The following article by Stan Greenberg is cross-posted from Democracy Corps:

America is being shaped irreversibly by a growing new majority of millennials, racial minorities, immigrants and secular people. So how did the presidential election produce such a reactionary result, surprising all the pollsters, including me? “Shy” Tories and Brexiters apparently upended Britain. Did “shy” Trump voters upend America?

To understand what happened, you have to start with the demand for “change”.

The elites, academics, pundits and even President Barack Obama look at the US and see a dynamic country that is economically and culturally ascendant. But America is also a country of deepening inequality and growing political corruption. Most people struggle with declining or stagnant incomes, while CEOs and billionaires have taken most of the gains in income and wealth. More than anything, people are angry that the game appears to be rigged by corporate special interests.

Donald Trump managed to become the Republicans’ candidate of change by attacking crony capitalism, trade deals favoured by big business, the billionaire SuperPacs that fund the candidates and Hillary Clinton’s ties to Wall Street. That allowed him to ride the support of the Tea Party and white people without a four-year college degree all the way to the nomination.

But the cry for change coming from the new liberal American majority was just as intense. Bernie Sanders’ call for a “revolution” produced landslide victories with millennials and white Democrats without a four-year degree. This progress nearly allowed him to contest the convention. No less than Trump, Sanders attacked Clinton for her Wall Street speeches and SuperPacs.

Clinton achieved her most impressive leads in the polls when she, Sanders and Elizabeth Warren embraced after the primaries and after her convention speech that demanded an economy that worked for all, not just the well connected. She emerged with her biggest lead when she closed the debates with a “mission” to “grow an economy, to make it fairer, to make it work for everyone”, and “stand up for families against special interests, against corporations”.

That led many more voters to see Clinton as standing for the American middle class, which most working people aspire to, and being better on the economy, truthful and willing to stand up to special interests.

Working as a pollster for Bill Clinton in 1992 and Al Gore in 2000, I watched voters settle into their decisions immediately after the debates. Trump and Hillary Clinton were both talking about change, and Clinton was winning.

But then the campaign’s close was disrupted by a flood of hacked emails, whose release was linked to Russia, intended to show that friends of Bill Clinton were using the Clinton Foundation to enrich the former president, and then by FBI director James Comey’s letter to Congress announcing the reopening of his investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.

This allowed Trump to close his campaign with a call to “drain the swamp” and reject “the Clintons’ big business trade deals that decimated so many communities”.

The Clinton campaign fought back. It attacked Comey for his unprecedented intervention and then used its advertising muscle to shift the spotlight from Clinton to Trump. Its ads running right through the very last weekend showed Trump at his worst. By then, nobody could remember that Hillary Clinton was a candidate with bold economic plans who demanded that government should work for working people and the middle class, not corporations. She was no longer a candidate of change.

As President Obama campaigned for her at the end, Clinton urged voters to “build on the progress”. She closed her campaign with a call for continuity and incrementalism. That turn is why the polls turned out to be so wrong.

This was a “change election” for the new American majority too, and that late turn by Clinton produced disappointing turnout among Hispanics, African Americans, single women and millennials. The African Americans’ greatly diminished turnout in Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee likely gave the states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin to Trump.

Clinton’s total vote fell well below Obama’s in 2008 and 2012.

The new American majority really did make up the majority of voters for the first time, and they helped Clinton win the popular vote. But their late pull back upended the pollsters’ key assumptions about turnout.

The other change voters, the white men without a four-year college degree, did their part too. They were never shy about their support for Trump, but concentrated in rural and smaller towns in the rust belt, they became even more consolidated in their support for him, put out lawn signs and turned out to vote in unprecedented numbers. Our polls showed him with a 36-point lead before the conventions. But further consolidation and higher-than-expected turnout gave Trump an unimaginable 49-point lead and 72% of the vote among this group. The Trump vote was never shy, just not fully consolidated.

And don’t forget the non-college-educated white women who, after all, are a majority of the white working class. Through most of the campaign, Trump’s disrespect of women and Clinton’s plans for change allowed her to compete with him for their support. She trailed by just nine points after the debates. But with Clinton mostly attacking Trump and no longer talking about change, the women shifted, almost unnoticed but dramatically, to Trump. He won them by 27 points, a nine-point bigger margin than that achieved by Romney in 2012.

These late turns allowed Trump to win Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania by a percentage point.

America has changed, but this change election produced a reactionary result.

The following Democracy Corps memo, written by Stan Greenberg and Nancy Zdunkewicz  for The Roosevelt Institute, is cross-posted from a DCorps release:

Read more…

“Hillary Clinton didn’t just win the popular vote. She won it by a substantial margin…By the time all the ballots are counted, she seems likely to be ahead by more than 2 million votes and more than 1.5 percentage points, according to my Times colleague Nate Cohn. She will have won by a wider percentage margin than not only Al Gore in 2000 but also Richard Nixon in 1968 and John F. Kennedy in 1960.” — from David Leonhardt’s New York Times op-ed, “Clinton’s Substantial Popular-Vote Win.”

“Trump called Electoral College a ‘disaster’ in 2012 tweet,” reports William Cummings at USA Today.

