Trump won because of more than ‘whitelash’

Weeks removed from the history made on Nov. 8, perhaps we can less emotionally look at what made the difference between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton becoming the next president of the United States.

On election night, CNN contributor Van Jones characterized the will of the voters who supported Trump as “whitelash”, specifically an anti-President Obama reaction borne of racism.

His (not entirely inaccurate) portmanteau notwithstanding, I think a fair appraisal of the results shows more lashes than that.

{mosads}Let’s also first note that exit polling found many voters who had voted for Obama in 2008 voted for Trump in 2016. Change elections will do that. Black white, yellow or orange, Americans voters who are set on a course correction will not be denied.

“Whitelash” alone does not explain the rise of Donald Trump.

“Blacklash”: African-American voters stayed home because Obama was not up for reelection. His legacy may have been on the minds of some voters, but there was no checkbox on the ballot. National turnout was down an estimated 2 million for Clinton, compared to President Obama in 2012. You could make a good case that lower black voter turnout in Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina cost her wins, and 41 electoral votes — enough to make her President.

“I-lash”: As much as Clinton tried to assert that the campaign was not about her, it clearly was, to most voters. The election was a referendum on her as much as anything else, including Trump.

It was not about Democratic values, or her latest 18-point plan to make pre-K a reality. Her candidacy’s historic possibility was a sideline story. And the focus on her kept the focus off of what voters care about: them.

Obama bears some guilt on this also, for making the election about himself in speeches like the keynote he delivered at the Congressional Black Caucus Dinner in September where he asserted “I will consider it a personal insult, an insult to my legacy, if this community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election.”

Message delivered, mission not accomplished.

“Hacklash”: Forget about Clinton’s email server (although most voters remembered it to her detriment on Election Day). The hacking of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s email account was a classic example of ill-gotten information whose source became secondary to the discussion. Voters cared little whether the Russians were trying to get Trump elected. They were more focused on and disturbed by the internal chumminess of the Democratic National Committee with the Hillary for America team, sausage-making of the media and the Clinton campaign, and the air of arrogance wafting across the emails.

To that point, let’s put into context the angry working-class white voter we’ve heard so much about since the election. Hearing from and talking to Trump voters, I feel pretty confident in asserting (without trying put all of them, “deplorable” or not, in one basket) that these Americans are fine with much of what ostensibly sets their anger meter to high.

Immigration? Sure, if you follow the rules. And learn the language. If it was good enough for all those generations who came here and helped make America great, why not now? And Trump’s not really going to build a wall that Mexico will pay for. He’s just going to make the border more secure. 

Diversity? Hey, that’s cool. But why do we have to have special categories for everything? Why all the hyphens? Can’t we just all be Americans?

Jobs? Can I get mine back? And if I can’t, why should I listen to the people in Washington who keep telling me they’re making it better, if they haven’t delivered to this point?

That’s the topline frustration I hear from Trump voters who made that frustration manifest in their fervent support of an unlikely hero.

There’s also a lesson to be learned from 2016 about the value of letting the democratic process play out. Mainstream Republicans quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) wished during the primaries that, like the Democrats, they had a superdelegate superego to shackle the id of Trump’s maverick march to the nomination.

Now, they and many Democrats are reassessing the value of having anything that smacks of a self-styled enlightened elite influencing the selection of the candidate.

For Democrats, Clinton’s march to the nomination was akin to the captain of the Hesperus, lashing his daughter to the mast to keep her safe from a raging storm at sea.

But when she went down, so did the party, including senators and House members who might have won with a better person at the top of the ticket.

As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in his poem, “The Wreck of the Hesperus”:

“O father. I see a gleaming light,
Oh say, what may it be?”
But the father answered never a word,
A frozen corpse was he.
Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark,
With his face turned to the skies,
The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow
On his fixed and glassy eyes.

Voters did not show up for Hillary Clinton, or President Obama, this November. So now the Democrats have to look to someone else to captain the ship before they tether themselves to another lost cause.

Tim Farley is managing editor and host of “The Morning Briefing” and “The Midday Briefing” on P.O.T.U.S., Sirius XM’s 24-hour politics channel. Follow him on Twitter @MorningBriefing.

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