Trump might use his new-found power to build up a real, strong electoral base. Photo: Carlo Allegri/Reuters

Donald Trump’s victory has left many pundits with egg on their hot blushing faces – an entire bubbling omelette. They’ve reacted by going from one extreme – sniggering at his chances – to another. Now they’re hailing his win as a revolution, the harbinger of a major realignment in US electoral politics, which somehow went undetected by conventional polling techniques.

They’re still spinning.

A cool look at the available numbers shows a different picture. Trump won fair and square, to be sure, but it is the tactical victory of a weak candidate who knew how to fish out the right amount of votes from the right places.

It is a victorious uprising not a revolution. A battle has been won, not a war.

A revolution would be a strategic victory. The victories of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s, and Ronald Reagan’s in the 1980s, shifted the centre of US electoral politics for decades thereafter. In 2016? All the post-electoral statistics suggest that Trump’s victory leaves Republican Party strategists facing the same long-term electoral challenges that they did after Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012.

That year the Republicans drew up a report that showed their core base was shrinking and that they needed to make more inroads with growing minority groups, like Hispanics, which Romney had lost with large margins to Barack Obama. Reince Priebus, who will be chief of staff in Donald Trump’s White House, knows that report well. He supervised its writing.

This report was so convincing that it formed part of the conventional wisdom informing pundits in 2016. It is why they thought Trump’s rhetoric about Latinos (among others) was politically suicidal. If the pundits were so wrong, doesn’t it mean that the report was wrong as well?

Not really. The report was focusing on long-term strategic issues. Trump exploited a narrow window of tactical opportunity: maximising turnout by the diminishing Republican base and depressing turnout for a weak, unpopular opponent, Hillary Clinton.

But there’s a limit to how long you can continue to squeak out electoral victories by winning greater margins of a shrinking base.

Consider just three sets of facts that emerge from this election.

First, Trump lost the popular vote. This would be the sixth, out of the last seven Presidential elections (that is, since 1992), where the Republicans could not even win a plurality of the popular vote. In the same period, the Democrats have twice managed to win the popular vote three times in a row.

The Democrats’ mistakes cannot be put down to mistaken polls. The polls were right

Of course, on two of those occasions – the 2000 election and this year – the Republicans still won the White House, despite losing the popular vote. But the argument here is about demographic trends and overall popularity. Donald Trump has not reversed Republican weakness in the country at large.

Moreover, in terms of the popular vote, this year sees the Republicans with a weaker result than in the last two presidential elections, which they lost. Trump obtained fewer votes than Mitt Romney and, marginally, fewer even than John McCain in his landslide defeat in 2008. This, despite there being 40 million more eligible voters today than eight years ago.

The statistics are damning. Forty-five per cent of eligible voters stayed at home. Six million fewer people voted than in 2012, two-thirds of them Democrats. Of those who voted, around five per cent voted for third parties. Trump and Clinton obtained only around a quarter each of the popular vote.

If all you’re interested in is who’s in the White House for the next four years, then these statistics don’t matter. But if you’re interested in what this says about the US moving forward, then extreme caution is called for when drawing conclusions about electoral realignments and political revolutions.

The need for caution is underlined by the second set of facts. The dynamics of the Rust Belt – the decaying industrial zones of the Midwest, where Trump racked up striking improbable victories – should not be oversimplified.

Yes, Trump won white working-class voters with huge new margins. Obama lost them to Mitt Romney by a 26-point margin. Clinton lost them by 39 points to Trump – a Democrat performance worse than Walter Mondale’s in 1984 (when the Democrats lost every state except for Minnesota and the District of Columbia).

These margins helped Trump win the Rust Belt. But it was hardly the only factor.

Millions of Democrats turned out to vote for their party’s candidates in the Congressional and Senate races but then left the Presidential choice blank – having been repelled by Clinton. In Michigan, 90,000 people voted Democrat but not for Clinton (or Trump). She lost the state by 13,000 votes.

In fact, the election turned on 112,000 votes in three states. Clinton neglected them. Trump knew where they were. Of the 700 counties (country-wide) that voted twice for Obama, Trump took a third, many of them in the Midwest.

The Democrats’ mistakes cannot be put down to mistaken polls. The polls were right – the swing state polls performed exactly as in 2012, with the same degree of error. But the Democrats (and the pundits) interpreted them wrongly. Trump (and Bill Clinton, whose insistence on the white working class was ignored by his wife’s advisors) got it right.

Because the polls were correct, the final set of facts should emerge clearly. Some southern states, a Republican stronghold for the past 50 years, are gradually becoming competitive for the Democrats. Demographic changes are seeing the percentage of the Hispanic vote rise, which currently favours the Democrats.

Now it’s true that Clinton performed worse with Latinos than Obama did in 2012 (by five per cent), just as she did with Afro-American voters. But that’s due to her personal weakness as a candidate.

Strategically, the trend in the south favours the Democrats. Trump’s scorched earth policy may have been good enough for one electoral battle. But, in the longer term, the Republicans will need to build bridges with Latinos and other minorities.

If the numbers are so clear, how come so many pundits are still hailing Trump’s result as a revolution?

One reason could be that it makes their mistakes with prediction easier to explain. Revolutions are shock events, inherently unpredictable. Another reason is that, having been so wrong about Trump once, everyone is taking refuge in the new conventional wisdom. Why stick your neck out or appear not to have learned your lesson in humility?

And, of course, there is the devastating nature of the Democrats’ defeat. It is easy to be mesmerised by it and forget about Republican weakness. The Republicans now dominate the offices of the land. They control the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives, while having almost twice the number of governors.

Control of offices brings real power. But do not confuse holding office with popularity or stable electoral coalitions.

True, Trump might use his new-found power to build up a real, strong electoral base. As of today, however, he still does not have it.

This brash, risk-taking billionaire played the general election the same way, all these years, he’s played the tax code. He gamed it.

ranierfsadni@europe.com