As for Electoral College reform and the difficulties posed by GOP domination of state legislatures, Ed Kilgore notes, “As it happens, there is a way around the constitutional-amendment process and its small-state veto power: the National Popular Vote initiative. It is an interstate compact whereby states agree to cast their electoral votes for the popular-vote winner. It becomes effective once states controlling 270 electoral votes agree to it. So it basically nullifies the Electoral College without abolishing it…At present, 11 jurisdictions (ten states plus the District of Columbia) representing 61 percent of the electoral votes needed to make it effective have signed onto the agreement. Earlier momentum has been stalled by the current dominance of state governments by Republicans, who (rightfully, it would seem) perceive themselves as benefiting from the status quo. It’s a good reason, in addition to such obvious considerations as redistricting and the considerable power of state governments, that Democrats might want to place a real premium on making large gains at the state level in 2018.”

At Alternet Jeremy Sherman takes a look at “How Trump Won—and How Candidates Will Win From Now On: The election was not decided on issues, values, character, scandal or national direction, but on confidence.” Sherman argues “Trump postured as the infinitely confident candidate. Though most of us thought he would lose, he campaigned throughout as though he were infallible…He acted as though he believed in his own supreme power to interpret reality correctly and to do whatever it takes to bring reality to heel under his command…Confidence is what all advertisers sell” He may be on to something here. Raw, relentless confidence may be worth a couple of  points with the GOP’s low-information voters, Ted Cruz and other conservatives have referenced.

In his November 11 NYT op-ed, “Where the Democrats Go From Here,” Bernie Sanders argues “I believe strongly that the party must break loose from its corporate establishment ties and, once again, become a grass-roots party of working people, the elderly and the poor. We must open the doors of the party to welcome in the idealism and energy of young people and all Americans who are fighting for economic, social, racial and environmental justice. We must have the courage to take on the greed and power of Wall Street, the drug companies, the insurance companies and the fossil fuel industry.” Great points, all,  and I think most Democrats believe that. But our messaging and image usually gets smothered by Republican repetition of the Big Lie — that Democrats are more elitist than them. We’ve got to figure out how to overcome their messaging edge.

Frank Bruni’s NYT column, “The Democrats Screwed Up” makes a persuasive argument that Democrats have failed to provide younger, more dynamic leaders needed to win elections, relying instead on old-timers who provoke more yawns than excitement. Bruni doesn’t deal with possible solutions, like investing more in candidate recruitment and training. Some Democratic organizations and progressive institutions like the Center fo the American Woman in Poltiics, NALEO and Emily’s List have modest leadership development programs. But the scale and funding should cerainly be expanded across the board.

Maybe a little more precision is needed than this retread. How about “It’s the infrastructure, stupid” for a 2018 midterms mobilizing theme? Trump has made some vague infrastructure program noises, and Dems might gain some leverage calling out Republican senators and house members who block it.

Abby Phillip, John Wagner and Anne Gearan explain why “A series of strategic mistakes likely sealed Clinton’s fate” at Washingron Post Politics,” and note in a revealing paragraph: “Some Democrats inside and outside of the campaign say that there is little Clinton could have done to stop the slide even if she had spent more time campaigning in Wisconsin and Michigan. The forces­ that caused her loss in the upper Midwest were also at work in places­ where her campaign sent her far more often and invested huge amounts of money, including Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida.”

Worst ‘trial balloon’ ever.

The following article is cross-posted from a Democracy Corps e-blast (website link here):

We are entering a period too awful to contemplate, and James and I thought it important to share our first take on what happened and why. Thankfully, Women’s Voices Women’s Vote Action Fund and the Roosevelt Institute supported this election night survey and critical research on the changing electorate and the economy throughout this cycle that allows us to offer unique perspective. There are extensive findings that we are only just beginning to fully explore and will continue to release to add texture to this complicated outcome. This note focuses on why people voted the way they did and what happened across this very diverse and divided electorate.

First, we believe Hillary Clinton and Democrats could have won this election if Democratic base voters turned out at higher numbers and appealed to enough white working class voters, particularly women, to win the Rust Belt.

Second, it should not be ignored that some of the reason for Trump’s upset is malicious interference by the Russian Federation and their allies at WikiLeaks, as well as reckless politics by the F.B.I. in the post-debate period. Battling back against this media coverage forced Clinton to take her foot off the pedal. She was unable to end the campaign turning out her voters by talking about the change they were demanding.

Democracy Corps’ research for WVWVAF and Roosevelt has consistently shown the importance of putting forward a progressive economic agenda and message of change to motivate a changing electorate, reach out to persuadable voters, and consolidate the Democratic base. In our polling we found that Hillary Clinton gains her biggest leads when she is calling for an economy that works for everyone, not just the wealthy and well-connected, and puts forward bold policies to end trickle-down economics. Debate dial-meter testing for WVWVAF found voters became more enthusiastic about Clinton and viewed her more positively when she went after Trump for proposing massive tax-breaks for himself and failed to release his own tax returns. (View our debate dial meter group reporting here and here)

Instead, the campaign closed by attacking Trump and few voters remembered her bold economic plans and the change she was promising. The result was an election where the “New American Majority” did not turnout in anywhere near the numbers expected.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump was on message running on cleaning-up the political system, attacking Clinton as a tool of big business and Wall Street, and offering a reprieve from bad trade deals that cost American jobs and greater public investment. For those who voted for – or considered – Trump, his vow to repeal Obamacare and keep liberals off the Supreme Court were the most important reasons to cast their ballots. But nearly as important were his economic plans and how his business success prepared him to create jobs.

Trump’s hard-line immigration stance ranked fifth and may be an overstated factor in the outcome of the election. Even a plurality of Republicans say that “Immigrants today strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents.”

