Nobody saw it coming. Not the media. Certainly not Hillary
Clinton. Not even Donald Trump’s team of data scientists, holed up
in their San Antonio headquarters 1,800 miles from Trump Tower, were
predicting this outcome. But the scientists picked up
disturbances—like falling pressure before a hurricane—that others
weren’t seeing. It was the beginning of the storm that would deliver
Trump to the White House.
Flash back three weeks, to Oct. 18. The Trump campaign’s internal
election simulator, the “Battleground Optimizer Path to Victory,”
showed Trump with a 7.8 percent chance of winning. That’s because
his own model had him trailing in most of the states that would
decide the election, including the pivotal state of Florida—but only
by a small margin. And in some states, such as Virginia, he was
winning, even though no public poll agreed.
Trump’s numbers were different, because his analysts, like Trump
himself, were forecasting a fundamentally different electorate than
other pollsters and almost all of the media: older, whiter, more
rural, more populist. And much angrier at what they perceive to be
an overclass of entitled elites. In the next three weeks, Trump
channeled this anger on the stump, at times seeming almost unhinged.
“A vote for Hillary is a vote to surrender our government to
public corruption, graft, and cronyism that threatens the survival
of our constitutional system itself,” Trump told an Arizona crowd on
Oct. 29. “What makes us exceptional is that we are a nation of laws
and that we are all equal under those laws. Hillary’s corruption
shreds the principle on which our nation was founded.”
His hyperbole and crassness drew broad condemnation from the
media and political elite, who interpreted his anger as an
acknowledgment that he was about to lose. But rather than alienate
his gathering army, Trump’s antipathy fed their resolve.
He had an unwitting ally. “Hillary Clinton was the perfect foil
for Trump’s message,” says Steve Bannon, his campaign chief
executive officer. “From her e-mail server, to her lavishly paid
speeches to Wall Street bankers, to her FBI problems, she
represented everything that middle-class Americans had had enough
of.”
Trump’s analysts had detected this upsurge in the electorate even
before FBI Director James Comey delivered his Oct. 28 letter to
Congress announcing that he was reopening his investigation into
Clinton’s e-mails. But the news of the investigation accelerated the
shift of a largely hidden rural mass of voters toward Trump.
Inside his campaign, Trump’s analysts became convinced that even
their own models didn’t sufficiently account for the strength of
these voters. “In the last week before the election, we undertook a
big exercise to reweight all of our polling, because we thought that
who [pollsters] were sampling from was the wrong idea of who the
electorate was going to turn out to be this cycle,” says Matt
Oczkowski, the head of product at London firm Cambridge Analytica
and team leader on Trump’s campaign. “If he was going to win this
election, it was going to be because of a Brexit-style mentality and
a different demographic trend than other people were seeing.”
Trump’s team chose to focus on this electorate, partly because it
was the only possible path for them. But after Comey, that movement
of older, whiter voters became newly evident. It’s what led Trump’s
campaign to broaden the electoral map in the final two weeks and
send the candidate into states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and
Michigan that no one else believed he could win (with the exception
of liberal filmmaker Michael Moore, who deemed them “Brexit
states”). Even on the eve of the election Trump’s models predicted
only a 30 percent likelihood of victory.
The message Trump delivered to those voters was radically
different from anything they would hear from an ordinary Republican:
a bracing screed that implicated the entire global power
structure—the banks, the government, the media, the guardians of
secular culture—in a dark web of moral and intellectual corruption.
And Trump insisted that he alone could fix it.
In doing so, Trump knit together a worldview, frequently
propounded by Bannon, that the U.S. was on the cusp of joining the
right-wing populist uprisings that have swept across Europe. It was
Trump who featured Nigel Farage, the champion of the United
Kingdom’s Brexit campaign, at a Mississippi stadium rally and Trump
who became the American embodiment of that sentiment. “It was
basically the game plan from the very first day I arrived,” says
Bannon.
Trump’s election represents a jarring realignment of American
politics. It delivered a rebuke to GOP leaders such as House Speaker
Paul Ryan, even as it cast Democrats into the wilderness. It could
render large swaths of the GOP agenda inoperative. But we really
don’t know yet.
Long before election night, Trump’s data operatives, in
particular those contracted from Cambridge Analytica, understood
that his voters were different. And to better understand how they
differed from Ryan-style Republicans, they set off to study them.
The firm called these Trump supporters “disenfranchised new
Republicans”: younger than traditional party loyalists and less
likely to live in metropolitan areas. They share Bannon’s populist
spirit and care more than other Republicans about three big issues:
law and order, immigration, and wages.
They also harbored a deep contempt for the reigning political
establishment in both parties, along with a desire to return the
country to happier times. Trump was the key that fit in this lock.
“Trump is fundamentally a populist,” says Bannon. “He’s the leader
of a populist uprising. But he’s also an enormously successful
entrepreneur who succeeded in real estate, media, and branding.” The
voters who elected Trump, he says, wish to partake in this story of
American success but not destroy the American system of government.
