percent, was 5 points below Obama’s haul in 2012.
In any analysis of the 2016 vote, it is difficult to separate the issues of immigration and free trade. In an October 2016 report, Pew found that Trump voters were decisively more hostile to both free trade agreements and immigration than the general public, and much more hostile than Clinton supporters.
A detailed analysis of exit polls in four key states that helped deliver the election to Donald Trump — Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — produced interesting findings not only about Hispanics, but also African-Americans — who are less supportive of liberal immigration policies than other core Democratic constituencies — and whites. In each of these states, opposition to immigration was higher than the national average.
Take Clinton’s performance in Florida. She should have benefited from the drop in the white share of the state’s electorate from 67 percent in 2012 to 62 percent in 2016. She did not, however, because her margin among whites, 32-64, fell significantly below that of Obama, 37-61. Black turnout grew modestly from 13 percent in 2012 to 14 percent in 2016, but Clinton’s margin among African Americans, 84-8, fell well below Obama’s, 99-1.
The same pattern held for Michigan, where the white share of the electorate fell from 77 percent in 2012 to 75 percent in 2016, but Clinton lost the white vote in Michigan by 21 points, 36-57, while Obama lost it by 11 points, 44-55.
The patterns are not the same in all the Trump states. In Pennsylvania, for example, the white vote, which went 56-40 for Trump over Clinton, increased from 78 percent in 2012 to 81 percent in 2016. This boosted Trump’s statewide totals so that he carried Pennsylvania by 68,236 votes out of 5.97 million cast. An additional factor in Clinton’s defeat there was a decline in black turnout from 13 percent of the electorate in 2012 to 10 percent in 2016.
Wisconsin stands out because there the racial and ethnic makeup of the electorate remained virtually the same from 2012 to 2016. The state shifted from blue to red for one reason: the swing among whites toward Trump. Trump won 53 percent of white Wisconsin voters to Clinton’s 42 percent, an 11-point margin, compared to the 3-point spread between Mitt Romney and Obama, 51-48...
Overall, public opinion on immigration — particularly the views of those opposed to immigration — played a crucial role in the outcome of the 2016 election. Among the 13 percent of voters who identified immigration as the most important issue, Trump won, 64-33.
This data demonstrates a key element in the politics of immigration...
.@lamblock Just wow: Ivanka Trump aggressively confronted, verbally attacked by man on flight with kids. https://t.co/qdZZjvW3fC
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) December 22, 2016
Harassing women and children at Christmas. Classy. pic.twitter.com/LX3u5RPS5t
— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) December 22, 2016
Leftists are nasty, intolerant, hateful people. Period. https://t.co/jPju92p0q9
— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) December 22, 2016
Leftists are out of control. https://t.co/UZ9PpE0G58
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) December 22, 2016
Ivanka Trump Berated, Harassed By Man On JetBlue Flight https://t.co/wdcCmBlXMW
— Ƭαвιтнα Ɓℓιѕѕ ❤ (@BlissTabitha) December 22, 2016
Please don't harass the president's grandchildren on planes (or anywhere). Sorry if this ruins your weekend plans.
— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) December 22, 2016
this is getting lots of attention tonight https://t.co/SYlsj80HzB— Hadas Gold (@Hadas_Gold) December 21, 2016
.@oreillyfactor: “The left wants power taken away from the white establishment and they want a profound change in the way America is run.” pic.twitter.com/EggkBz7kvZ— Fox News (@FoxNews) December 21, 2016
Fox News' Bill O'Reilly under fire for race comments: "The left wants power taken away from the white establishment" https://t.co/qxBfsChIKw pic.twitter.com/RkaPfIRvvU— CNN (@CNN) December 21, 2016
Three weeks before Election Day, as she sat at her kitchen table to fill out her ballot, Kim McKinney Cohen was angry and fed up. The Democratic Party, to which she had been unswervingly loyal for four decades, had sabotaged her chosen candidate, Bernie Sanders, and then lectured her about the need to vote for a woman whose hawkishness and arrogance rubbed her the wrong way. When Hillary Clinton said dismissively supporters of Donald Trump were “a basket of deplorables,” Cohen had heard enough.Keep reading.