The arguments for Clinton that won her support were her experience, her temperament and suitability to serve as Commander in Chief, her capacity to govern for Americans of all backgrounds and her support for women on equal pay, the right to choose and funding Planned Parenthood. As we saw, that was her closing argument. Her plans to grow the economy by taxing the rich and investing in the middle class were overshadowed and only rank fifth in voter attention.

The attacks on Trump that registered among those who voted for Clinton and considered her concerned the hateful things he has said about vulnerable minority groups, his disrespect for women, and his inability to handle the nuclear codes given his thin-skin.  His plans to cut taxes on the rich, likely himself, and his refusal to release his tax returns scored even lower, and were not elevated enough to make an impression on voters.

Because the Clinton campaign ended up running on her experience, suitability to govern and openness to America’s diversity and women, but not on the economy and change, it is not surprising that the Democrats ended up best on uniting the country and reviving the middle class. Because they did not run on the economy and change, Republicans have a 6-point lead on handling the economy. And while voters questioned Trump’s capacity to serve as Commander in Chief, the GOP has a 10-point lead on keeping the country safe.

On Election Day, millennials and Hispanics – two of the groups that form the Rising American Electorate – were among the least engaged voting blocs, with obvious consequences (only 72 percent of Hispanics and 68 percent of millennials gave the highest rating of significance of this election on a 10-point scale).

Despite all that, the Rising American Electorate did become the majority of the vote for the first time. The groups of minorities, unmarried women and millennials who twice elected President Obama now formed 55 percent of voters, pushed up by the growth of millennials and Hispanics. African American voters held their share of the vote at 12 percent, while unmarried women still fell just short of being one-quarter of the voters. They helped Clinton win the popular vote.

White working class voters played a big part in the very late swing to Trump, particularly in the battleground states. This came in part from further consolidation of white working class male voters and elevated turnout, particularly in the rural areas and small towns in the Rust Belt. We always had Trump performing well here: he held a 36-point lead before the conventions, and in the end, won by 49-points with 72 percent of their vote.

Just as important was the late switch of white working class women. Hillary had been competitive among white non-college women after the debates, pushing Trump’s margin to 7-points.  But the disrupted close to the campaign saw those women move dramatically away, with Trump winning by 26 points, 7-points better than Romney.

These voters thought Trump was raising legitimate working class issues, and with the Clinton campaign mobilizing its diverse base and no longer talking about change, the white working class women moved to the Republicans in many states.

Obviously, we are only beginning to understand this new moment and what it means for progressives. We look forward to sharing the rest of our findings in the coming week.

This survey took place Monday, November 7 – Wednesday November 9, 2016 among 1,300 voters or (on Monday only) those with a high stated intention of voting in 2016.  In addition to a 900 voter base sample, oversamples of 200 Rising American Electorate voters (unmarried women, minorities and millennials) and 200 battleground state voters (AZ, FL, OH, IA, NC, NV, NH, PA, VA, WI) were included. Margin of error for the full sample is +/-3.27 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.  Of the 1,300 respondents, 65 percent were interviewed via cell phone in order to accurately sample the American electorate.

Josh Marshall, editor and publisher of TalkingPointsMemo.com, presents an illuminating exchange of views on the presidential election results between two of the sharpest progressive thinkers, John Judis and Theda Skocpol.

Responding to Judis’s earlier TPM post, “Why Trump Won – And Clinton Lost – And What It Could Mean for the Country and the Parties,” Skocpol writes:

John, your piece is an elegant example of a genre of post-election autopsy that works no better, I fear, than those polling models.

You offer speculative interpretations of exit poll responses (known to be problematic data) presented as margins for various voter blocs in an aggregate national election. A lot of creative argument that HRC was a poor candidate because voters did not hear the economic message you wish she had delivered. Two problems: national polls showed that voters said she was better than Trump on plans for the economy. That is a small problem, however, because virtually no real policy discussion occurred in this election. Second, huger problem: HRC actually won the national aggregate election you are imagining in the TPM piece by a whopping 2.5 million or more votes. If America were what you measure here, she would be President-Elect.

Judis believes that Skocpol underestimates the public opinion reaction to the economic hollowing-out in rust belt states. As Judis writes,

If you look at a map of where the U.S. has lost manufacturing jobs since 2000, the two leading places are Michigan and North Carolina, and not far behind are Ohio, Pennsylvania (especially in the western half), and Indiana – all states that Trump won, and in the case of all but Indiana, states that Democrats campaigned in, and had won in the past. They are states where many of the voters blame trade and runaway shops — two of Trump’s big issues — for the loss of their jobs.

I haven’t seen any polls asking residents of once-thriving, but now depressed former factory towns in the Rust Belt how they feel about the presidential candidates. But Nate Cohn notes further at The Upshot,

Youngstown, Ohio, where Mr. Obama won by more than 20 points in 2012, was basically a draw. Mr. Trump swept the string of traditionally Democratic and old industrial towns along Lake Erie. Counties that supported Mr. Obama in 2012 voted for Mr. Trump by 20 points.

Skocpol is correct that polls show voters liked Clinton’s economic views better and that policy discussion was weak throughout the presidential campaign. But Trump and the GOP nonetheless succeeded in branding in the minds of millions of voters the image of Clinton as a ruling-class elitist, who cozied up to Wall Streeters. I heard some media-driven version of that throughout the long campaign, even in “liberal” media — despite the fact that Clinton supported clear, strong positions favoring Wall St. reform and against off-shoring jobs.

