Attention has so far concentrated on Clinton’s loss among the white working class, a decline captured by Trump’s landslide victory among white men without college degrees. The scale of the downturn took Clinton’s team by surprise, but they had known Trump would outperform them in that demographic. What shocked the campaign’s statistical wizards—and what has attracted less notice in election postmortems—was Clinton’s performance with college-educated whites. Before the election, conventional wisdom held that Clinton would become the first Democrat to break Republicans’ longtime hold over that cohort. Instead, they came home to Trump. When combined with depressed turnout in the groups Clinton needed to carry, it was enough to eke out wins in key swing states. Clinton dominated Trump in affluent suburbs but came up short in the middle ground between Scarsdale and Brexit America. The defeat was not only about voters Trump stole from Clinton; it was about voters she couldn’t steal from him.
The Next Democratic Party 3
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