编者按：北京时间11月9日，激烈的美国总统大选终于落下帷幕，共和党总统候选人、纽约地产大亨唐纳德·特朗普（Donald Trump）率先拿到270张选举票取得胜利，当选新一届美国总统。作为“现代历史上最没有准备好就当选总统的人”（《纽约时报》），特朗普是如何赢得选举的？也许下面的文章可以为你解答。
"The silent majority stands with Trump."
It’s the key factor. Remember this quote on those signs being held by his supporters? It served as both a slogan, and, as we have found out…
It was a warning.
A warning that went completely unheeded by every major news outlet. They laughed it off.
“That’s great kids, but Clinton has the vocal majority, good game.”
And yet the election results prove that the slogan was indeed true. A huge silent majority overwhelmed the predicted polling outcome.
Why was this the key factor?
And why were the polls so radically off?
For starters, the Democrats made a terrible assumption, one that hadn’t caused them any trouble up until now:
They assumed that states that historically voted blue would continue to do so.
And this is where it all goes down. Every polling prediction used this assumption as a starting point, taking them for granted. They focused heavily on battleground states, ignoring the possibility that their home base was susceptible to attack. They ignored the warning of a silent majority.
Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan have been blue for the past two decades. This election, each one flipped red, undermining the core of pundit predictions. It was precisely when this flip happened that everyone started panicking and Clinton’s odds of winning plummeted. The silent majority struck, and it struck hard.
But why were they silent up until now?
The Clinton campaign made it acceptable, trendy, and cool to hate Trump supporters
The Clinton campaign colluded with major media news outlets (as evidenced from Wikileaks) and constantly pumped out negative videos of Trump while largely ignoring the constant scandals Hillary found herself in.
In his speeches, Trump often made remarks of certain minority groups. These remarks usually included praise alongside criticism, and he usually made sure to add that he didn’t mean to say that a minority group as a whole was to blame.
The news outlets pounced on this. It wasn’t hard, they just had to edit out or not show the parts where Trump explained himself. As a result, the people who actually attended his rallies saw perfectly reasonable statements, and those who didn’t only saw edited footage that showed him making racist and outlandish remarks with no clarification. On top of that, the edited footage was often spliced with cheering from his audience. Any reasonable person seeing a clip like that, without knowing it was edited, would rightly be horrified by both Trump and his supporters.
And so a divide was created.
“Trump is racist and his supporters are racist” became the justification for hating Trump supporters. From that point on, any person who outed themselves as a Trump supporter while in a liberal circle could expect to get shamed. The better option was to stay silent.
The Clinton campaign didn’t stop there. They paid celebrities large sums of money to endorse Hillary, in an effort to reach a millennial base. They even paid many prominent YouTubers to endorse her, videos of which can be found right now (along with videos by YouTubers who called out that kind of play and refused).
They made it seem like all the “cool kids” were supporting Hillary, and against the evil that was Trump. How does a Trump supporter argue against a pop culture icon telling everyone they are evil? Should probably stay silent instead.
With the mainstream media calling out Trump supporters as evil, celebrities saying the same, and even many universities deeming pro-Trump comments as “hate speech”, it’s not hard to see why the silent majority formed and became as potent as it was.
The Democrats tried to show that passing judgment on groups of people as a whole was bigoted. And yet that’s exactly what they did by lumping all Trump supporters into a “basket of deplorables”.
That irony was not lost on the silent majority.
The DNC collusion against Bernie Sanders created “Bernie bros”
It’s well known now that the Democratic primary was not fairly fought. Bernie Sanders was backstabbed by the very party he was representing, due to its higher financial and political interest in a Clinton presidency. Yet Bernie’s message touched the hearts of many who sought to overthrow the establishment and the system that Clinton represented. When he was betrayed by the DNC, many of his supporters refused to back Clinton, the one who unfairly robbed the man they put their faith in of a fair fight. They saw in Bernie an outsider who would bring change to the system, and who else was a populist icon who also wanted to bring down the establishment?
You guessed it.
Well… you can’t really announce out loud that you were for Bernie and now for Trump. See the point above.
The silent majority grew even more.
Legitimate issues went unaddressed by Clinton
Trump wanted to “Make America Great Again”. How was he going to do this? We still don’t know, but it does involve a lot of winning apparently.
“Making it great again” recognizes that it currently is not. His platform was based around acknowledging that America had problems while under eight years of Democrat rule.