Regardless of how accurate was the meme, it was repeated ad nauseum until a critical mass of persuadable/lazy voters bought it. That’s not to say a majority of white working-class voters believed it. But it sure looks like a lot of them did.

Further, Clinton certainly should have been considered much more “trustworthy” than Trump on these concerns, given both his lengthy track record of screwing workers and his daily whoppers and contradictions. His campaign will hold the Pinnochio record for a long time, but none of his supporters seemed to care much. They wanted their anger at liberal failures vented, and Trump delivered. Never mind the fact that it was almost completely Republican obstruction that prevented any hope of forward progress.

Trump and the Republicans were able to do this by deploying ‘the big lie’ repeatedly. In one of  the most compelling insights of the exchange, Skocpol notes,

Previous work shows that Trump voters are NOT disportionately affected by trade disruptions, factory closings, etc. What is more likely is that these nonmetro areas had organized networks – NRA, Christian Right, some RNC and Koch network/AFP presence – that amplified the right media attacks on HRC nonstop and persuaded many non-college women and some college women in those areas to go for Trump because of the Supreme Court…HRC’s narrow loss was grounded in this absent non-metro infrastructure – and Dem Party losses in elections overall even more so.

There is no question that the Republicans have a louder echo chamber, as Skocpol cites, in their “longstanding natural organized networks” that penetrate into the rust belt and heartland, more extensive, disciplined and cooperative than the Democratic hodgepodge of single-issue constituent groups concentrated in coastal areas. The conservative organizational commitment to meme repetition is enviable, and the 2016 campaign shows the power of it. Repeat the big lie often enough and resistance to it eventually evaporates, especially when it goes unchallenged. It’s a scary phenomenon, and Democrats better find a creative way to address it.

Skocpol’s reminder that “HRC actually won the national aggregate election you are imagining in the TPM piece by a whopping 2.5 million or more votes…If America were what you measure here, she would be President-Elect” may be scant comfort in light of the fact that Clinton lost the electoral college majority. But it is worth repeating every time Trump or his minions try to infer that he has a genuine mandate.

Democrats should leverage the moral advantage that can be gained from reminding the public of the injustice that that the nation-wide popular vote margin, no matter how large, is irrelevant in selecting  America’s chief executive. Two million votes isn’t chicken change, and every Democrat called on to comment should say so until it sticks. It won’t give Dems back the white house; but it could help to prevent a stampede to repeal some Democratic reforms.

The Republicans got off easy in 2000. This time their presidential candidate will lose the popular vote by at least four times Gore’s popular vote margin, and Hillary Clinton’s popular vote edge will be greater than that of both Presidents Nixon and JFK. If Democrats let the public forget that, Trump and the GOP will be emboldened to eradicate all of the hard-won reforms Democrats have achieved in the 21st century — and maybe more.

Like Democrats everywhere, I’ve been suffering through a difficult week. But as a long-time supporter of the Clinton project in Democratic politics, and of the Obama presidency that sustained and extended it in important way, I thought it was time to mark its likely end. And so I did so at New York:

The contrast in the bookend images of the beginning and end of the Clinton presidential campaigns could not be much starker. In 1992, Bill Clinton’s campaign broke a Republican Electoral College lock, and he took office as the leader of “different kind of Democratic Party” — one more in sync with both centrist impulses among white voters. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign broke a Democratic presidential winning streak — though it did maintain a winning streak in the national popular vote.

In 1992, Bill Clinton led a so-called New Democratic movement that represented successful congressional and state and local elected officials impatient with the national party’s fecklessness. In 2016, Hillary Clinton represented a final toehold of Democratic power in Washington, even as the Donkey Party’s strength out in the states reached a low ebb.

The contrasts go on and on. In 1992, Bill Clinton became the first (and, up until now, last) Democratic presidential candidate since 1980 to carry the white working class; his campaign spent a lot of time looking at how to appeal to the “Reagan Democrats” in places like Macomb County, Michigan. On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton’s candidacy was largely done in by a historically poor performance in this same demographic, especially in states like Michigan (she lost Macomb County by more than 10 points).

In 1992, Bill Clinton was the leader of a young, insurgent, policy-oriented branch of his party challenging the “paleoliberals” who were still living in a social democratic wayback machine and the identity politicians who had forgotten how to construct a broadly appealing message. In 2016, Hillary Clinton was the representative of older forces in her party; she left younger voters cold in the primaries — running against a septuagenarian social democrat, no less — and lukewarm in the general election. Her main emotional appeal revolved around her identity as a woman.

In 1992, Bill Clinton was very much on the offensive. In 2016, his wife was largely on the defensive from the beginning to the end of the whole campaign.

This story of decline is not just about the Clintons, of course. Even though he defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries, the Obama administration is usually — quite rightly, I would say — viewed as a continuation of the Clinton tradition in policy and politics. Indeed, the familiar observation that Hillary Clinton was running for “Obama’s third term” this year could quite easily yield to a broader characterization that she was running for a fifth term for the Clinton-Obama brand of center-left politics.

You could certainly see this in her campaign and her government-in-waiting: crammed with the best and brightest of both the Clinton and Obama campaigns and the Clinton and Obama administrations. When the good ship Hillary sank on the evening of November 8, an enormous amount of talent and accumulated experience went into the vasty deep along with her presidential aspirations….

