Unthinkable...

Five takeaways from an unthinkable night

Donald Trump defied all expectations and rode a white wave to the White House.

By Glenn Thrush

Anger trumped hope.

Donald Trump’s astonishing victory over a heavily-favored Hillary Clinton on Tuesday is the greatest upset in the modern history of American elections – convulsing the nation’s political order in ways so profound and disruptive its impact can’t even be guessed at.

Donald Trump was too crass, too much of a brazen sexist, too much a blustery orange-maned joke, too ill-informed about the operations of a country he wanted to run, too much of a threat to markets and the security establishment – too pessimistic -- to ever win the White House. Underestimated at every turn, spurned by his own party, the reality-show star was able to defeat a better-funded better-organized Hillary Clinton by surfing a tsunami of working-class white rage that her army of numbers crunchers somehow missed.

Hillary Clinton had fully expected to make history when her motorcade sped from Chappaqua to Manhattan, had planned fireworks to celebrate her being elected the first female president in the 240-year-history of the republic. Instead her legacy is one of tragedy, futility and squandered opportunities – proof that a conventional candidate can do practically everything by the numbers (win debates, raise the most cash, assemble the greatest data and voter outreach effort in history) and still fall to a movement impelled by raw emotion, not calculation.

When you wake up on Wednesday morning the United States will be a different place.

The markets will tank, but they will recover. World leaders will shudder, but they will adjust as they always do. Half of the country that viewed him as a dangerous demagogue, even a neo-fascist, before the election will wonder, probably for the first time in their lives, if their country is the same one they were born in.

His tens of millions of inspired supporters will awake to a hopeful new dawn, content in having finally torn the rotten establishment they had long loathed, and wondering how he plans to make their America great again.

And in about two months Donald John Trump – the man who has said he’s smarter than any of the men who will now be his generals – will be wrapping his fingers around the nation’s nuclear football.

As a French diplomat said Tuesday, reflecting on Trump, the stunning Brexit vote and the rise of right-wing parties in Western Europe: “This is a world we do not know anymore.”

Can he do anything to calm a divided, terrified country together? Will he try? There is real fear in many parts of the country tonight. Trump’s remarkable victory was gained by waging total war on his enemies, lukewarm allies, the “dishonest” media and the very idea that he had to be civil or respect the norms of American politics.

Trump himself had trouble believing he could actually pull the thing off (an aide told CNN early Tuesday that he would need a “miracle” to win. So his final rallies had a screw-it quality, returning to a provocative pattern of his underdog days – calling out the “rigged game” he seemed certain to lose and goading his supporters into a state of fury that made dissenters and reporters feel endangered.

There was a time, earlier in the campaign, when he refused to join his backers in chanting “Lock her up!” Toward the end, he was joining them in that chant.

Democratic consultant Stephanie Cutter, who worked on President Obama’s 2012 campaign, described how many Clinton supporters feel: “He’s about rejecting immigrants, he’s about keeping your foot down on people, women.”

Clinton, in her upbeat closing message had emphasized that she would be a president for all Americans, and would try to reach out to Trump’s voters; he never reciprocated and the demographic groups that backed her overwhelmingly rejected him with fewer than 7 percent of blacks backing his candidacy, under 25 percent of Latinos earning his vote and a gender gap that led women to support Clinton in 10 to 20 percent greater numbers.

The question now is whether he will do anything meaningful to reach out to them – to assure Democrats, women, blacks and Hispanics that he views them as co-equal members of the American family. And will they believe him?

Hillary Clinton is a footnote in history. As Tuesday night dragged into Wednesday morning, as the thousands of would-be revelers turned into marble-eyed mourners, some of the younger women in the crowd looked up at the roof of the joyless Javits Center, its glass ceiling very much intact.

The shocking result ended a lot of dreams, and one of the most extraordinary and extraordinarily polarizing careers in American politics.

At 69 – having suffered the most humbling upset imaginable to a deeply, nearly fatally flawed opponent believed to be the only Republican contender she could actually defeat – is spent as political force. Clinton will forever be known as one of the worst closers in political history, a woman who was never capable of selling a wary public on herself, on account of her own shortcomings and paranoia or perhaps as a result of a sexism so ingrained in American culture women as well as men suffered from it.

The good news for Democrats: Clinton is now out of the way, clearing the road for a new generation of leadership with far less baggage. Despite her loss, the Democratic Party’s ideas remain more popular than the Republican platform on global warming, social issues, infrastructure spending, taxes and even immigration, Trump’s signature issue.

The bad news: What would have happened if the party had nominated Bernie Sanders – the 74-year-old socialist who Clinton dismissed as unelectable?

White voters finally found someone who spoke their language. The most telling comment of the entire election came when a pollster buttonholed an early Trump supporter, and asked her how she could possibly believe in a novice rabble-rouser with no distinct plans other than a slogan on a red hat. “We know his goal is to make America great again,” she said. “It’s on his hat.”

That wasn’t a small thing. Hillary Clinton had the whiff of Ivy League arrogance and spoke with the technocratic complexity of the Federal Register, coming across as a liberal given to lecturing Americans not inspiring them. For all his flaws, Trump speaks with gut-punch directness and an earthy, sledgehammer humor that succinctly channeled their anger.

Trump made his fame as a reality TV star but, in reality, he speaks the language of right-wing talk radio, which reflects the raw rage of working-class whites (who still make up about a third of the country’s population) who feel squeezed by globalization, left out of the Starbucks-and-Snapchat prosperity of the coastal elites and really, truly need to have America be great again. It’s noteworthy that Clinton and her staff circulated academic studies documenting the lifespan decline of poorer whites – and Clinton’s communications director Jennifer Palmieri, pointing to a map of the country in her office, ran a sympathetic finger over Appalachia and promised that Clinton would work hard on behalf of them after the election.

But Clinton, opting for the Obama strategy of focusing on maximizing turnout among her core constituencies, never made a serious pitch to working-class white men (who backed Trump by a record 48 percent margin) and she paid a terrible, terrible price.

The Clinton campaign got their numbers wrong. Forget the public polling of the election – which was all over the map, but backed an aggregated surmise that Clinton had a 70 to 85 percent chance of winning the presidency on the eve of the election.

When I emailed a senior Clinton strategist for their internal polling data on Tuesday morning, I was told her lead was in the 4-to-5 percent range and that the campaign was feeling “very good” about their prospects. There were, I was told, internal tensions within the campaign over the dissemination of polling data and voter-file analytics, but there appears to have been some major miscalculation that blinded her team to the massive turnout of white voters in exurbs and rural areas in the Midwest and Florida.

Clinton’s vaunted ground game was supposed to give her a one-to-two point advantage, and while it helped boost turnout in Hispanic areas (and brought some underperforming African American neighborhoods up to a respectable level) Brooklyn failed to account for the wave of Trump-stoked anger that rendered their painstakingly created model of the electorate so off-base.

James Comey is Public Enemy Number One (To Democrats). The evidence is mixed, but Clinton staffers and many Democrats blame the FBI director’s unprecedented announcement, 11 days before the election, for throwing the race to a man they deem unfit to serve in the nation’s highest office. Clinton’s internal numbers tanked in the days after the director announced he would examine thousands of new emails found on the laptop of Anthony Weiner, the husband of Clinton’s aide-de-camp Huma Abedin. “He f---d us, and he f----ed the country,” a senior Clinton campaign official told me late Tuesday.

The incident – to Trump’s delight – rekindled doubts about her character and trustworthiness. And even his announcement, on the Sunday before Election Day, that the emails were deemed innocuous, couldn’t save her.