Donald Trump Won Because Democrats Failed To Support Hillary

Democrats didn't lose the 2016 election because of "racist" Trump voters, they lost because they didn't show up to vote for Hillary Clinton. 

While all these protesters are running around furious at all the "racists" who voted for Donald Trump, Trump actually got less Republican votes in 2016 than John McCain did in 2008 or than Mitt Romney did in 2012. Did some racists vote for Donald Trump? Sure. But some racists also voted for Hillary Clinton. (Contrary to mainstream media belief and coverage racists of all colors exist. In fact, if I could change one theme of modern media coverage it would be this -- the idea that minorities can't be racist. It's an absurd notion.) 

Trump didn't win because he mobilized a massive tidal wave of Republican voters the likes of which we'd never seen before, he won because Hillary Clinton couldn't turn out the same Democratic voters that showed up at polls in 2008 and 2012.

Having said that, these loser protesters are certainly having an impact. The problem for them is this, they're motivating people to vote for Republicans instead of Democrats. Many reasonable people can't bear to vote for the same candidate as this precious snowflake from the University of Oklahoma.

Or as this hard core PC Bromani protesting the election and castigating racism in the process.  

In fact, look at this data on number of votes received in each of the last three Presidential elections. (Winner in bold) 

2008 Presidential Election:

Obama 69,498,516 McCain 59,948,323

2012 Presidential Election:

Obama 65,915,795 Romney 60,933,504

2016 Presidential Election:

Hillary 59,943,017 Trump 59,705,048 (These numbers may continue to rise over the coming days, but they are pretty much complete.) 

Trump got less Republican votes than John McCain in 2008 -- and a million less than Romney in 2012 -- but Hillary got ten million less votes than Obama did in 2008 and nearly six million less than Obama did in 2012. 

So where did these Democratic voters go?

Well, just over five million of them voted for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein in 2016. (I was, for instance, an Obama voter in 2008 and 2012 who voted for Gary Johnson in 2016. Gary Johnson received four million votes and Jill Stein received a million. So let's say that three million of those third party voters came from Hillary's column of Democratic support.  

That still means that Hillary is missing seven million 2008 Obama voters and three million 2012 Obama voters.

Who were these people?

Well, we know from the data that Trump turned over 200 of the nearly 700 counties that Obama won twice to his side.

Let me repeat that, of the nearly 700 counties that Obama won twice, Trump flipped 209 of them to his side in 2016. (Hillary won 467 of them.) That's a truly remarkable stat that speaks to the weakness of Hillary Clinton's support. Theoretically these voters, having gone for Obama twice, would have been predisposed to favor her. Yet Trump won nearly a third of them.  

Not suprisingly, of the counties that Obama won once in his two presidential campaigns, Trump beat Hillary 194 to 13!

The vast majority of these counties were in the Midwest battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Ohio, where Trump won the election. And even Democrats would have to acknowledge, I think, that it would be a stretch to call these voters who supported Obama and flipped to Trump racists. After all, they'd already voted for Obama against white men.

Indeed, one of the most interesting data points out there is this, number of SEC, Big Ten, and Big 12 states won in 2016.

Trump won all 11 SEC states and every Big 12 state. Plus the Big Ten states of Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio and Iowa. He narrowly lost Minnesota by one point.

Hillary won Illinois and Minnesota. 

Trump essentially won this election via the College Football Coalition, the middle swath of this country that is obsessed with college football on Saturdays.  

For the truly swing voter out there -- the person who voted for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016 -- Trump was a much better candidate than Hillary. (It always stuns the media how many people can swing from Obama to Trump, but there are millions of people who do this every election. They're middle of the road voters who don't have strong political beliefs and are able to swing from one side to another. Trump won these voters and Hillary lost them.)

Now, to be fair, Hillary also picked up quite a few rich and highly educated Republican voters who couldn't stand Trump. But that actually makes her vote total even worse. Because it means she drastically underperformed Obama's vote totals despite getting the benefit of Republican voters who supported Mitt Romney in 2012. Hillary won voters who make over $250k a year, which was just 6% of the electorate, 47%-45%. (Indeed, Hillary won all voters who make $100k or more a year. So much for the Republicans as the party of the rich.)