For all of Hillary Clinton’s vast policy chops, and the array of advisers she had at her command, she drifted away from quite a few of the old Clinton family themes. This phenomenon is almost universally attributed to political opportunism — she repudiated the TPP and emphasized a lot of old left-labor policy prescriptions, it was broadly assumed, first to preempt Bernie Sanders’s appeal and then to keep Trump from outflanking Democrats on the “populist” front. But beneath all of the politics was a much more fundamental problem: The whole conception of the relationship between activist government and the private sector the Clinton tradition had maintained just was not credible anymore.

Central to the entire Clintonian New Democratic movement (of which I was a loyal foot soldier for a long time) was the belief that the best way to achieve progressive policy goals was by harnessing and redirecting the wealth that a less-regulated and more-innovative private sector alone could generate. That seemed to work during the late 1990s and sporadically even later. But the economic collapse at the end of the Bush administration and the struggle to head off growing inequality throughout the Obama administration has made the create-then-redistribute model for Democratic economic policy less and less satisfying, while creating a backlash among those who view any Democratic cheerleading for the private sector — especially the financial community — as a de facto act of betrayal signaling a high probability of personal corruption.

As Neil Irwin noted in an especially insightful recent column, even within Hillary Clinton’s policy apparatus there was a steady trend toward abandoning the old Clintonian model and instead focusing on a predistributive economic model that sought to shift wealth from the top to the middle and bottom of the income brackets by capturing more of it for the “masses” at the very beginning — via instruments ranging from high minimum wages and employer mandates to aggressive antitrust action and strong support for collective bargaining. This very different policy emphasis, and with it a more hostile attitude toward the corporate sector, was not just a matter of “shifting to the left” to head off Bernie Sanders; it was an acknowledgement that the old Clinton (and to a large extent Obama) economic strategy had failed substantively and politically.

One way to look at it is that old-school labor-oriented liberalism has finally won its very extended argument with centrists and is ready to reassume leadership of the Democratic Party under the banner of Bernie Sanders or Sherrod Brown. Another way to look at it is that neither wing of the party has some magic formula. And that problem extends beyond economic policy, too. Faced with the aggressively reactionary cultural thematics of the Trump campaign, progressive “populists” often fell into their old habit of condescendingly telling white working-class voters their most fondly cherished beliefs were just neurotic symptoms of their “real” economic class grievances. And as Hillary Clinton’s unfortunate gaffe about the “deplorables” showed, centrists often had little to say to cultural traditionalists other than “Please, hurry up and die off.”

For a very long time, the Clinton/Obama style of policy and politics represented the best politically feasible vehicle progressives had devised for managing an era of enormous economic and cultural change without alienating a majority of the electorate or forgetting the big prize of a fairer and more diverse country. It all seems to be falling apart at the moment, but Democrats really do need to move beyond a choice between the best thinking from the recent or the distant past.

That’s worth remembering before Democrats undertake another “struggle for the soul of the party.”

In the wake of what happened on November 8, Democrats have two questions: (1) How did it happen? and (2) Why did we not realize it was going to happen?

The first question will take a long time to answer. But I took a shot at answering the second at New York right after the results came in:

When something as surprising as Donald Trump’s election to the presidency happens, it is natural to blame the non-messenger: the polls that by-and-large predicted a Clinton victory somewhere in the neighborhood of Barack Obama’s in 2012. And because so much political analysis is based largely or entirely on polls, the entire commentariat — or at least the part that was not overtly cheerleading for Trump — was off, too….

It will take a while to sort through the debris and figure out how so much data and so much smart analysis got it all wrong. But the beginning point has to be that the final popular-vote margin is not going to be that far off from the final polling averages.

Hillary Clinton now leads in the national popular vote. With a lot of mail ballots still drifting in from heavily pro-Clinton states like California and Washington (where mail ballots postmarked by Election Day still count), she is almost certain to wind up winning the popular vote by about one percent. The final Real Clear Politics polling average had Clinton ahead by 3.3 percent. At HuffPost, the average Clinton lead was 4.6 percent. So they were off by roughly 2 to 3 percent. That is a fairly normal polling error, as Nate Silver pointed out prophetically before the votes started coming in:

“The track record of polling in American presidential elections is pretty good but a long way from perfect, and errors in the range of 3 percentage points have been somewhat common in the historical record. Of note, for instance, is that Obama beat his national polling average by nearly 3 points in 2012, although state polls did a better job of pegging his position. In 2000, Al Gore was behind by about 3 points in the final national polling average but won the popular vote. In 1996, Bill Clinton was ahead in national polls by about 12 points, but won by 8.5.

“In three of the last five presidential elections, in other words, there was a polling error the size of which would approximately wipe out Clinton’s popular vote lead — or alternatively, if the error were in her favor, turn a solid victory into a near-landslide margin of 6 to 8 percentage points. There’s also some chance of a larger error still. In 1980, Ronald Reagan led in final national polls by slightly less than Clinton does now, but wound up winning the popular vote by almost 10 percentage points.”

The bigger polling error, if there was one, was at the state level. Even there, though, there is in some cases less than meets the eye. In Pennsylvania, the state that put Trump over the top, the final Real Clear Politics polling average showed Clinton leading by 1.9 percent. Trump won by 1.1 percent. Once again, that’s a 3 point error. In Florida, the RCP average had Trump up by 0.2 percent. He won by 1.4 percent. That’s a 1.2 percent error. North Carolina? Trump led the polling average by one percent, and won the state by 3.8 percent. Are we seeing a pattern here?

