We should resist the temptation to over-interpret Trump’s election victory. Progressives who think they’ve woken up in another country should calm down, take a stiff draught and reflect on the actual results from the swing states. First, with the exceptions of Iowa and Ohio, there were no Trump landslides in key states. He merely did as well as Mitt Romney had in 2012, compensating for smaller votes in the suburbs with larger votes in rural areas to achieve the same overall result. His combined margin of victory in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania was razor thin, under 78,000 votes. The surprise of the election was not a huge white working-stiff shift to Trump but rather his success in retaining the loyalty of Romney voters, and indeed even slightly improving on the latter’s performance amongst evangelicals. Thus economic populism and nativism potently combined with, but did not displace, the traditional social conservative agenda.
A key factor was Trump’s cynical covenant with religious conservatives after their own candidate in the primaries, Ted Cruz, dropped out in May. He gave them a free hand to draft the party platform at the Convention and then married one of their popular heroes, Mike Pence of Indiana, a nominal Catholic who attends an evangelical megachurch. At stake, of course, was control of the Supreme Court and a final chance to reverse Roe vs Wade. This may explain why Clinton, who unlike Obama allowed herself to be identified with late-term abortions, underperformed him amongst Latina/Latino Catholics by a margin of 8 points or more.