“Well, then,” she sighed, "I guess I'm a deplorable.”
The final results of the 2016 presidential election look like this: Hillary Clinton got roughly the same number of votes that President Obama received four years ago en route to his reelection, but she nonetheless lost the presidency to Donald Trump, who came in at least 2.8 million votes behind her.Still more.
That’s a highly unusual outcome — the biggest gap between the popular vote and the electoral college in almost a century and a half. Only now, with almost all the nation’s ballots counted, have analysts begun to flesh out what led to that result and what implications it has for the nation’s deep political divisions.
Start with California, where Clinton beat Trump by almost 2 to 1, amassing a margin of more than 4.2 million votes. That’s a victory more impressive even than Obama’s in 2012, and it included a win in Orange County, which had sided with the Republican in every presidential election back to 1936.
But Clinton’s huge majority in the nation’s largest state was also part of her key weakness — a base of support too concentrated in the big, urban areas of the northeast and the West Coast.
A candidate gets all of a state’s electoral votes whether she wins by four or 4 million, so in the national picture, the huge size of Clinton’s majority in California, as well as a similarly lopsided margin in New York, did her no good. Clinton piled up similarly “wasted” votes in some big, Republican states — notably Georgia and Texas — in which she did significantly better than recent Democratic nominees, but not well enough to win any electoral votes.
By contrast, Trump’s vote “was incredibly efficient,” said Tom Bonier of TargetSmart, a Democratic data and strategy firm based in Washington. “Where he lost, he lost big. Where he won, he won by a little. There weren’t many wasted votes. He won almost all the close ones.”
Trump narrowly eked out the victories he needed in key states of nation’s industrial belt, taking Michigan by 10,704, according to final returns, Wisconsin by 22,717 and Pennsylvania by just under 45,000, according to a compilation of the latest data maintained by David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report.
The reasons that happened varied from state to state, Bonier and other analysts note. In Ohio and Wisconsin, for example, turnout fell, belying the image of an army of previously hidden Trump voters storming the polls.
In Pennsylvania, by contrast, that image may be more accurate — turnout rose significantly across the state. Similarly, in Florida, Clinton won heavily in nearly all the places that Democrats generally count on, but lost because of a huge election-day upsurge in heavily white, nonurban counties of the central part of the state, according to an analysis by Democratic strategist Steve Schale.
One big, consistent piece of the problem was that Clinton performed worse than Obama did in blue-collar, predominantly white communities outside of major cities; such as the counties that include Scranton and Erie, Pa.; Youngstown, Ohio; Green Bay, Wis.; and Daytona Beach in Florida. In many such counties, Clinton’s vote was 15 percentage points or more below what Obama received in his reelection.
“When I look at those blue-collar areas, I’m still kind of in awe” over how dramatic the change was, said Sean Trende, election analyst for the RealClearPolitics website.
Clinton actually did better than Obama in counties that have high levels of education — Orange County being a prime example — as well as suburban counties outside Philadelphia, Atlanta, Houston and several other major cities.
Indeed, the share of the white population with a college degree or higher turned out to be one of the strongest predictors of which candidate would win a particular area this year.
Trump’s weakness in those suburban counties, which in the past have often sided with Republicans, provides “a big red, flashing sign for both parties,” said Trende.
The danger for Democrats is that “if Trump can bring those suburban Republicans back into the fold” without losing his core support among blue-collar, white voters, “he could win a pretty significant victory” in the next election, Trende said.
The danger for Republicans is that if Trump fails to improve his standing in the suburbs, “there are a bunch of GOP representatives from those districts” who could suddenly be at risk...