America is suffering. Unemployment is high, and worse, the government is trying to distort statistics to show otherwise, in the hopes of winning another election cycle. Trump identified areas where it was affecting the core bulk of Americans, such as job outsourcing. Did it even matter if he didn’t have a concrete plan? Just saying the problem exists alone let those infuriated by the current system feel that their voices were being heard. “Make America Great Again”, while vague in its means, was nevertheless inspirational in its promised end.
What did the Democrats do to counter this? Remember this attempt?
“America is already great.”
What voters saw in this attempted rebuttal, was the Democratic party once again sweeping their concerns under the rug, telling disillusioned members who had voted for them before that the country was already great and that no change was necessary.
“Make America Great Again” resonated with those who wanted solutions.
Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign struggled for a while to come up with a good slogan. At first, they resorted to simple statements on her website, such as
“We cannot afford a Donald Trump presidency.”
Not too inspirational. Who’s the one running the fear campaign now?
Then they shopped around some more, and ultimately settled on “I’m With Her”. This was used all the way through Election Day.
Not only did their indecisiveness on a catchy slogan hurt their marketplace exposure time (and people who work in branding will know this all too well) but the slogan itself was hardly inspirational to those with legitimate concerns. It simply oozed selfishness.
Voters saw Trump as: “MAGA, we have problems but I will fix them for you”
While they saw Hillary as: “Be with me and help me become president. At least I’m not Trump. He’s racist. Me me me, it’s my turn.”
One slogan was a rallying cry for all of America.
The other slogan was all about Hillary Clinton.
And then we go to the debates.
What did Trump keep on doing in the debates? He kept on highlighting the struggles of the blue-collar workers, even in blue states. Even during questions that had nothing to do with them, he kept on bringing the topic back to why jobs were becoming scarce, and what he would do (albeit vaguely) to fix it. Clinton’s platform was largely focused on still attacking his flaws and defending herself against her own baggage rather than acknowledging the suffering voters in the blue states that she thought were hers from the start.
The silent majority of those states had other plans.
The Emails + Wikileaks
I really wonder how Hillary will feel from now every time she opens an email browser and realize what her past actions cost her. The email scandal could have gone away had she told the truth about what it was that she deleted. But she didn’t.
Supporters tried to say that they were insignificant. But if the contents were insignificant, why was she trying so desperately to hide them?
And then there were the Wikileaks, every day pumping out more and more evidence about Clinton’s media collusion, her receiving debate questions ahead of time, proof of the DNC sabotaging Bernie, the questionable use of charity money, and basically verifying that accusations dismissed by the Clinton campaign as conspiracies were indeed true.
While the mainstream media outlets refused to cover this, the silent majority were already committed to learning what they needed to further their conviction.
Liberals who were still with her tried to blow off the whole thing; there was no reason to think that she had committed anything sketchy.
The silent majority had all the reasons they needed.
Vote Wars: Revenge of the Silent Majority
And then they struck. On Election Day, the silent majority flipped the predictions by turning crucial historically blue states red, and then continuing the rampage. As the map started bleeding red in parts it shouldn’t have, the media outlets panicked. It was easy enough before the election to claim that there was no way for Trump to win, in hopes of discouraging voters. But they were powerless when the actual election was underway.
This is a historic election that will go down in the books. Trump fought against a ridiculously large gauntlet of contenders in the primaries, and won. He recovered from his own party betraying him after his leaked comments about grabbing women. He fought against every underhanded tactic the DNC threw at him, media collusion, every mainstream media outlet being against him, his supporters being silenced, and won.
Has there ever been another moment in history when a billionaire was the underdog?
Academics, from now and possibly centuries later (if we as a species make it) will study and analyze this election. And I hope that right now, despite almost every liberal crying about how racism and bigotry are what drove these results, that they realize there were many factors at play here.
Racism? This was the same country that elected Obama. Twice. And some states that gave their votes to him now gave them to Trump.
Bigotry? The definition of bigotry is the refusal to acknowledge other viewpoints. And by nonstop claiming it was the fault of a racist country, the losing side is fulfilling this requirement.
If your side lost in this election, recognize where the blame truly lies. Demonize the other side all you want, but recognize that the very ones who tried to lead you to victory performed selfish actions without your consent, used underhanded tactics, undermined democracy, divided the country by promoting intolerance to different political beliefs, withheld crucial information about your candidate’s shady dealings, and ultimately lost it for you.
You did your part. Your party didn’t.
