The media, polls were wrong

OPINION:

The Republican Party committed suicide Tuesday night. We were told on good authority that the Grand Old Party would do just that if it elected Donald Trump. The wise heads, if not necessarily the wise guys of media big and small, said so. On one memorable day in early October we counted 32 items in a single edition of The Washington Post setting out the evil of the Donald that Republicans and the nation could expect if voters took such a leap. But leap they did, and that’s a pretty lively corpse in the parlor. Now the Democrats must deal with disarray.

Voters, denied the privilege of breathing the rarified and sometimes hallucinatory air of certain precincts in Manhattan and Washington, had kept their peace during the long march of strange and sometimes weird campaign events, even as they were harried by pollsters, reporters and finally the billion-dollar ground force assembled by Hillary Clinton to round them up and herd them to the polls.

It didn’t work, and not because Hillary was a “flawed” candidate, in the word that became the cliche of the post-mortem analyses, or because the Donald was better organized and for once more disciplined, but because he had early on put his ear to the ground and listened. The Democrats listened only to each other, taking sustenance in their collective wisdom, and what they heard was nonsense. Donald Trump was in touch with what the hicks and rubes were trying to tell the ruling elites, and Hillary and her wise guys were not.

The evidence rolled in with the votes. The Donald modestly outperformed the Republicans of 2012 among both black and Hispanic voters, and massively among the unfashionable white working-class stiffs who had attended neither Harvard nor Yale nor any other college, and whose concerns and dreams had been long ignored by the elites of both parties. Without these voters Hillary’s candidacy was doomed, and the repudiation of the Democrats was even deeper.

Republicans not only elected a president, but won states that Democrats had owned for decades, retaining the crucial control of the House and Senate, electing three new governors and more state legislators than they thought possible. When the smoke and the cordite aroma of the battlefield cleared, the Republicans held 33 state houses and control of 69 of 99 state legislative chambers. They won the state senate in Kentucky that had been safely Democratic for nearly a century.

As the sun rose on Wednesday morning — in the east, as usual — neither the Democrats nor the pundits could accept what their eyes and ears told them. The Never Trump crowd began to make noises that pshaw! they had been secretly praying for the Donald all along. Perhaps one or two of them actually had, but if there was a mandate for Donald Trump in the results it was to beware of posers and easy riders, and remember who brung him to the dance.

President Obama invited the Donald to the White House on Thursday to talk about a transition to the Trump White House, and he and the president-elect said all the right things to reassure everyone. The president was particularly gracious with the needed reminder that when a president succeeds, everyone, Republican and Democrat alike, shares in the success.