There were a couple of true shockers: Wisconsin, where Clinton led in the polling average by 6.5 percent, only to lose by a point. But there was not a whole lot of polling there for the abundantly good reason that few observers (and until the very end, even the Trump campaign) thought the state was competitive. And even more lightly polled “shocker state” was Michigan, where actually, Clinton’s lead in the polling average was only 3.4 percent, and Trump is currently ahead by a hair.

So why do so many political observers (and well-informed voters) have the sense this morning that we were taken by surprise because the “polls were wrong”? I think there are three key factors.

First, a lot of people were convinced by early voting data that Clinton was going to win states like Florida and North Carolina, making a Trump win impossible. Actually Democrats did not take much of a lead out of early voting in either state, making it entirely feasible for Republicans to “catch up” on November 8. Nevada, by contrast, was a state where (a) Democrats did take a sizable lead in early voting, and (b) early voting was an extremely high percentage of total turnout. Sure enough, Clinton won. But a lot of people over-interpreted early voting in some places, and several of the Rust Belt states that represented Trump’s breakthrough did not offer much in the way of early voting. Early news sticks though.

Second, there was a tendency to mentally add a point or two to Clinton’s poll numbers because of her big advantage in paid media and field operations. Actually, Trump closed the advantage in paid media right at the end, and Clinton did very little advertising in several of the “firewall states” that ultimately did her in. As for the vaunted Clinton get-out-the-vote machine — well, we may have to wait for more information on how that went down. It is entirely possible that the combination of RNC and state GOP resources, plus the galvanizing effect of Trump’s monster rallies, all but eliminated the supposed Clinton advantage. Or maybe she would have lost more decisively without all those field offices. It is too early to tell.

In the end, of course, the real reason Trump’s win came as a shock is because so very many people — Republicans as well as Democrats — simply could not envision the man winning a presidential election. It is still a bit difficult to absorb how he got from where he was to where he is now; like a carnival barker wandering into the Met and delivering a brilliant performance as Iago in Verdi’s Otello. Let’s don’t blame the polls for our struggle to understand the Trump phenomenon.

In his New York Times op-ed article, “Presidential Small Ball,” Thomas B. Edsall nicely sums up the key demographic components of Clinton’s supporters: “Clinton held an 80-point advantage among African-Americans, but was unable to match Obama’s 87-point edge in 2012 or his 91 points in 2008. She won 65 percent of Latino voters, compared with the 71 percent who voted for Obama in 2012. She won 28 percent of non-college white voters to Trump’s 67 percent, the largest gap in this demographic since the early 1980s, according to Pew. Moreover, she lost whites with college degrees 49-45. Among millennials, she won 54 percent of voters aged 18 to 29, compared with 60 percent for Obama in 2012…Clinton’s heavy investment in building support among women produced a one-point improvement on Obama’s 2012 record: according to exit polls, she won women by 12 points (54-42), compared to Obama’s 11 points (55-44). Obama lost men by 7 points in 2012, 52-45, while Clinton lost them by 12 points, 53-41.”

Does the second popular vote win/electoral college defeat for Democrats in presidential elections in 16 years mean Dems should make direct popular vote election a priority? In a close popular vote presidential election like 2016, Democrats could just as likely have benefitted from the electoral college, and, in 2000 the Florida vote count and Supreme Court decision muddied the effect of the electoral college. So there is probably no built-in advantage for Republicans in the electoral college. The best argument for direct popular election of the President is a moral one: Majority rule should mean majority rule. We don’t need an 18th century filter to protect us from the will of the voters, and you could argue that in 2016 the electoral college actually served the worst instincts of the rabble the founders feared. For a good backgrounder/update on the movement for direct popular election, check out James Lartey’s post, “Hillary Clinton poised to win popular vote despite losing presidential race” at the Guardian.

Does the 2016 election indicate that voters want to reign in ‘free trade’ and globalism? When you look at the arc of rust belt states for Trump stetching from PA to WI, it’s hard to avoid that conclusion. Whatever the actual economic benefits to the U.S. of ‘free’ trade, NAFTA, TPP and the free ride for runaway plants, it is a very tough sell, which defies credible explanation and makes it’s proponents sound like elitists. Hillary Clinton’s inability to shake off the globalist stigma of her husband’s administration, Trump’s free trade-bashing and Bernie Sanders’s primary/caucus wins in 22 states as a critic of unbalanced trade agreements provide ample testimony that many voters believe trade has in recent years been more of a job-killer than a job creator. Be sure to read Edward McClelland’s Washington Post article on the topic, “The Rust Belt was turning red already. Donald Trump just pushed it along.” In one key graph, McClelland explains, “Clinton, on the other hand, seemed to take the Upper Midwest for granted, never campaigning in Wisconsin and finally making a panicky visit to Detroit on the Friday before the election. In the 1980s, Michigan was the forging ground of the Reagan Democrats: hawkish, socially conservative, suburban, blue-collar workers who ignored the United Auto Workers’ entreaties to vote for Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale. (Their heartland, Macomb County, just north of Detroit, voted for Obama in 2012 but gave Trump 54 percent of its vote on Tuesday.)”

