Revisiting 2016 Presidential Election

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The 2016 presidential election which made Donald J. Trump U.S. President, is in the news once more, in The People of the State of New York against Donald J. Trump election interference case, glibly known as the hush money trial.

How and why did he win the election?  Here’s one man’s opinion, from the book Beyond The Messy Truth by Van Jones.

“Though 2016 was a calamity, it was long in the making. I have spend a great deal of time trying to find out what went wrong in 2016 in particular.

To prepare for my CNN show The Messy Truth, I travelled to numerous states, trying to understand why Hilary Clinton lost an election that most pollsters said she would win. On one trip, I flew to Detroit to get to the bottom of why Michigan, which had gone to Obama during both of his elections, voted for Trump (by a margin of ten thousand measley votes). I found out one reason was that two hundred thousand more whites (who make up 75 percent of the population in the state) voted for third and fourth parties, like the Libertarian Party and the Green Party. As election analyses later revealed, Trump was much better at mobilizing Michigan’s lapsed (people who hadn’t voted in recent elections) and new voters than Clinton was.

But another fact got my attention: Analysis showed that Hillary Clinton severely underperformed Obama in the Michigan counties with high numbers of black voters. Those counties contained 37 percent of the state’s voters. I wanted to know where she went wrong with African Americans in the microcosm of Michigan, since they are a mainstay for the Democratic Party nationwide.” Page 40, Beyond The Messy Truth by Van Jones. 

Nonqaba waka Msimang

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