Grand White Coalition (2)

but i had breakfast with my dad at a denny’s this summer that concerned me. he is a deeply principled man. a very good person with strong values. he is rust belt middle class. he went to the seminary for years to be a priest but ultimately felt it wasn’t for him. he cares deeply about people, is the kindest person i know, and doesn’t have a racist bone in his body. he coached me and my 3 siblings in basketball and soccer and more. he’s that dad. at that breakfast he told me was voting for trump and he was certain trump would win. this was weeks before the conventions.

it was about bringing down the establishment.

he said there were millions like him who were so angry at the path we were on that they would put anyone in the office to blow it all up.

trump only won because he struck a chord with the mainstream. he got people like my dad to vote for him — good people who believed they did the right thing by voting for him.

my wife was crying tonight over this election. it felt like the biggest failure of america we’ve ever experienced.

Grand White Coalition

One of the biggest upsets in American political history was built on a coalition of white voters unlike that of any other previous Republican candidate, according to election results and interviews with voters and demographic experts.

Mr. Trump’s coalition comprised not just staunchly conservative Republicans in the South and West. They were joined by millions of voters in the onetime heartlands of 20th-century liberal populism — the Upper and Lower Midwest — where white Americans without a college degree voted decisively to reject the more diverse, educated and cosmopolitan Democratic Party of the 21st century, making Republicans the country’s dominant political party at every level of government.

Magnified by the constitutional design of the Electoral College, and aided by Republican-led efforts to dampen black and Latino voting in states like North Carolina, Mr. Trump’s America proved the larger on Election Day. It smashed through the Democrats’ supposed electoral “blue wall” — the 18 states carried by Democrats in every election since 1992, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, plus the diverse and well-educated parts of the country that Mr. Obama attracted in his two races, like New Mexico, Nevada, Virginia and Colorado.

Starting Wednesday, you could walk from the Vermont border through Appalachian coal country to the outskirts of St. Louis without crossing a county Mr. Trump did not win decisively. You could head south through rural and suburban Georgia all the way to South Florida, or northwest through the Upper Midwest, or make a beeline for the West Coast, skirting only the rising Democratic communities of Colorado and the booming multicultural sprawl of Las Vegas before finally reaching Mrs. Clinton’s part of the country.

“I feel our country is on the verge of becoming a third world country,” he said. “Our children are not going to have a future. We are not going to have a future.”