From Caribbean News Service
NEW YORK, Nov 09 2016 – When the US election race became a referendum on what it means to be an American, Hillary Clinton thought she had victory in her sights.
But voters had a different idea than the wily veteran of over four decades of American political life. In far greater numbers than expected, voters rejected her in favor of Donald Trump, an erratic tycoon whose mean-spirited campaign attracted unprecedented criticism for a major-party nominee. In the end, Clinton’s fraught history—symbolized by the baroque investigations into her private e-mail server—overcame whatever advantages her centrist agenda, critiques of Trump’s outrages, and well-funded, professionally run campaign could give her.
Soon after Pennsylvania’s 20 votes in the electoral college were called for Trump by the Associated Press early Wednesday (Nov. 9), it was clear the path for a Clinton victory had disappeared.
Indeed, Trump’s bet that white voters would turn out and surprise the pundits seems correct: Rural white voters in states that Democrats were counting on turned out to deliver for Trump, while Clinton could not find the language to win them over. Fears that she had not campaigned hard enough to defend the Democratic firewall late in the race proved true, as Trump outperformed the polls to win a series of close victories in the midwestern states, in addition to taking the key swing states of Florida and North Carolina, where Clinton failed to do as well as president Barack Obama did in 2012.
Trump owes his victory to the polarization of American politics—the final difference in the vote will likely be less than two percentage points. But enough voters ignored warnings about
Trump’s threat to US democracy to propel a man who embodies some of America’s most deep-set historical vices to the presidency. Why? He promises a return to a fantastic past where the social and economic turmoil of the 21st century can be avoided.
It does not seem likely he can deliver on those promises, but voters appear all too used to politicians who don’t keep their promises. White Americans heard Trump’s voice, not Clinton’s, and came out to make him president.
From Caribbean News Service
