WHAT HAPPENED? The demise of Hillary Clinton

Success consists of going from failure to failure without lose of enthusiasm. ~ Winston Churchill

This was not an exciting “election cycle”; there was no hope involved, only accusations and denigrations. We were politically exhausted by Nov. 8, and the turnout data have confirmed this. Voter turnout for all 50 states was 58.0% of eligible voters; in 2012 it was 58.6%; in 2008 it was 62.2%. This means more than 97 million eligible voters did not vote last week.

Too many Democratic voters simply stayed home. California had the 4th lowest state voter turnout of any state, just 51.8%. State turnout rates ranged from 74.0% (Minn.) to a trifling 34.0% (Hawaii). Although Hillary Clinton won the popular vote with a 1% margin, she will garner only 228 Electoral College (EC) electors. Donald Trump will win with 290. Many liberal-progressive Democrats understandably remain distraught and upset. I certainly empathize.

Although Republicans intimidated certain voters, and created deceitful barriers to reduce or eliminate likely Democrat voters from casting ballots, that is not the only reason she lost. More importantly, the Trump voter turnout was unexpectedly much stronger and broader than anticipated. Hillary Clinton’s loss wasn’t merely caused by what the Republicans did. It was also due to what the Democrats didn’t do.

First, the Democrats couldn’t hold together Obama’s 2012 coalition, and didn’t spend any real effort to peel away much of a sliver of white middle-class and lower-middle class voters who Trump focused on.

In my last blog, “Voter Turnout,” I mentioned that Clinton’s grand challenge for this election was to persuade more Hispanics, Blacks, women, millennials and college graduates to actually vote for her than they did for President Obama. Her campaign failed this challenge. Only 12% more women voted for Clinton than Trump; only 18% more millennials voted for her. Other published voter turnout analyses have stated that Trump won 53% of the white women’s vote. At this point, so soon after the actual election, there is a fair amount of conflicting information about the characteristics of voters and who they voted for. These discrepancies probably arise from differences between specific exit polls’ sampling methods and analysis. Nevertheless, the results are woeful.

The efforts Democrats undertook to entice Hispanics, Blacks, millennials and other pro-Democrat voters to vote for Clinton did not raise their turnout. In fact, initial turnout analysis indicates that Clinton’s support margins (the difference between people who voted for her and who voted for Obama in 2012) declined for Black, Hispanic and Asian voters, as well as for men and people who earn less than $50,000 per year.

In past elections, two key demographic categories for the Democrats – Hispanics and millennials - have been difficult to lure into voting booths. Again this time they didn’t vote enough or give her sufficient margins for her to win on Tuesday.

Nationally, only 11% of votes cast on Nov. 8 were by Hispanics, the same turnout as in 2012. No other turnout data are yet available regarding ethnicity/racial voter participation, but when they are I doubt they will show anything that speaks of a successful turn-out-the-vote effort for Clinton.

Second, Clinton’s campaign seemed to have forgotten the importance of the archaic, but elemental Electoral College. In close elections like this one, the EC can provide additional importance for the smaller-population states that Trump won.

She overwhelmingly won urban-dwellers (by a 24% margin), but lost small-city and rural voters (by a 28% margin). Guess what; the states away from America’s coasts with lots of small cities outnumber the fewer states with very large cities.

This is one reason why this election’s state-by-state results’ map resembles a landscape with  blue-tinged boarders (all of the west coast and the northern part of the east coast) and a very wide, red middle, with just 4 blue exceptions (CO, NM, MN and IL). It’s been a long time since the red middle has been as wide. Trump won 30 states, Clinton just 21, including Washington, DC. This landscape became the election victory for Mr. Trump, at Sec. Clinton’s expense.

The electoral bottom line: Clinton couldn’t get enough of her targeted voters in enough states to vote for her to win. Trump’s dark, nefarious, emotion-based appeal to “the forgotten” middle-class won the day, and is now changing the political panorama of the nation.