Donald Trump has pulled off the unthinkable and won the American presidency, multiple media outlets are projecting. Anyone who tries to explain the 2016 presidential election in a tweet, or even a column, will capture only a fraction of the story.
Now that that's out of the way, here are my four theories of the case.
1. White people woke up. People who thought that everything Obama represents is an existential threat to them. White people who were not reliable Republican voters, but who felt totally abandoned by the powers that be. Exurban whites. Rural whites.
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2. Hillary Clinton couldn't cut it. An eminently qualified candidate could not rise above 30 years of being Hillary Clinton, and could not figure out how to effectively counter persistent doubts about her credibility, including some she sowed herself. She didn't get all the votes she could have gotten.
3. Technology. It is now possible for the disenfranchised to fight back, to give to the establishment that looks down upon them a middle finger, and to do it in a way that the establishment cannot perceive. Technology has been an unheralded magnifier of Donald Trump's support.
4. Restrictions on voting. It has been an open secret that the GOP has done everything it can, legally and politically, to reduce the ability of minorities to vote in presidential elections. Twenty states made it harder to vote since 2006.
Put these four suppositions together, and you begin to explain how we live in a world that can elect Barack Hussein Obama twice as president, a world that still supports his policies, and then turn around and elect an openly bigoted billionaire businessman from New York to be his successor.
