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The Trump Shift

From The Wall Street Journal, Trump May Herald a New Political Order [1] by John Steele Gordon:

So does Donald Trump’s stunning election herald something permanent—a shift akin to those brought by Jackson, Lincoln, McKinley and FDR? That’s a fair bet, considering the GOP gains that preceded it. True, Mr. Trump did not win a plurality of the electorate. But Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote margin of 2.9 million was built on an extremely narrow base. Mrs. Clinton won only in coastal cities, academic enclaves and very poor areas such as the Mississippi Delta and the Alabama Black Belt. Subtract her margins in a mere five counties—the New York City boroughs, save Staten Island, and Los Angeles County—and she lost the popular vote in the remainder of the nation by more than 500,000.

Mr. Trump capitalized effectively on the Democratic Party’s alienation of white working-class voters, sometimes dismissed as “deplorables” or denizens of “flyover country.” That allowed him to carry Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, states where no Republican had prevailed since the 1980s. Whereas in 2012 Mitt Romney carried Brown County, Wis., which includes Green Bay, by 1.8 percentage points, Mr. Trump’s margin was 10.7 points. The GOP advantage in nearby rural Marinette County swung even more dramatically, from 3.5 points for Mr. Romney to 33 for Mr. Trump. That was more than enough to make up for Mr. Trump’s relative weakness in affluent Republican suburbs like Waukesha County, near Milwaukee, where Mr. Trump’s margin was 7.8 points narrower than Mr. Romney’s.

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