“This is not the French Revolution,” says Bannon. “They destroyed
the basic institutions of their society and changed their form of
government. What Trump represents is a restoration—a restoration of
true American capitalism and a revolution against state-sponsored
socialism. Elites have taken all the upside for themselves and
pushed the downside to the working- and middle-class Americans.”
According to Cambridge’s analysis, these Trump backers
subordinate the standard conservative Republican priorities,
especially social and cultural issues such as abortion and guns,
which Trump largely ignored during the campaign, and cutting Social
Security and Medicare spending, which he vowed to preserve. Trump
got elected by outlining a worldview that reflects these
priorities—even though many of them are sharply at odds with those
of Ryan and the Republican leaders that Trump has displaced.
Trump’s primary challenge as president, since he’ll need
congressional support, will be to synthesize his brand of populist
Republicanism with the diminished, yet still powerful, version
espoused by leaders like Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell. One way to do this may be with a kind of free-market
capitalism to which many conservatives pay lip service but rarely do
much to bring about. “Those elites [Trump rails against] are
represented in Washington by a bevy of lobbyists,” says Bannon.
“Crony capitalism has gotten out of control. Trump saw this. The
American people saw this. And they have risen up to smash it.
Ordinary people want to make sure we have an evenhanded system
that’s transparent and accountable and takes their interests into
mind. And they want to share in the rewards.”
Throughout October, the surge of early ballots from these voters
grew so strong that Oczkowski’s team members decided to reweight
their surveys to account for the possibility that the electorate
might look much different than even they had imagined. Part of it,
Oczkowski concedes, was wishful thinking—an attempt to conjure up an
electorate that would favor his candidate just enough to illuminate
a plausible path to victory. “Older white voters were returning
early ballots at an enormous clip,” he says. “So either older people
were voting early because of enthusiasm or this was a trend that
would carry through to election night.”
After adjusting their models in late October, Trump’s numbers
immediately shot up across the Rust Belt—2 points in Michigan, 2.5
points in Pennsylvania. Suddenly, the Battleground Optimizer showed
a way to win.
The trend did, indeed, materialize at the polls. Trump made some
of his biggest gains over Mitt Romney’s performance in small
Midwestern counties, which allowed him to sweep Rust Belt states
that hadn’t voted Republican since the 1980s. And on election night,
in the critical state of Florida—the key to any Trump path to 270
electoral votes—the rural vote spiked 10 percentage points higher
than the campaign’s optimistic scenarios had assumed. Taken as a
whole, Trump’s electoral map represents a powerful, largely rural
backlash against a country where wealth and power have increasingly
accrued to the cities.
“No one could have anticipated the exceptional concentration of
wealth and talent in just a handful of urban centers. Class is
etched into location, and the way location defines your economic
opportunities—but the brew is combustible,” says Richard Florida, a
professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management
and author of The Rise of the Creative Class. “It’s really
the bypassing of a way of life, and they know it. And no one is
standing up for them.”
Trump did. And in doing so, he appealed to some people who were
once Democrats or descended from New Deal Democratic families. In
Rust Belt strongholds like Mahoning County, Ohio, these voters would
explain that Trump alone seemed to register their complaints in a
political world that was otherwise deaf to their concerns. “These
were disenfranchised voters who no party has spoken to for several
elections,” says Oczkowski.
Back in May, speaking to Bloomberg Businessweek about
how he intended to
remake the Republican Party, Trump laid out precisely the
message that would activate these voters in November. “Five, 10
years from now—[it will be a] different party,” he said. “You’re
going to have a worker’s party. A party of people that haven’t had a
real wage increase in 18 years, that are angry. What I want to do, I
think cutting Social Security is a big mistake for the Republican
Party. And I know it’s a big part of the budget. Cutting it the
wrong way is a big mistake, and even cutting it [at all].”
Having sent Trump to the White House, this newly activated
coalition of white rural voters will now expect him to deliver on
their priorities. Trump is, of course, a wildly unlikely tribune for
rural America. He’ll be the first president since Richard Nixon to
live in a high-rise when elected. His closest tie to the
agricultural economy is Trump Winery. And the economic policy he
espoused most vigorously was his desire for more infrastructure
spending, which he illustrated in strikingly metropolitan (and
luxurious) terms. “You land at LaGuardia, you land at Kennedy, LAX,
and you come in from Dubai, China—you see these incredible airports,
and you land, we’ve become a third-world country,” he said this
fall.
It remains a mystery how Trump will govern. No president in
living memory has as little political experience or has put forward
fewer details of the policies he intends to pursue. But it’s
possible to see in Trump’s coalition of voters and the issues they
care about the broad contours of a new Republican politics that’s
more populist, more rural in its character (and less beholden to
Wall Street), and oriented toward a class of Americans—not all of
them conservatives or even Republicans—whose concerns weren’t
addressed by the Democratic and Republican parties that both
crumbled on Nov. 8.