Now it's Democrats Who Need an 'Autopsy'

Want to get attention in the Big Apple? Try carrying a big Donald Trump campaign sign through Times Square.

A network news producer and friend of mine happened to do just that on her way home from the Republican president-elect's victory speech.

The people whom she passed on the street didn't know that she was bringing the sign to give to a friend who collects campaign memorabilia. All they saw was a young African-American woman carrying a Trump sign on the night when many were experiencing the political shock of their lifetime: the unexpected defeat of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton after weeks of leading the polls.

With that in mind, my friend's good deed sounded about as risky as Bruce Willis' character in "Die Hard with a Vengeance," forced by a terrorist to walk around a Harlem street wearing a sandwich board that says "I Hate (plural of the N-word)."

Fortunately, my friend received nothing more damaging than angry glares and one woman who angrily shouted something anti-Trump.

More surprising, she said, were the smiles and thumbs-up gestures she received from black people, including a taxi driver, some Amtrak baggage handlers and a hotel doorman "who could have been Hispanic."

In short, she said, "I received scorn from white-collar professionals but support from working-class blacks and Hispanics."

Ah, congratulations, I told her, you have found some of Trump's "hidden voters."

For months, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway has been claiming a "big hidden Trump vote in this country."

Right, I thought, and he's going to win the unicorn vote, too, right?

After all, the nonpartisan Morning Consult and Politico tested this possibility by comparing online survey results with those of telephone surveys, which involve more social pressure, and found little difference.

Yet levels of concern varied with different experts. Even Democratic pollster Celinda Lake expressed concern at a Democratic National Convention event over the higher numbers Trump received in online surveys than he received in telephone surveys, according to the Washington Examiner.

But we can see in the exit polls from Election Day that more than 200 counties that voted for Barack Obama twice decided to go for Trump this time, a larger flip than most pollsters anticipated.

Unsurprisingly, most of the flipping came from white voters, and black voters still have 88 percent of their vote to Clinton, compared to 8 percent for Trump. Yet, considering Trump's weak outreach to black and Hispanic voters, it was surprising to see that he got 1 percent more of the black vote than his predecessor Mitt Romney in 2012.

And despite his casual stereotyping of immigrants as criminals, Trump beat Romney's 27 percent of the Hispanic vote by two points.

So as unscientific as my friend's experience might be as a measure of public opinion, it illustrates how dramatically our stereotypes can hide the complexities of Trump's appeal across racial groups.

If Trump's campaign has had a positive effect it is in raising public awareness of the vast numbers of working-class Americans who feel left-behind by globalization, cosmopolitanism and other socio-economic changes of the past half-century.

The big looming question now for both parties -- caught by surprise as they have been, along with multitudes of us media observers, by Trump's success -- is how they can tear down the walls of the information silos in which we Americans have balkanized ourselves and reintroduce ourselves to each other.

When the Republican National Committee found they had lost the popular vote in five of the previous six elections, they commissioned an "autopsy" of how they could reach out for more racial, ethnic and gender diversity.

Trump ignored that outreach approach and instead dug deeper. He rallied his party's conservative base with an appeal that worked most successfully with the non-college whites who felt left behind by economic changes and most ignored by the political and economic establishments.

Now it is the Democrats' turn. They, too, need to have an autopsy-style self-examination. Coming from the left, for example, Sen. Bernie Sanders' agenda is very similar Trump's on the right, although they offer very different remedies. His faction of the party does not have all the answers, but they deserve to be heard. That's one way to begin to lure that "hidden" Trump vote out of the shadows.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)