The reporter who got the 2016 election right by talking with the people rather than consultants

Frank Buckley:

You can observe a lot just by watching, said Yogi Berra. And you can learn a lot just by talking to people. Instead of talking at them. Salena Zito is a reporter, and in 2016 she hung out in bars and poolrooms talking to people, begging for their opinions. That’s how she learned that Donald Trump might win the presidency.

She was a regular on the “John Batchelor Show,” along with an academic. Like Batchelor, the academic knew that Trump didn’t have a ghost of a chance and explained it all so well that it was hard to disagree.

Trump was uncivilized, the Republicans didn’t have a ground game, the Democrats had all the data-miners.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the analyst proved Hillary Clinton would win. But then Zito would blurt out that, when asked, people were saying they liked Trump. Poor Zito, a reporter at a Pittsburgh newspaper. It was pretty embarrassing.

Except the academic had gotten it wrong, and Zito had gotten it right.

Now she’s written about what she heard in a new book, “The Great Revolt,” co-authored with Bard Todd. In it, they describe the different groups to which Trump appealed, groups that were hidden in plain sight. You only had to talk to them.

There were the Second Amend­ment women, for example. Hillary got fewer women’s votes than Barack Obama did in 2012, and white women broke for Trump. Some of them wanted to keep their guns and liked what Trump said about gun rights.

There were the “King Cyrus Christians,” who voted for someone not very religious but who promised to protect their religious practices, as King Cyrus had for the Jews. Actually, those King Cyrus Christians included a lot of patriotic Orthodox Jews, and even the Christians sensed that Trump was a co-religionist.

Mostly, there were voters whose beliefs were mocked by all that was fashionable, by Obama and by Hillary herself, voters who craved respect. Their religious beliefs had been called bigotry, their pride in America denounced as white pride, the country they loved derided as fatally flawed. When they were told they had brought their misery on themselves, through their foul habits, they filed this away.

When they were called deplorable, they paid attention. When their cherished institutions — their religion, their patriotism, their regional loyalties — were derided, they voted for Donald Trump.
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Nevertheless, the book would teach Democrats something useful about their fellow Americans. The simplistic and idiotic way of explaining the 2016 election is to label Trump supporters as “populists.” That’s essentially a smear, meant to link them to racists like Pitchfork Ben Tillman or Father Coughlin.
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I have long thought the use of the term "populists" was a slur and was intentionally used by those who look down on these voters.  There are still few academics who understand what happened and how repulsive the elites have treated these people.  Calling them "alt-right" and Nazis is not going to change their minds.  It is interesting that Democrats are willing to embrace MS-13 killers as part of humanity, but not Trump voters.