Now it's Trump's America, But Can He Deliver?
President-elect Trump? Well, whaddaya know. There really was a "hidden Trump vote" after all.
For months almost every opinion poll had Democrat Hillary Clinton firmly holding onto her No. 1 position in the presidential race. No problem, said Republican Donald Trump's team, which claimed a "hidden vote": Trump voters who didn't want to admit their choice to pollsters.
Preposterous thought. Numerous pollsters with sophisticated computers constantly belching out data, there was no way a hidden block of voters was eluding their scrutiny.
Until President-elect Trump.
Somewhere, I imagine, Mike Royko is smiling.
The late Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and champion of working stiffs in his beloved Chicago and elsewhere used to be so annoyed by political pollsters that in the early 1980s he urged his people to lie to them.
At that time, he didn't have much success, perhaps because people were not sufficiently embarrassed by whom they were voting for. Today's Trump voters apparently don't share that same level of enthusiasm.
What they do share is a towering discontent with the political status quo and the leaders of both parties' establishments. Why not lie to pollsters? By Trumpian reasoning, the pollsters are part of the "corrupt establishment" too.
Whether by accident or design, Trump tapped into that discontent and, along the way, flagrantly demonized immigrants, Latinos, Muslims and at least one "nasty woman," in his view, Hillary Clinton.
And the more we media workers and other critics criticized him, the more his loyal base embraced him and cheered him on.
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(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
