CLINTON TRUMP
White men 31% 63%
White women 43% 53%
Hard to overlook the fact she didn’t win over her demographic. The collapse of the Obama coalition hurt too (~5m fewer Dem voters than 2012).
LV Anderson puts it pretty bluntly:
If Trump has demonstrated anything, it is that the facts–citable, provable, hard facts–don’t matter. The voter apathy, the slender margin of electoral votes, the bare majority in the Senate, the actual deficit in popular vote, doesn’t matter. The GOP won across the board, the previoulsy silent Trump voters are now speaking up in gleeful retaliation to largely imagined slights, and it will be viewed by Trump boosters as a “landslide”, even while Trump undermines every value they hold dear and fails to live up to the supposed promises of bringing jobs back or being an “outsider” fighting against “the system”.
Stranger
Christie out, Pence in charge of transition team
So Trump is taking a swim in the swamp after all.
Like I said elsewhere, Trump is on pace to break all his campaign promises before taking office.
Maybe with a different message overlaid (I’ve seen several) but I believe this is the map you’re referring to, and yes it is quite impressive.
What it really shows is that almost the whole country outside of liberal hotspots like NY, southern CA and the Pacific NW went for Trump.
“I’ve arranged with my executor to be buried in Chicago. When I die, I want to still remain politically active.”
~Mort Sahl
I believe the feeling is that if one were to subtract all the dead, multiple and illegal alien voters, Trump would have won the popular vote too.
I’m sure that is a feeling held by many people. Doesn’t mean there’s a whit of evidence to support it, though.
Sure, “almost the whole country” as defined in square miles, but that’s not the way elections work.
And dismissing half the population as “liberal hotspots”, as if those votes don’t count, is not helpful.
I didn’t dismiss it so much as point out that it’s concentrated in relatively small areas of the country. It’s no surprise to anyone that heavily populated urban areas tend to vote Democratic. The key thing to me about that map is that it shows Trump’s support was surprisingly widespread outside the heavily concentrated liberal hotspots.
We could also say that Hillary’s support was surprisingly widespread outside the heavily conservative flyover countries.
Seriously, I’m not sure what the point is here, other than to act like the half of the electorate that voted for Trump represents some baseline normalcy of people, and the half that voted for Hillary represents an anomaly. What it actually represents is a fairly even cultural split.
Depends on how you define widespread, I guess.
Yeah, that’s pretty much it. 
There’s also the fact that in previous elections the areas of support for each candidate seemed to be more jumbled up, with no one candidate sweeping 80% or more of the country, area wise. But perhaps it’s just that no one ever did a county by county breakdown before, but the impression the map above gives is that the whole country outside the aforementioned and expected liberal hotspots uniformly went for Trump.
It’s just come as a huge surprise to me that a brash New Yorker like Donald Trump, with all his associated and media-driven baggage, would do so well across so much of the salt-of-the-earth part of the U.S.
Exactly. The map does not really look substantially different from 2008 and 2012; pockets of blue in a sea of red. What it really shows is the sharp divide between urban and rural voters—not an easy fence to mend. It’s like finding common ground between rappers and country artists.
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Never let the facts get in the way of a good conspiracy theory!
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As long as the salt of the earth types own a television, they could watch “The Apprentice.” That was his 15 year audition.
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If you were to overlay a population density map over the red and blue map, I think you’d likely find a similar distribution. People tend to settle where the water sources are. Despite its huge population, for example, most of Japan’s citizens live near the coastlines.
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This makes me wonder how many of Trump’s voters watched The Apprentice relative to Hillary’s voters. Feeling like you already know someone may go a long way.
Clinton voter here. Heck, I watched The Apprentice for a few years and was aware of Trump since probably the 80s, and I didn’t like the guy. He was always bragging about what he had and usually seemed to be exaggerating when he talked. I also have followed the Clintons since Bill ran for president and I couldn’t stand the Clintons in the 90s because of all the scandal stuff, though I softened over the years. For this election, I didn’t really like Clinton all that much, but I thought she was competent and had reasonable plans to do stuff, while Trump’s bombastic style scared me and I didn’t think he had any reasonable plans
I used to wonder why Trump even bothered with The Apprentice. It seemed to take up a fair amount of what seemed to me was his busy day, and it didn’t really pay that well considering how much he made in other ways. More and more over the course of the election I began to think he was actually laying the groundwork for his run for the presidency.
I mean, Donald Trump has been a household name since the 80s, at least since The Art of the Deal was published in 1987, and everyone has been aware of him. (sucker that I was, I believed he actually wrote that book too, but of course we know now and it should not be surprising that it was ghostwritten)
I’ll admit that I kinda admired his moxie and business-savvy, and liked him showing up to deliver his little catchphrase of “you’re fired!” on The Apprentice. He was fine when he was relatively harmless to the country - he just never should have become President of the freakin’ country.
Something to keep in mind about people being scared of Trump because of his more bellicose statements: Liberals were terrified of Reagan in large part because of his fervent anti-communism and his bellicose statements towards the Soviets, fearing that he would start a war. Reagan did start to push the Soviets into a corner, but finally recognized that he might be pushing them towards war and started to make peace with them. The Soviet Union finally fell during the next administration. Trump now being president might come to understand some of his desired actions will be counter productive and back off some. Some people believe some of his more damaging statements (like the Nato thing) are just posturing to get a better deal. We can only hope or that he moderates some of his intended actions
Of course, it goes without saying that Reagan had a far more upbeat campaign message than Trump, and people are in part fearful because of Trump’s racist and similar hateful and bullying statements
Support is widespread geographically because the population of the country is itself widespread geographically. There is no more and no less merit in dominating the whole of the states of Iowa and Nebraska vs. doing so for the city of Los Angeles (well, except in your local candidate having to put in a whole lot more mileage). If you turn the map into a cartogram in which the counties be sized per population, you end up with something that looks more like the half-and-half public it really is, the blue then looks merely discontinuous, not isolated. Then there’s also the famous “purple America” map where the counties were colored on a spectrum of redder to bluer according to the total votes.
Trump’s been a celebrity for decades. The Apprentice was part of his turning himself from a figure mostly of the celebrity/trade press to one with a true mass audience.
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Observation: One thing about those surprised at how “normal” people voted for Trump and why his ofensive statements were not seen as per se disqualifying no matter what - millions of Americans every day have to experience that someone in their place of employment or marketplace or family or community who is an ignorant, abrasive lout, conspiracy theorist and bigot, is nonetheless in a position of responsibility and somehow managing avoid trouble. So there is already a large cohort out there of people conditioned to that being a total a$$#ole is not intrinsecally inhabilitating.