Ready to be even more amazed? Trump also stole black and Hispanic voters from the Democrats. 

Trump won more Hispanic and black votes than either McCain or Romney did. Indeed, Trump won eight percent of the black vote in 2016, which is higher than Mitt Romney's seven percent in 2012. (Most of Trump's gains came from black men, where he received 13% of the vote). Trump also won 29% of the Hispanic vote, including 33% of Hispanic men, which is more than Romney's 27% of the Hispanic vote in 2012. 

For all the time the media spent telling you that Trump was racist against blacks and Hispanics, he actually outperformed Mitt Romney with both groups.

Which goes to show you that the media's assertion that Trump was racist, sexist and misogynistic actually had no impact on the race at all. I suspect that's because these insults, regularly hurled on social media for even the slightest provocations, have become akin to the boy who cried wolf. Liberals have spent so much time calling opponents sexist, racist or misogynistic that these insults have no substantive impact on voters. It's just noise. 

Worst of all, based on the Hillary's vote totals, those insults don't even energize the base. They might even do the opposite, energize the base of the person being insulted. Why would that happen? Because if Trump's supporters feel those attacks are illegitimate, it makes them want to support him even more than they did before. 

Calling Trump a sexist certainly didn't have much impact with white women, who supported Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, and with women in general, who supported Hillary Clinton 54%-40%, which was just one more percentage of support for her than Barack Obama received in 2012.

So much for that favored media storyline about all the women who were rooting for Hillary to break that glass ceiling. When it came to the actual voting, that just wasn't true.   

In fact, if you want to interject race into the equation, the only way I can see that it really applied in this election more than any other recent elections was in this way -- millions of black people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 didn't show up to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. (Obama won black voters 93% to 7% in 2012 while Hillary won black voters just 88% to 8% against Trump.) 

Given that Hillary espouses pretty similar positions to Obama and that Michelle and Barack campaigned widely for her in an effort to drive black voters to the polls, it certainly seems like many black voters chose to stay at home rather than support Hillary. 

Why?

Maybe it was because they weren't excited about Hillary's candidacy, or maybe it was because they were more willing to vote for someone who is the same color as them than for a white woman. 

Man, if only there was a word for when someone prefers someone of their own color over someone of a different color. 

Oh, yeah, that's called being racist. 

So if you're looking for racism in the 2016 presidential campaign, it's easy to find, but it's on the democratic side, not the republican side.

Ultimately Donald Trump didn't win because he mobilized a massive tidal wave of racist, sexist and misogynistic Republican voters to rally around him, he won because Hillary Clinton couldn't get the same Democrats who showed up at the polls in 2008 and 2012 to vote for her in 2016.

If all these protesting Democrats are looking for someone to blame for losing the election, all they have to do is look in the mirror.

It's not Trump's fault you lost the election, it's yours.  

Written by
Clay Travis is the founder of the fastest growing national multimedia platform, OutKick, that produces and distributes engaging content across sports and pop culture to millions of fans across the country. OutKick was created by Travis in 2011 and sold to the Fox Corporation in 2021. One of the most electrifying and outspoken personalities in the industry, Travis hosts OutKick The Show where he provides his unfiltered opinion on the most compelling headlines throughout sports, culture, and politics. He also makes regular appearances on FOX News Media as a contributor providing analysis on a variety of subjects ranging from sports news to the cultural landscape. Throughout the college football season, Travis is on Big Noon Kickoff for Fox Sports breaking down the game and the latest storylines. Additionally, Travis serves as a co-host of The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, a three-hour conservative radio talk program syndicated across Premiere Networks radio stations nationwide. Previously, he launched OutKick The Coverage on Fox Sports Radio that included interviews and listener interactions and was on Fox Sports Bet for four years. Additionally, Travis started an iHeartRadio Original Podcast called Wins & Losses that featured in-depth conversations with the biggest names in sports. Travis is a graduate of George Washington University as well as Vanderbilt Law School. Based in Nashville, he is the author of Dixieland Delight, On Rocky Top, and Republicans Buy Sneakers Too.