President-elect Donald Trump took his Thank You victory tour to Hershey, Pennsylvania, on Thursday night, regaling the crowd with a 20-minute play-by-play of his Election Night victory, boasting about how he won the GOP "bride that got away" — Pennsylvania hadn't voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1988 — and thanking black voters for staying home on Election Day.
Trump began by claiming he "did great with the African-American community," and crediting his "famous" pitch to black voters: "What the hell do you have to lose?" Black voters were "smart, and they picked up on it like you wouldn't believe, and you know what else?" Trump asked. "They didn't come out to vote for Hillary, they didn't come out. And that was the big thing, so thank you to the African-American community."
Black voters in Pennsylvania (and elsewhere) in fact "voted overwhelmingly for Clinton," says Albert Hunt at BloombergView, but Trump was right about the second part: African-American voters "were only 10 percent of the electorate, down from 13 percent last time. If black voters had made up 12 percent of the Pennsylvania electorate, she probably would have won the state."
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