Trump’s win is history repeating itself

“No, I didn’t get to vote today. I received my mail-in but I didn’t get it mailed back in time. But I think there’re enough smart people here to make the right choice.” As a female, college-educated, junior executive at a television station in Maryland, Chelsea was squarely in Hillary Clinton’s target demographic but evidently she didn’t feel the urgency. She should have.

A few hours later, it is clear there were not enough smart people to make the right choice. At 2am Wednesday morning, Donald J Trump had pulled off one of the greatest surprises in electoral history. Chelsea updated her Facebook status: “Ah fuck. I'm pissed... with Trump in charge, I am legit afraid for our country's safety.”

How did it happen? Why did nobody foresee this eventuality? How could the Clinton’s campaign war chest of $1.3bn, pitted against Trump’s “mere” $795m, not swing the result? How could a campaign supported by all major newspapers not win the election?

As Karl Marx quipped, history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Historically, this election is reminiscent of the 1948 contest when the Democrat President Harry S Truman defied the polls and won a surprise victory against the Republican candidate Thomas Dewey—and two other contenders, the populist “Dixiecrat” Strom Thurmond and the left-leaning Henry Wallace.

Gallup and other pollsters had relied on telephone polls, which showed an overwhelming lead for Dewey. But they had not taken into account that, at the time, only middle-class voters—the demographic that normally votes Republican—had telephones. Hence, potential Democratic voters, who could not afford them, were systematically excluded. The same mistake may have been made in 2016. Nowadays, white working-class voters—the demographic that voted overwhelmingly for Trump—do not have landlines any more. The reliance on telephone polling put Hillary Clinton ahead. Polls carried out via the internet, such as those conducted by the company Rasmussen, were more likely to show Trump in front.

There are other parallels with 1948. Back then, Truman conducted a whistlestop tour across America instead of a targeted campaign. The received wisdom was that his campaign was doomed. The same was said of Trump, with his lack of a “ground operation” deemed a fatal flaw by the media. Like Truman in 1948, Trump was right—and the journalists were wrong.

A search for explanations has landed on filmmaker Michael Moore’s theory “The Last Stand of the Angry White Man." Moore pinpointed these men’s fears: “There is a sense that the power has slipped out of their hands, that their way of doing things is no longer how things are done.” In his documentary Michael Moore in TrumpLand, he explained how Clinton—and the Republican establishment candidates—lost because they were out of touch with working-class voters, the ones who work for low wages and without the prospect of owning a property or paying off their credit card debt.

Billy Cross, a cult hero and a musician who played with Bob Dylan, offered a similar explanation. “You want to know why this happened? Globalization and the inability of government, or rather the willingness of government to allow multinational corporations to run the show. Trump could have been anyone. We just got unlucky with this one but I truly understand why these people voted the way they did.”

Of course, the Democrats have plenty of excuses, and some of them are justifiable.  Earlier this year, a federal appeals court in North Carolina pointed out that the Republican-enacted voter identification law targeted African-Americans with “almost surgical precision.” Moreover, it is easy to blame the FBI’s decision to reopen the inquiry into Clinton’s emails. But these explanations overlook the fundamental flaw in the Democratic campaign: the candidate. The private email server, the close association with Wall Street, and close to 30 years in politics all added to the negative perception that Clinton was an ultimate insider.

“Hilary Clinton is so hatable,” read a text message from someone I know called Michele, a nice, middle-aged, middle-class woman from Indiana. She organises academic conferences, travels abroad—and votes for Trump. The hatred that she expressed sealed the political fate of Hillary Rodham Clinton.