CONNOR HOFFMAN
Managing Editor
Donald J. Trump will be our next president. I never thought I’d have to use that sentence, but like everyone else on Tuesday night, I was indeed wrong. Now, many of you may be wondering why Hillary Clinton lost to Trump on Tuesday, but the signs couldn’t have been more clear from the beginning. Clinton lost because the voters in this election wanted an outsider, and Clinton is nothing if not a symbol of the establishment.
Trump won on Tuesday with 290 electoral college votes compared to Clinton’s 228 electoral college votes, according to NBC News.
The first sign of Clinton’s weakness for the Democrats should have been after she nearly lost the primaries to Sen. Bernie Sanders. Sanders represented a true outsider and really excited the Democratic base, and he would have been a much stronger candidate for the Democrats to have run against Trump.
Also, the fact that her campaign basically rigged the entire Democratic primary and even colluded with the media to win the Democratic nomination, as shown with the WikiLeaks email leaks, really hurt her appeal with the base. The Democrats attempt to coronate Clinton as president seriously backfired.
The economy was the main issue that this general election was being fought on, and Clinton seriously screwed up trying to make this election a referendum on Trump. In fact, her sole focus on Trump probably only encouraged the swing state voters to think that she didn’t care about their economic issues.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the North American Free Trade Agreement, two crucial free trade agreements, were two issues that seriously made Clinton looked inauthentic. Clinton tried to disavow both of these trade agreements, but her criticism of them seemed quite fake, as she was involved with NAFTA in the 1990s and she called TPP “the gold standard in trade agreements” before she changed to being against it.
Clinton’s lack of charisma is another huge reason she lost. She was not able to excite the Democratic voters in key swing states like Obama did in 2008 and 2012. This woman tried to campaign as being a third term of Obama, but that’s not what the voters wanted.
Just take a look at voter turnout in the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan in the 2008 and 2012 election compared to the 2016 election.
In 2008, Obama received 2,872,579 votes in Michigan, 1,677,211 in Wisconsin and 3,276,363 in Pennsylvania, according to CNN. In 2012, Obama received 2,561,911 votes in Michigan, 1,613,950 in Wisconsin and 2,907,448 in Pennsylvania, according to NBC News.
In the 2016 election, Clinton only received 2,267,373 votes in Michigan, 1,382,210 in Wisconsin and 2,844,705 in Pennsylvania, according to CNN. Trump very narrowly won these swing states because Clinton could not excite her base.
Keep in mind, Sanders beat Clinton in both Wisconsin and Michigan. In fact, the conventional media wisdom had projected that Sanders was going to lose Michigan, and just like Trump, he came out with a “yuge” surprise win. Shouldn’t that surprise win have shown the media and the pollsters that the voters in the Midwest were quite volatile and unpredictable this election season?