In his article, “How the Rustbelt Paved Trump’s Road to Victory” at The Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein observes “those who did vote stampeded to Trump in insurmountable numbers. In particular, Trump beat Clinton among white voters without a college education by an astonishing 39 percentage points—a margin larger than Ronald Reagan’s against Walter Mondale in his 1984 landslide. Trump not only beat her by nearly 50 points among blue-collar white men, but by almost 30 points among non-college-educated white women. (Trump is president largely because white working-class women gave him double-digit margins in key states—a development that may occupy gender studies scholars for years.) Similarly, Trump captured more than three-fifths of rural voters nationwide; in the decisive Rustbelt states—Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and possibly Michigan—Clinton suffered death by a thousand cuts, as Trump improved over Mitt Romney’s 2012 performance almost everywhere outside the biggest cities.”

But don’t be fooled by the vast swatchs of red ink on election maps, which have more to do with geography than political preferences of voters. As L.A. Timess reporter Cathleen Decker puts it desribing Hillary Clinton’s electoral college shortfall, “A switch in three states of only about 50,000 votes out of some 120 million cast nationwide would have been enough to give her the victory.”

As you scan the post-mortems on the 2016 election, also have a gander at Naomi Klein’s critique, “It was the rise of the Davos class that sealed America’s fate,” also at The Guardian, which begins, “They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates. They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry…But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism. That worldview – fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine – is no match for Trump-style extremism. The decision to run one against the other is what sealed our fate. If we learn nothing else, can we please learn from that mistake?…The Democratic party needs to be either decisively wrested from pro-corporate neoliberals, or it needs to be abandoned. From Elizabeth Warren to Nina Turner, to the Occupy alumni who took the Bernie campaign supernova, there is a stronger field of coalition-inspiring progressive leaders out there than at any point in my lifetime.”

So how did Democrats do in the battles to win majorities of state legislative chambers? According to the National Conference of State legislatures, “Four chambers switched from Republican to Democratic control: New Mexico House; Nevada Assembly; Nevada Senate; and Washington Senate (Republicans, however, will have functional control as one Democrat will caucus with the Republicans.)…Three chambers switched from Democratic to Republican control: Kentucky House; Iowa Senate; and Minnesota Senate. …Two chambers will be tied: Connecticut Senate and Delaware Senate.”

The Center for American Women in Politics notes that, despite Hillary Clinton’s popular vote win/electoral college loss, women do have some encouraging election gains, including: “Nine new women of color, all Democrats, will enter Congress: three in the Senate and six in the House. A total of 37 women of color will serve in the 115th Congress…A total of six women have won Senate races. The totals include four newcomers, all Democrats, and two incumbents (1D, 1R) winning re-election…The newcomers include two women who won open seats: Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Catherine Cortez-Masto (D-NV); and 2 women who defeated incumbents: Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) and Maggie Hassan (D-NH)…A total of 10 new women (8D, 2R) have been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, joining 73 incumbents who won re-election.” However, there will be one less woman in the House than the number currently serving.”

Lastly, presidential election post-mortems are understandably hard on the losing candidate. Putting her candidacy and career in politics in perspective, Hillary Clinton’s achievements and conributions are extraordinary. As a social change activist, First Lady, U.S. Senator and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has earned high praise for her tireless commitment to public service, her work ethic, policy acumen and genuine decency as a human being. The Republicans threw everything they had at her for decades, including the ugliest lies and innuendo any political figure has had to endure in our times, and she never flinched or retreated. And let’s not forget two of her historic accomplishments — as the first woman to win the presidential nomination of a major political party and the first woman to win the popular vote in a presidential election. If she never did anything else, her accomplishments so far provide a source of inspiration and encouragement — to young women in particular, who are considering a career in politics and public service — and to all American progressives.

The following article by Georgetown University Professor Sherry Linkon, a faculty affiliate of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor and editor of Working-Class Perspectives, first appeared at Moyers & Company on November 3rd:

At the end of most US presidential elections, most Americans are ready to see the last of campaign ads, social media commentaries and tension-fraught news coverage. That’s even more true this year. But more than in most recent elections, we shouldn’t expect the frustrations and divisions that have surfaced over the past 18 months to disappear after the ballots have been counted. Tensions over class and race, especially, may die down, but they aren’t going away. If a new president will take them on, something good might yet emerge from this ugly election.

Although it’s true that working-class voters are declining in number, they have drawn increasing attention over the past several elections, in part because, as Ruy Teixeira and his colleagues at The Democratic Strategist have been arguing for a while, they remain a crucial demographic. And this year, the white working class has not only been recognized as a key voting bloc, it has been an active player, demanding that the country and its leaders recognize the economy does not work for many Americans.

Amid far too many reports that have pinned Donald Trump’s success on the white working class, this year’s election coverage also has drawn attention to real problems, many of them rooted in class and racial inequalities. If the next president wants to succeed she (or he) must address what design experts call “wicked problems” — big, complex issues that resist simple explanations or one-dimensional solutions. It won’t be easy.

The election has created the conditions for addressing the first of those: class resentment. I don’t mean the resentment poor and working-class people feel toward the wealthy. I mean the resentment they feel toward a government that doesn’t seem to care about them or have the will to address economic inequality. I’m also talking about resentment toward a public discourse that denigrates and blames working-class people for not being more like the middle class. WNYC’s On the Media provided a terrific overview of that discourse in a series of reports about common and problematic assumptions that shape reporting on poverty. As host Brooke Gladstone explained, reliance on these assumptions generates media that reinforces the idea that people are poor because they don’t work hard or because they make bad choices. No matter how much we might deplore some of the behavior and attitudes that have surfaced in the election, we can’t address the class-based cultural divide by dismissing poor and working-class people as “deplorables” who lack the critical thinking skills that college education provides.

