Trump won because Republicans of all stripes went home to party's flawed new owner: Keith Boag
Surprising victory suggests many Republicans got over their concerns about nominee
Donald Trump succeeded because "he heard voices other people weren't hearing."
That was the simple explanation offered by Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan the morning after Tuesday night's earthquake. But at best, it's only partly true.
Trump will be president because Republicans of all sorts decided to come home to their party and live with his faults.
Ryan himself is evidence of that.
He condemned Trump's personal attack on Judge Gonzalo Curiel last summer as the "textbook definition of racism." And yet he got over it. Now he looks forward to working with the new president.
Other Republicans, including big names like senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, got over similar concerns. Only a relative few, such as Ohio Gov. John Kasich, wouldn't or, in the case of Senator John McCain, did and then didn't.
Their difficulty was never that Trump "heard voices other people weren't hearing," it was that he paid attention to voices they found repellent.
He paid attention to Ann Coulter, the alt-right and Breitbart.com, all of whom delight in enflaming racial resentments.
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Trump built his campaign on a platform and rhetoric that was repugnant to a huge swath of the Republican Party.
He tapped into the frustrations of people who feel left behind by a changing economy, or frightened that violence from foreign lands will arrive on American shores, and he made Muslims and immigrants their scapegoats.
The legitimacy of their anxiety didn't cancel out the ugliness it provoked — until it did.
Republicans got over it
Many Republicans hesitated to get behind Trump during the primary season. For a long time, he seemed to have a ceiling of only about 35 per cent of Republican voters.
But they got over it.
Republicans gradually pulled behind Trump, first for the nomination, and then in the general election.
Exit polls show Trump's support was fairly typical Republican. He did better than Mitt Romney had in 2012 with working class whites, and better than expected among college-educated whites.
He did better in some rural areas than Romney and no worse in some urban areas.
His share of both the Hispanic vote and the African-American vote was slightly higher than Romney's, too, although not where it was under George W. Bush.
His odds also got a boost from a decline in the overall voter turnout, which seems to have been down by more than five million voters compared to 2012. Lower turnout disproportionately helps Republicans because the most reliable voter happens to be their core constituent — older and white.
It seems Hillary Clinton actually won more votes overall, but she didn't spread them as efficiently as Trump throughout the battleground states. She ran up more votes than she needed in states she couldn't lose, and fell short in states she had to win.
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The Clinton turnout problem was a surprise for her team because they had claimed to have two significant advantages over Republicans: a much richer database of voter information to help them identify their voters and many more field workers to get those voters to the polls.
Just as the problems with Trump were exposed in the primaries, so too were the problems with Clinton.
She had the money, she had the organization, she had almost the entire Democratic establishment behind her and yet for months Senator Bernie Sanders dogged her through the primary states.
He branded her as "more of the same," too friendly to Wall Street and too hostile to change.
Many Sanders supporters were drawn to the party by the freshness of his progressive platform and the quirky charms of his oratory, only to be repelled by what they concluded was a corrupt system rigged to choose Clinton instead.
Clinton's deeper problem was that she just couldn't pull the Hispanic and African-American vote to the polls the way Barack Obama had.
It's not clear who the next Democratic leaders will be, but it's probably time for a generational change.
Republicans have a different challenge, and not one many would have predicted a year ago.
They have come home to their party knowing that Trump owns it and that's who they are now.
Trump's belief in himself
Trump will be at the top of the strange world of government, a world that, when it works at all, works in ways that run contrary to his life experience.
He has run many, many successful businesses, he told us a million times as though that was all he needed to know to govern a complex and divided country full of tension, conflict and resentment.
He has promised to do a lot of difficult things and he'll need help to succeed. His tools in business were fear and bullying; in government he will have to argue and persuade.
But while so many others strive for an open-minded re-examination of their assumptions at this moment, Trump's belief that he can do anything has probably never been greater in his life.
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