Twenty-sixteen has been the most historic election of the new millennia with the republican outsider, Donald Trump, capturing the presidency from a well-established Hillary Clinton. Most of the polls and projectionists were wrong, the electoral map was effectively re drawn, and democrats are going to have to commence a complete party autopsy to understand what went wrong. But it’s also important to understand Trump’s meteoric rise to power parallels the Brexit vote that recently took place in Britain. Trump won the election by a large margin, turned blue states, and ran the table as far as battleground states go…but how did he do it?

First, it’s important to understand why he gained so much support, and why Hillary did not. The basic fact is that the white working class put Trump in the presidency and allowed him to destroy the democrat’s so called Blue Wall of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump won all three of these outright, with the most coveted being Wisconsin, a state that has not been red since 1984. CNN reported that in rural areas, 40 percent of whites supported Trump,and that in many cases hidden voters not reached by polls meant the difference in large counties. I guess the Trump Campaign was correct in saying that polls don’t reach trailer parks. But the election result goes further than a Trump success here. There’s also room for a Clinton failure. While Obama was serving in office, the moderate wing of the democratic party was slowly losing ground to the progressive wing. In the past, these moderate democrats, called Blue Dogs, would have helped Clinton win the middle class in these key states, but they were nowhere to be found this election. The Clinton campaign not only underestimated the Trump support, but also incorrectly judged their own polling demographics.

But now, we need to know how Trump generated this support, and he did so by fully utilizing the RNC, something Hillary missed out on concerning the DNC. This started back in 2014 when the RNC realized the Obama campaign had delivered a severe political hit to them. They began to campaign, heavily in Florida, and ended up flipping ten counties in that state alone. Once those counties turned, Clinton couldn’t bring them back. But Clinton wasn’t just outmanned — she was outgunned as well. Trump’s insidious nature with the alt right was able to spur an internet revolution or backlash against liberal ideology. Resulting in drummed up support for individuals to go out to the polls in a particularly polarized America. Trumps fiery rhetoric, promise of tax cuts, and protectionist trading interests were able to get these working class voters to the polls, something that Clinton stopped short of.

Trump was able to capitalize on the industrial midwest region of the country and turned states red that experts predicted would stay blue.And that’s the most secretive part, all of this happened under the nose of the Clinton campaign and hit them like a silver bullet in the end. Trump was able to rally an army of voters without anyone realizing and storm the polls on election day in unprecedented fashion.

Sam Lombardo