Panel of political analysts study Trump victory
Evan Sanders
Costas Panagopoulos, director of the Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy and the graduate program in Elections and Campaign Management at Fordham University, is silhouetted in a graph showing voters who changed to the Republican party.
Louis Jacobson, deputy editor/senior writer for the Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact.com website, speaks to those in attendance of the 2016 Election Analysis Forum held in the Eberly Hall at California University of Pennsylvania.
Evan Sanders
Those in attendance of the 2016 Election Analysis Forum held in the Eberly Hall at California University of Pennsylvania listen as Political analyst Jon Delano, money and politics editor at KDKA-TV, speaks.
Costas Panagopoulos, director of the Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy and the graduate program in Elections and Campaign Management at Fordham University, speaks to those in attendance of the 2016 Election Analysis Forum held in the Eberly Hall at California University of Pennsylvania.
Donald Trump’s surprising win was about the working class deciding it wants change.
That was the consensus of a four-person panel of political analysts who met at California University of Pennsylvania a week after Trump stunned the nation by besting Democrat Hillary Clinton in one of the most heavily watched and divisive presidential campaigns in recent history.
“The Trump voters are really New Deal Democrats,” said William Binning, chair emeritus at the Political Science Department at Youngstown State University in Ohio. “They think they have been screwed by the government.”
States such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which have traditionally voted Democratic, voted for Trump. As a result, the election swung away from Clinton and went to Trump, who won the popular vote in those three states by a combined total of around 110,000. In addition, the majority of voters in three other states, Florida, Iowa and Ohio, which voted for Obama in 2012, voted for Trump.
In the Greater Pittsburgh area, only Allegheny County went to Clinton. Other counties, including Fayette, Westmoreland and Washington, supported Trump.
Still, Clinton — who won the popular vote — faced an uphill battle trying to win a third term for the Democrats, said Costas Panagoupolos, the director of Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy and the graduate program in Elections and Campaign Management at Fordham University in New York. She was not able to piece together the Obama coalition, he said.
“Trump beat Clinton on terrorism and immigration,” Panagoupolos said.
Then, there were Trump’s outrageous statements that garnered him free television time, he said.
“How did Trump manage it?” Panagoupolos asked. “White anxiety about multi-culturalism. Trump got nearly $2 billion in free media.”
“If women supported Hillary Clinton more, then she would have won,” he said.
But, late-deciding voters also helped elect the billionaire president. More than 50 percent of that group of voters selected Trump over Clinton, said Louis Jacobson, deputy editor and senior writer for the PolitiFact.com website.
“The GOP has a huge lock on federal and state government, even though it has a much smaller electorate,” Jacobson said. “Trump doesn’t come from a policy background. He might sub-contract some governance to the GOP.”
But what if Trump had lost, Binning asked his fellow panelists.
“They would probably be wondering about the nominating system,” he said. “How did he get nominated? Through the media. This guy was a TV star, a strong, tough guy who bossed people around. Look what happened in California. People elected the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) governor. If we didn’t have the law that the president had to be born in the United States, we could have President Schwarzenegger instead of a second-rate reality star.”
Alan Abramowitz, a political science professor at Emory University in Georgia, noted that 59 percent of all eligible voters cast ballots, much higher than in previous elections. He too said Trump has an uphill battle on his hands.
The panelists said Trump will also have a hard time changing President Barack Obama’s health care law or the health care law — which is providing 20 million people with health care coverage — despite the fact the Republicans hold the majority in both the House and Senate.
“The transition team is in chaos,” Abramowitz said. “And there is uncertainty about cabinet positions.”