How Trump Won

The Inside Story of a Revolution

Joel Pollak, Larry Schweikart

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781621575382
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A book to challenge the status quo, spark a debate, and get people talking about the issues and questions we face as a country!

CHAPTER ONE

The Most Astounding Election in American History

Larry Schweikart

Joel’s campaign diary will be an indispensable primary source for any objective and unbiased political history of the 2016 campaign. When such a history is finally written—if, indeed, any will ever be—they will declare this the most astounding election in American history. Its outcome, with businessman and former reality TV show star Donald J. Trump slashing through a crowded and talented field of Republican contenders to win the nomination, then battling a Democrat opponent in Hillary Clinton who, by all accounts, was a favorite not just to win the general election but to do so in a blowout, was the political equivalent of the American hockey team defeating the Soviets in the 1980 Olympics.

Trump, a man with virtually no political experience, with almost no support from party insiders, and with little large-scale funding besides his personal fortune, emerged seemingly out of nowhere to roundly defeat the largest stable of credible candidates the Republican Party has ever fielded in the modern era and seized the nomination . . . easily. Then, astonishing supporters and detractors alike, he was elected president of the United States without the traditional armies of consultants and pollsters, or the seemingly necessary “ground game” that was required to merely win a primary, not to mention a general election. His Democratic Party opponent had not just the active support of a sitting president touted for his high public approval numbers but also the endorsements of every wing of the Democrat coalition, which in sheer voter registrations outnumbered the Republicans. And Trump had to beat not only Clinton but three other smaller-party candidates as well. All of this came despite the fact that his own party wasn’t solidly behind him—with powerful Republican office-holders offering tepid and wavering support, at best, and #NeverTrump intellectuals churning out daily articles for venerable conservative magazines. On top of all of those apparently fatal disadvantages, Trump faced entirely monolithic and extraordinarily nasty opposition from almost every outlet of the so-called “news” media.

Jerome Hudson of Breitbart News has catalogued the number of times the “experts” insisted Trump had no chance. Just a few of their predictions:

• Ross Douthat of the New York Times: “Donald Trump will not be the Republican nominee”

• Washington Post editor James Downie: “Let’s dispense with the notion that Trump has a real shot at winning in November”

• CNN contributor Hilary Rosen: Trump had lost the election “from the first day he announced”

• The Huffington Post: “Donald Trump will not . . . win the general election. . . .”

• The Los Angeles Times: “Hillary Clinton will beat Donald Trump” by seven percent with “perhaps a double digit landslide” (If you’re going to be wrong, go big!)

• Fox contributor Karl Rove, who has recently repeatedly been wrong, on MSNBC: “Trump can’t win [the] general election” because conservatives will stay home (Surprise, Karl: conservatives—plus disenfranchised whites and union members—won the election for Trump)

• RealClearPolitics elections analyst Sean Trende on November 4, hedging his bet somewhat: “There’s probably a 90% chance Trump loses”

• Bloomberg columnist Jonathan Bernstein: “Seriously, Trump Won’t Win”

• The New York Daily News: promised a “yuge” November loss for Trump

• The Nation, reassuring its lefty readers: “Relax, Donald Trump can’t win”

• Forbes specifically claimed, “Trump won’t win Wisconsin”

• Frank Luntz, who tried to delete his Twitter predictions after Clinton’s bid turned south, on Election Night: “Hillary Clinton will be the next President of the United States” (Oops)¹

Yet Trump won.

Only two national pollsters, both of them viewed as “outliers,” had Trump ahead on Election Day, November 8.

Yet Trump won.

Not a single major television network could even remotely be considered “friendly” to The Donald.

Yet Trump won.

How?

Now the story of how Trump won the most astounding election victory in our nation’s history can be told. To explain exactly what Donald J. Trump did to be elected the forty-fifth president, I’ll be drawing on the perspective of a group of outsiders. In addition to myself (a professional historian), we were a pollster, an aerospace engineer in the defense industry, an obstetrician, an investment banker, and one analyst who still wishes to remain entirely anonymous. We were not full-time politicos, but we managed to beat the professional politicos with our own analysis, predictions, and spot-on advice to the Trump campaign.

These amateurs saw Trump’s strength early, and some of us predicted his success far earlier than anyone else. On Election Day, we came together to provide real-time data to the Trump campaign that even Team Trump didn’t have. Using data from all of us, the pollster in our group of “Renegade Deplorables” was able to call states for Trump with certainty up to an hour before the major networks broke the news.

More important, though, is also the story of why Trump won—the “forgotten” Americans he spoke to, and the ideas that he talked about to appeal to them. In achieving what everyone said he couldn’t, Trump realigned the Republican Party, making it “inclusive” for the first time in years and attracting the white working class for the first time since 1984. Trump won by taking states no one thought he had a chance of taking, and by stealing Clinton’s own taken-for-granted voters out from under her nose. His election is a revolution in American politics that has realigned the political party system in dramatic fashion—possibly establishing a third “Party System” in American history (although the Republican Establishment has, so far, sidled up to Trump in a move that might prevent such a realignment).

Donald Trump’s rise to be the nominee of the Republican Party in 2016—let alone the victor in the presidential race and, on January 20, 2017, president of the United States—was absolutely unforeseen just eighteen months earlier. It was so unlikely that only a handful of observers, including Ann Coulter, Bill Mitchell, and myself, had thought it even possible.² What had we seen that virtually all of the pollsters (save People’s Pundit Daily and the USC/Los Angeles Times poll), all of the political pundits except Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, and all of the talking heads on the news missed?

