The base of primary voters Trump cultivated, described in-depth in chapter one, stayed with him and then expanded, ultimately taking him past Clinton and breaking through the longstanding Democratic “Blue Wall” in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania – swing states lost to Republican presidential hopefuls for nearly three decades. Throughout the Rust Belt, which Obama comfortably carried in 2008 and 2012, Trump racked up massive backing in blue-collar counties that surmounted Clinton’s stronger showing in the cities and more white-collar suburbs.
Clinton maintained slight advantages in what had previously been general-election bellwethers like Hamilton County in Ohio, Bucks County in Pennsylvania and Oakland County in Michigan. It’s likely Trump’s harsh comments on immigration helped Clinton improve on Obama’s performance with Latinos in states like Arizona and Texas, where she significantly closed the gap from 2012 but still came up short.
On the other side of the ledger, though, Trump’s candidacy fueled a decisive surge in turnout in rural and working-class counties and in areas where the percentage of people over age 55 is higher than the national average. Furthermore, 1.4 million more people from those areas voted in 2016 than four years ago, according to the American Communities Project. Exit polls showed a 14-point swing among whites without a college education toward Trump versus Romney’s 2012 performance. Critically for Trump, his appeal resonated with voters in states that are key to winning the Electoral College.
This shift was easily spotted at the county level. For instance, in small, working-class Juneau County, Wisconsin, home to 26,500 people, Trump bested Clinton by 26 points. President Obama won the county by 9 points four years ago. In Macomb County, Michigan — a blue-collar Detroit suburb home to 855,000 people — Trump won by 11.5 points. Obama won it by 4 points in 2012. And in Lackawanna County in northeast Pennsylvania, typically a critical county for Democrats in the battleground state, Clinton won, but barely, beating Trump by about 4 points. Obama won the county four years ago by 28 points.
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