How I missed the signs of a Trump win: Bill Sternberg
The clues were there all along. They should have made me question the polls.
How to explain Donald Trump’s stunning victory? Looking back, several real-world clues should have caused me to question the supposedly sophisticated models that pointed to a comfortable Hillary Clinton win.
Start with the July day I spent in Stark County, Ohio — long a bellwether in presidential elections — while the Republicans were having their convention in Cleveland.
At a Greek restaurant in Canton, I talked to an 83-year-old businessman named Don Leuchtag about the campaign. Like a lot of the diners, he wasn’t pleased that out of all the people in America, his choice had come down to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Don was torn. He didn’t trust Clinton for a minute. Trump was offending a lot of people and selling a “pipe dream” about walling off America from immigrants and imports.
I checked back with Don shortly before the election to see what he had decided. He emailed me on Election Day. “In the end I held my nose and voted for Trump,” he reported, because Bill and Hillary Clinton seem to believe that the rules don’t apply to them. “I know Trump is an unknown card, but maybe that’s what we need,” he added. “We will not solve our major problems under the current people in office.”
As Don Leuchtag goes, I thought, so goes Stark County. So it did. (Trump beat Clinton in the county by 17 percentage points; in 2012, President Obama and Mitt Romney were virtually tied there.) As Stark County went, so went Ohio. (Trump won the state by more than 8 percentage points; in 2012, Obama won by 2 points.) And as Ohio went, so went the nation. (No Republican, Trump included, has ever captured the White House without winning the Buckeye State.)
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With the benefit of hindsight, that day in Stark County provided other signals about the underlying forces driving the election.
Sitting at another table at the Athens restaurant was a white Canton police officer who was unhappy with Clinton’s support of the Black Lives Matter movement, a reminder of the racial tensions never far from the surface in America.
Another customer, Patrick Rimke, 64, started our conversation by mentioning something he had read that morning on Breitbart, the pro-Trump website. His comment confirmed that even older voters were bypassing traditional news media in favor of partisan news sources stoking anti-establishment fervor. In fact, Breitbart’s chairman, Stephen Bannon, would soon become CEO of the Trump campaign. Trump was appealing to “people who are fed up,” said Rimke.
After lunch, I headed for North Canton, home to the massive brick factory where Hoover vacuum cleaners used to be manufactured. Hoover and later owners had shifted thousands of jobs to Texas, Mexico and ultimately China.
The union hall across Main Street from the mostly vacant plant was about to close down for good. I asked one of the last people there, Jean Rice, who or what she blamed. “Probably NAFTA and bad trade deals,” she replied, echoing Trump’s message on the campaign trail.
When friends and associates back home in deep-blue Maryland asked how Trump could possibly have won the Republican nomination, and whether he had a shot November, I’d take out my smartphone and show them a photo of the former Hoover plant.
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Sure enough, Trump’s improbable path to victory sliced straight through the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin and their counties flush with white, working-class voters.
My final clue that an upset might be in the making came from a working-class Hispanic woman I know. A few days before the election, I asked her how she planned to vote. Considering Trump’s denigration of Mexican immigrants and a Latina beauty queen, I presumed she would be firmly and enthusiastically in the Clinton camp. But she said she was undecided, concerned that Clinton might end up in jail if elected. Her chauvinistic husband, she added, didn’t think a woman should be president.
And sure enough, surveys of people after they voted suggested that Trump did far better than expected among Hispanics, about as well as Mitt Romney did in 2012.
Anecdotal evidence? Absolutely. But, after this year’s unexpected outcome, who are you going to believe? Pollsters, or your own eyes?
Bill Sternberg is editor of the Editorial Page of USA TODAY. Follow him on Twitter: @bsternbe
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