The publication Politico reports that the 2016 Donald Trump election was the most “anti” election ever, and that it exposed the ignorance of the political class about real America.
Politico reports in its piece “America’s Most ‘Anti’ Election Ever“:
On almost every level—right up to the bizarre early morning ending, with Clinton winning the popular vote while losing the electoral vote and the White House to Trump—the voting on Tuesday exposed how little we really knew ourselves as Americans, and how little the supposed political professionals knew about their jobs. Almost no one in the expert class got the projections right: Hispanics in Florida alarmed by Trump came out in record numbers but not enough to counter the white working class, who were alarmed by four more years of the Clintons; educated, multicultural millennials in North Carolina might power the state’s growing economy but they were overwhelmed by older voters fearful of illegal immigrants; black voters in Philadelphia didn’t love Clinton more than the displaced steelworkers hated the people like her who dealt away their jobs to foreign countries. In the end, Trump gathered a coalition of the angry that added up to more votes than Clinton could pull together by demonizing him as a crazed enemy of the establishment.
Politico reports that Clinton was seen as the candidate of the status quo:
Almost no one went to sleep Tuesday night, not for a long time. No one who realized how badly they had misread the temper of the country. No one—especially the establishment types—who could see just how utterly divided the nation was, that the reaction against the status quo was far deeper than they thought. That in fact Trump, for all his personal flaws and foibles, had read more accurately than Clinton the distress of what used to be known as America’s industrial middle class, which had watched helplessly and with growing rage as both political parties sacrificed working-class jobs and futures to a gauzy economic dream called globalization and open borders over the past three decades. That reaction was expressed in the overall vote: Many voters found Trump personally objectionable, even unqualified in any traditional sense; but they also found Clinton an unacceptable continuation of that hateful status quo. In the end, voters on both sides felt forced to vouch for candidates they believed in much less than they despised the alternative.