READING CLINTON—AND OBAMA—WRONG

For one thing, those of us who saw Trump as a formidable candidate early on knew that for eight years, a majority of Americans had been deeply dissatisfied with the Obama administration. This was despite not only his handy reelection in 2012 but also polls purporting to show that Obama continued to be very popular, with a high approval rating. (Below, I delve into the 2016 election-cycle polling, whose utter and total failure means that Obama’s approval rating must be suspect.) We saw that the Republican candidate had an opportunity to run against the weak, unpopular, and corruption-tainted Hillary Clinton. In short, we saw that a Republican had a solid shot at winning the White House. But we (and Donald Trump) were not alone in seeing that opportunity. Many contenders saw 2016 as the perfect moment to run for the presidency, producing the largest field of legitimate Republican candidates certainly in post–Civil War history and probably in all of American history. At various points one after another of them—Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Scott Walker—was thought to be a “sure thing” to win the nomination. Waiting in the wings was the insurrectionary Reaganite conservative Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

They all failed. Walker, unable to sell his Wisconsin reform message to the broader Republican base, was one of the first to drop out. Bush, damaged by the “low energy” label Trump gave him, which he never shook, was soon gone, despite a mind-boggling expenditure of campaign money on ads. Rubio survived long enough to win Puerto Rico and Minnesota, but failed even to be competitive in his home state of Florida. As the “sure things” fell by the wayside, the unlikely duo of Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich stayed in the race, trying to derail Trump. Yet despite winning a few states, they dropped so far behind Trump that at the last minute the two of them, without hope of winning the nomination outright for themselves, were forced into an unholy alliance aimed merely at denying Trump the 1,237 delegates necessary to cement his victory on the first ballot at the convention.

That, too, failed.

At the end of the process, some sixteen months after the race for the nomination had begun, a man with no political experience at all, who had never held elected office, and who had never served in the military, had won the Republican nomination—convincingly. Trump won a record 13 million votes in the GOP primaries. He racked up 1,400 delegates at a time when Nate Silver and the other so-called experts at Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog were insisting he would have a hard time getting to 1,237.³ He spurred excitement on the Republican side as no one in recent memory had, causing GOP primary vote totals to grow by 10 million from 2008.

Yet the Republican Party—especially the Old Guard, the likes of the Bushes, Mitt Romney, and John McCain—refused to fully embrace him. When it came to Donald Trump, the Republican Party establishment acted the part of a reluctant groom at a shotgun wedding.

The rejection of Trump by that establishment was a stunning display of disbelief and pride, for Trump’s dominance was mind-boggling at times. In the primaries, he won every county in Florida—where he was opposed by two Florida natives—except for Miami, and every county in Virginia. He won every county save for a single New York district in a five-state sweep of the Northeast. Beaten in Ohio by the sitting governor, Trump was the only other candidate to win any county in that state. (In the general election, Trump would go on to carry Ohio by a whopping nine points, or four times the margin by which George W. Bush carried the state in 2004—without an ounce of statewide support from Governor John Kasich.) He took the entirety of the state in the California primary, with 75 percent of the vote. Never viewed as the “evangelical” candidate—that was Cruz’s strong suit—Trump led in almost every state, and especially the Southern states of the “Bible Belt,” among self-described evangelicals. Though his appeal was supposed to be limited to the “uneducated,” Trump won the “college educated” and “some college” categories in almost every state.

A VERY PREDICTABLE PRIMARY BLOWOUT

In April 2016, pundits were in near universal agreement that Trump could not reach the “magic number” of 1,237 delegates at the convention. Just one month later, they glumly admitted he couldn’t be stopped. To many, the result seemed impossible, incredible, stunning.

To some of us, it was obvious.

I am on record as early as August 2015 predicting that Trump would win both the nomination and the election.⁴ Actually, I think I made the prediction earlier. By March 2016 I had concluded that Trump would compile at least 1,300 delegates in the Republican primaries—while the “experts” such as Silver were still insisting he would have a very tough path to merely reach 1,237.⁵

In November 2015, I predicted Trump would win the general election with a relatively easy Electoral College victory—which I then defined as between 300 and 320 electoral votes—but a narrower popular vote margin. In 2016, I refined that prediction to say Trump would win seventy or so electoral votes from formerly blue states, but by margins of under 2 percent. And just two days out, I wrote that “300–320 [Electoral Votes] are entirely within reach,” when most pundits were still saying Hillary would win by more than that much.⁶

Trump would in fact take Pennsylvania by 1.2 percent, Michigan by .3 percent, Wisconsin by 1.3 percent, and Florida by 1.3 percent. In “blue” states he lost, the margins were also razor thin in some cases: New Hampshire (under .5 percent), Minnesota (1.5 percent), and Virginia (4.9 percent, but only 200,000 votes). There were a few “blue blowouts,” such as North Carolina, where Trump doubled Romney’s 2012 margin, and Iowa, where Trump won by over nine percentage points. But by and large, this was a “big” victory won in tiny margins in a number of states. In short, for the sixteen months leading up to the 2016 election, I was pretty much correct, often even underestimating Trump’s strength.

DONALD TRUMP—CONSERVATIVE, NATIONALIST, OR BOTH?

A large portion of the so-called #NeverTrump opposition, led by National Review magazine, claimed (and I underscore “claimed”) that they opposed Trump because he wasn’t a real conservative. To the extent this was justified at all, they were going by some of Trump’s previous positions on social issues (which he had recanted some time back), his military isolationism, and his rejection of pure “free trade” theories—with his criticism of trade deals including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and his proposal to build a wall to stop illegal immigration from Mexico.

But in fact, much of modern “conservatism” is not traditional American conservatism as practiced by George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton (Federalists), James Madi...