Decision 2016

[Rich10]

Originally Posted by dok

Again, as I said to Rich, there's plenty of correct narratives for things that caused Trump to win, because he won a very narrow victory and changing any of a number of conditions would change that. My point is just that the last one of those things to fall into place, the most proximate to the election, was the late news cycle and the impact it had on undecideds.

There's no way to know what exactly led Trump to beat Hillary. In the conversations that I've had with Trump supporters, they seem to comprise 2 groups:

• High income people looking for a lower personal tax rate.
• Blue collar workers who are hoping for a return to the "better days" of 20 to 30 years ago.

A couple asked if a woman should be president. One person brought up whether Hillary was "crooked". Still, these seemed like after thoughts. Mostly, it came down to how each candidate would impact them financially. Now, I don't see Trump as the savior of the working class, but he sold this position well. Obviously, this isn't a scientific study with a thousand people, but its what I saw.

It will be interesting to see how history interprets this election.

[dok]

Originally Posted by vegietarian18

I guess I just think that the campaign, the way the DNC ran things as a whole were the major reasons for this loss. Clinton received far fewer votes than Obama did in both of his runs (59 million to 65 and 69 million), against a historically bad candidate. This was not a battle of swaying undecided voters. The democrats failed to create a campaign that energized their base.

It seems like you're repeatedly missing my point. All of these things can be simultaneously true. Yes, if Hillary was a better-liked candidate, or if she ran a better campaign in some way, then she probably wins. It can nevertheless be true that, even given these deficiencies, she probably wins if not for a late break of undecideds to Trump that provided those 1% margins in PA/MI/WI. And based on the polling we have, those undecideds were influenced by the late news cycle.

Originally Posted by Rich10

In the conversations that I've had with Trump supporters, they seem to comprise 2 groups:

• High income people looking for a lower personal tax rate.
• Blue collar workers who are hoping for a return to the "better days" of 20 to 30 years ago.

That's a fair assessment of many Trump supporters. There's also the social conservatives who were primarily motivated by the supreme court, but those are probably less common where you live.

However, most people you (and I) describe are not the ones that were holding out late in the campaign.