After Donald Trump’s shocking presidential victory in 2016, there was no shortage of autopsies to see why his victory was so surprising.
One, authored by the New York Times public editor Liz Spayd, the day after the election, said, “When the Times begins a period of self-reflection, I hope their editors will think about half of America as well rarely off. “
This half of the US – the 63 million who voted for Trump in 2016 – stunned the world again in 2020 after months of surveys and analysis suggested a resounding defeat not only for Trump, but also for Republicans in the US Senate and House of Representatives had.
We still don’t know if Trump will get a second term in the White House, but we do know that he broke his 2016 vote and received at least seven million more votes. Regardless of whether Trump wins or loses, the following questions are raised: Have those who helped shape the political narrative in the US “thought” over half of the US that is rarely covered?
Missed predictions
This year was marked by a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, Trump’s response to it and the noisy debate over how to deal with the pandemic, combined with a summer marked by incidents of police brutality that sparked violent protests in US cities.
Amid this narrative, the feeling arose that Trump was divisive and missed the moment. Political polls regularly showed that the majority of Americans disapproved of Trump’s overall job performance and his handling of the year’s crises. And those polls, in turn, showed that he was clearly behind Joe Biden in the presidential race, and that the incumbent Republicans in the Senate were fighting their Democratic opponents.
However, American voters did not stick to the script that election day would be a washout of Republicans. Republican political advisor Frank Luntz says that’s because pollsters just didn’t learn the lessons of 2016.
“They should have known better because they got it wrong four years ago,” Luntz told Fox News on Thursday.
Who are Trump’s voters?
Given these pre-election stories about American voters, who are the people who voted for Trump this year? Compared to 2016, the cross-section of Americans who voted for him was pretty similar for the most part, and there are more of them.
That year, nearly three-quarters (74 percent) of U.S. voters were white and 55 percent of them supported Trump, according to the Associated Press VoteCast poll after the election. About half of the men (52 percent) voted for him. Trump won 60 percent of the voters who live in small towns and rural areas.
Biden’s coalition consisted of college graduates (he won 57 percent of them) and women (Biden won 55 percent). And it won 55 percent of voters under 45, 65 percent of urban voters, and 54 percent of suburbanites.
As for the so-called 206 “pivot counties” that voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 but supported Trump in 2016, Trump won 174 this year. Biden only won 20 while the rest are still counting votes, according to Ballotpedia.
The gap
Much has been written about the political and cultural divisions in the United States: elite versus working class, religious versus non-worshipers, urban versus suburban. But Trump and his followers raise serious questions about whether the concerns and interests of either side are being over-centered by powerful people in Washington, New York and Hollywood, and accuse them of creating narratives that, despite being in the so-called “elite” who are apparently sensual are viewed as nonsensical by a large number of Americans.
It is Trump voters – the right wing, but also those in Central America, many of whom voted for Barack Obama but have since become disaffected with the Democratic Party – who continue to say they feel left behind and are economically and culturally ignored in sight after Trump’s election in 2016. But that was another lesson that seemed to have been forgotten in the run-up to this year’s Election Day.
“[T]They seem to forget that there is the rest of the world out here, the rest of the country, ”said Deana Wagner of Valley County, Idaho, of the US administration in Washington, DC and why they wanted to vote for Donald Trump.
It is voters like Wagner, the Democrats, and those who claimed Trump and the Republican Party had no contact with Americans again misunderstood, resulting in a much closer presidential election than originally expected and the unforeseen success of the Republicans running for the House and Senate.
Whether Trump wins or loses, the 70 million voters – and the census – who backed him are once again sending out a clear and loud signal that they are not going away.
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