Debunking the Rust Belt narrative: It wasn’t the angry white voter

You’ve been told that droves of angry white voters in the Rust Belt answered the clarion call to elect Donald Trump.

This from the same news media that told you for months, and into the night on Election Day, that Trump’s appeal to those angry white voters was racist, misogynist and various other –ists.

Now they’re telling you that it wasn’t so much the –ists and –isms, it was Trump’s populist message about how America has passed these poor folks by, and he has some solution for getting them back on the right track.

If that was the case, you wouldn’t expect Trump’s vote totals specific to the Rust Belt, and then also nationally, to resemble what Mitt Romney, in his 2012 election loss to Barack Obama, was able to pull in.

Let’s look first at Wisconsin, maybe the biggest upset of them all on Tuesday night. Trump has 1.409 million votes in the unofficial total in the Cheesehead State, defeating Hillary Clinton’s 1.382 million votes by a slim 27,000-vote margin.

Romney, in 2012, got 1.410 million votes in Wisconsin. The Romney total is about 1,500 votes above what Trump got in his victory in Wisconsin.

Clinton, for her part, trails well behind what Obama got in Wisconsin in 2012, at 1.621 million votes, about 239,000 more than Clinton in 2016.

Next door in Michigan, Trump got 2.279 million votes in 2016, an improvement of 114,000 votes over Romney in 2012, but Clinton, at 2.267 million in 2016, is nearly 300,000 votes behind Obama’s 2.564 million in 2012.

Ohio, similar story: Trump got 2.772 million votes there, 111,000 more votes than Romney’s 2.661 million in 2012, but Clinton’s 2.317 million is 510,000 votes off from Obama’s 2.828 million in 2012.

And finally Pennsylvania: Trump was at his strongest here, at 2.913 million votes in 2016, an improvement of 230,000 votes over Romney’s 2.680 million in 2012, but Clinton’s 2.845 million is 145,000 off from Obama’s 2.990 million in 2012.

You look at the numbers in the four Rust Belt states that delivered the presidency to Trump, and what you see is Trump surpassing Romney’s total by roughly 455,000 votes, and Clinton underperforming Obama by roughly 1.2 million votes.

Back to that narrative about the angry white voters in the Rust Belt taking up Trump’s message of economic populism and flocking to the polls to send him to the White House. My quick math has him improving in raw votes in the four states over the Romney effort in 2012 by about 4.8 percent.

My quick math on Clinton and Obama has her underperforming 2012 by about 14.1 percent.

These trends play out at the national level as well, going back two cycles. Obama, in his first run for president in 2008, got 69.5 million votes, then won re-election in 2012 with 65.5 million, 4 million less. Clinton, in 2016, will win the popular vote, right now, with a trickle of votes still to be counted, she’s at 60.5 million, to Trump’s 60.1 million.

So there you’ve got for the Democrats: 69.5 million in 2008, 65.5 million in 2012, 60.5 million in 2016.

And for the Republicans: 59.9 million votes for McCain in 2008, 60.7 million for Romney in 2012, 60.1 million for Trump in 2016.

What you have here, if you’re a Democrat, isn’t a problem connecting with angry white voters in the Rust Belt. It’s a problem connecting with angry Democratic voters in the Rust Belt and on the coasts as well.

Column by Chris Graham