Good leadership could address class resentment not only with better policies — more on that below — but also by taking it seriously. While claims that Trump’s support comes primarily from the white working class are problematic, both he and Bernie Sanders won votes this year because they addressed working-class people’s sense of being left behind by the economy and put down by the media. Both also recognized a simple truth about American culture: Class is a central and increasingly important divide. A good president will acknowledge that, but also will lead the way in fostering deeper and more critical conversations about the economic, social and cultural roots of those divisions.

Of course, the cultural divide reflects a very real and serious economic gap, and a good leader must be willing to talk about its sources and consequences — including the way contemporary global capitalism, neoliberal ideology and technology drive economic changes that deepen inequality. We need to create more jobs through infrastructure projects among other strategies. But we also need policies that address not only the quantity of jobs but also their quality — what they pay, how they are structured and how workers are protected from exploitation as well as physical and psychological injuries. Raising the minimum wage is just a start. American economic leaders need to look critically at the effects of the “gig economy” and rising precarity, a term some scholars have coined to describe the uncertainty facing many workers who can’t count on a regular paycheck. Instead of pushing for everyone to go to college, we need to focus on ensuring that the thousands of working-class jobs that our economy will continue to produce are good jobs. This doesn’t necessarily mean bringing back manufacturing. It probably does mean bringing back the labor movement, with a broader and more inclusive social unionism.

Inequality doesn’t stem only from employment, however. As Jack Metzgar has argued, we need tax policies that focus less on the persistent fantasy of trickle-down economics and instead put cash into the pockets of the working class, who will spend it. We could expand the earned income tax credit and increase credits to help families pay for child care, housing or college. We also need to take another look at health care. The Affordable Care Act was a step in the right direction, with in its emphasis on providing insurance to those who hadn’t had it previously, but it still relies on the private insurance industry. It’s time to develop a single-payer system that puts first the needs of ordinary people, not those of a profit-based industry.

Perhaps the most troubling problem that has surfaced in this year’s election is racism. While some have challenged stories that present racism as a white working-class problem, we also know that racism and racial divisions are real problems for working-class people. Racism is a class issue, in multiple ways. First, racial division undermines the class solidarity that could generate social change movements. It also distracts people from the real source of their problems — not other poor and working-class people, but the economic and political system that, as Guy Standing has suggested, is rigged against workers and what, in today’s economy, he has named the “precariat.”

At the same time, racism presents a threat to working-class people. While the profiling and anxieties that underlie police violence toward black people sometimes target middle-class (and upper-middle-class) African-Americans, working-class black men are probably at greater risk. Here, too, we need policies that more forcefully address racial injustice and divisions, to ensure that citizens are protected by the police rather than needing protection from them. But we also need policies that facilitate more racial interaction. Among the most interesting insights on this year’s election was Jonathan Rothwell’s analysis of Gallup poll data, which revealed that Trump’s strongest support came from white people living in highly segregated areas. Racism is a structural issue, not just a matter of morality or attitudes, and we need to address it with policies that challenge housing and education segregation and inequities.

None of this is easy, and these “solutions” are as limited as they are idealistic. I’m sure there are better ideas out there. Our next president needs to find them. She (or he) must pay attention — not only to the anger and frustration of working-class people but also to the complex nature of the problems that generate those feelings.

In 2008, Barack Obama’s campaign tried to keep his supporters’ momentum going by creating Organizing for America, which became Organizing for Action, a network of community organizing groups that largely faded from the national picture. This year, we need more.

Neither the media nor the new president should stop talking about and listening to the working class. It’s time to move from campaign mode to action, from courting working-class voters to addressing the conditions of their lives.

From the CNN Exit Polls;

41 percent of men voted for Clinton, 53 percent of women

Clinton won 45 percent of voters over age 65, compared to Trump’s 53 percent

58 percent of white voters cast ballots for Trump, vs. 37 percent for Clinton

43 percent of white women voted for Clinton, vs. 53 percent for Trump

43 percent of whites, age 18-29 voted for Clinton, while 48 percent voted for Trump

65 percent of Latinos voted for Clinton, but 29 percent voted for Trump

28 percent of whites with no college degree voted for Clinton, 67 percent of them voted for Trump

45 percent of white college graduates voted for Clinton, 49 percent of them voted for Trump

34 percent of white, non-college women voted for Clinton, 62 percent for Trump

62 percent of unmarried women voted for Clinton, 33 percent for Trump

51 percent of union household voters chose Clinton, 43 percent picked Trump

52 percent of voters who said the economy was the most important issue voted for Clinton, vs. 42 percent for Trump

39 percent of voters who said terorism was the most important issue voted for Clinton, vs. 57 percent of them for Trump.

29 percent of those who had an unfavorable opinion of both Clinton and Trump voted for Clinton, while 49 percent of them voted for Trump.

36 percent of voters said that Clinton’s use of private email bothers them “not a lot” or “not at all,” while 45 percent of voters said it bothered them “a lot” and 17 percent of voters said it bothered them “some.”

39 percent of voters said Trump’s treatment of women bothered them “not much” or “not at all,” while 50 percent said it bothered them “a lot” and 20 percent said it bothered them “some.”

62 percent of voters said the economy was “not good” or “poor”

27 percent of voters agreed that their financial condition was worse today than four years ago.

62 percent of respondents said the country was on the “wrong track.”