Lana, can you explain to me how can someone look at Trump during the campaign and not see the racism, sexism and incompetence? I mean really, his own words, his own actions are all the proof one needs.
You can see it, but decide that it doesn't matter, because you are not ever, in a million years, going to vote for Hillary Clinton, the near-literal embodiment of the system you know has been fucking you for decades--and who campaigned on "everything's fine, we just need to tinker around the edges" when your own life has been going to shit.
But then you look at Donald Trump and see this incompetent, racist, sexist baboon. And you either decide that a) that doesn't matter because he's promising some sort of change, b) you can't bring yourself to vote for either of these assholes so you vote for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein or write in Bernie Sanders or something, or c) you just stay home because there's no point, you're fucked either way (or you go, but leave the Presidential line blank). (Or d) you're a victim of voter suppression tactics.)
Look at Wisconsin. In 2012, Barack Obama got 1,620,985 votes, and Mitt Romney got 1,407,966 votes. In 2016, Donald Trump got 1,405,284 votes, and Hillary Clinton got 1,382,536 votes. People didn't want to vote for Trump--more people voted for Romney when he lost than for Trump when he won!--but they even more didn't want to vote for Clinton.
It's funny--I see people blaming the voters for Clinton's loss, as if they somehow owed her their vote. It's not that Clinton failed the voters, the voters failed Clinton, according to this analysis. Here's the thing: nobody owes anyone their vote. It's on the candidate to earn each and every vote. Hillary Clinton wasn't talking about what she would do for people (25% of her ads were about policy, by far the lowest proportion of any modern presidential campaign); she campaigned on "TRUMP BAD." And that's not a winning message. If you don't tell people how electing you will make their lives better, you can't be surprised when they don't bother to vote for you.
Trump, whatever his other faults, told people how he was going to make their lives better (even though he hasn't done much of any of it): he would kill NAFTA, which people blame (rightly or wrongly) for sending their jobs away; he would kill the TPP, which people feared would send even more jobs away; he would bring coal jobs back (even though coal is a dying industry). And, yes, he would kick out all the immigrants who are stealing your jobs (that you won't do anyway) and the Muslims who are going to kill you (even though you're far more likely to be killed by a right-wing terrorist). Trump told people that with him there was at least a chance their lives could be better; Clinton made it pretty clear that things were going to stay largely the same under her Presidency.
And when your income has been stagnant for a decade, you're living paycheque-to-paycheque, your health insurance premiums are flying up (even though they're lower than they would have been had the ACA never been passed--if you could even get insurance without the ACA)... you will take even the faintest glimmer of hope of something better than you will a promise that things will stay the same.
Would I have voted for Trump? Hell fucking no. But does that mean I can't understand what sort of pressures would drive someone to vote for him in spite of his misogyny and bigotry?
I saw it noted that since 1992, the winners of the Presidential elections have been whichever of the major party candidates managed to portray themselves as more the outsider. Tell me--which portrayed themselves better as an outsider, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton?
Keep in mind that a lot of these Trump voters will cheer, unprompted, when Bernie Sanders outlines his economic agenda for them. Yes, there are Trump voters who cannot be won over--the "deplorables" to whom Clinton accurately referred. But the others can be--but not by someone they see as inextricably linked to the machine that's been screwing them over. Populist sentiment will attach itself to populist candidates sometimes regardless of political ideology--we saw it here in BC where the federal populist vote went from the left-wing NDP in 1988 to the right-wing Reform in 1993 (in part because the BC NDP won power in 1991 provincially and were rather unpopular by 1993). And when that populist sentiment is running sufficiently high, as it was in 2016, and only one candidate actively tries to harness it, that candidate suddenly has a much better chance of winning.
But right now, populist and anti-establishment sentiment is running high. We saw it with Rodrigo Duterte. We saw it with Brexit. We saw it with Donald Trump. We almost saw it with Marine Le Pen. We saw it with Theresa May's crash and burn (or, rather, Jeremy Corbyn's outperforming expectations). We see it with Bernie Sanders being the most popular politician in the US.
Politicial populism is currently a force to be reckoned with. Ignore it at your peril; harness it properly and you will win.
Donald Trump saw that wave and rode it. Hillary Clinton was drowned.