The pundits still don’t seem to understand the meaning of President-Elect Donald Trump’s victory.
They are still fixated on his violations of political correctness, while largely ignoring his populist challenge to corporate power.
Financial markets understand better. The media doesn’t.
Even on the morning after, commentators, such as globalism cheerleader Thomas L. Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times, keep insisting that the answer must be in the categories of ethnicity, gender, race or religion.
Many college-educated pundits took comfort in the fact that higher education correlated with support for Clinton. However, they missed the real reason for this.
In a way, their university educations in multiculturalism and textbook economics blinded them to the depth of discontent outside the Northeast and the West Coast. Instead of thinking of Trump voters as ignorant, they should have recognized them as distressed.
Trump understood this and pandered to it in his speeches.
Whereas he won the votes of discontented people, including a higher percentage of the Latino vote than Republican candidate Mitt Romney received in the 2012 presidential election, despite insults about illegal Mexican immigrants, Hillary Clinton gained support from donors and voters who are reasonably satisfied with the status quo. Trump tapped into a nerve among many people who see the media as arrogant and superficial, ignoring the depth of their angst.
Whereas establishment pundits heard Trump’s political incorrectness, what Midwestern voters heard from Trump was restoration of one of their core values: fairness. I grew up in Massillon, Ohio, a racially mixed football town where everybody loved winning, but they also expected that everyone would play by the rules.
Originally published at The Street on November 12, 2016 – Pundits Just Don’t Get It: Here Is the Real Reason Why Trump Won