Donald J. Trump won the the race to become the 45th President of the United States of America. Trump won 306 electoral votes while Clinton won 232. Trump’s victory shocked almost every political pundit, news anchor, and pollster in the country. Now that the election is done, it’s easier to study how things played out and what led to a Trump victory. The two main reasons why Trump was able to win was his appeal to the white working class voters, and Hillary’s campaign failure to pay enough attention to rust belt states.

There is no doubt that the Democrats made a big mistake this election, which is that you can’t win an election without the white working class. In fact, the Republican party has not been powerful over many decades for that exact reason.

Trump kept talking about lowering taxes and creating more jobs by decreasing regulations and renegotiating trade deals like NAFTA. This is exactly what working people wanted in the rust-belt, especially those in Michigan and Wisconsin. Michigan and Wisconsin didn’t go “red” for more than 30 years, but Trump turned them red. So why did these two Democratic strongholds go red this year?

To start answering this question we need to look at the results of the Democratic primary in those states. Those two states were both won easily by Bernie Sanders. It’s clear that the people of those states wanted the change which Donald Trump talked so much about. In addition, the revelations from Wikileaks of the DNC favoring Hillary Clinton, certainly didn’t help her among Bernie supporters. Hillary didn’t make a single stop in Wisconsin during the general election. Political pundits laughed at Trump for even thinking that he could win Wisconsin and Michigan. However, the Clinton campaign failure to turn out its base is why Trump won.

The Trump campaign used a lot of data analysis to gain as many voters as it could. Let’s not forget that NAFTA and Trump’s economic policies played a big role. NAFTA is a trade agreement between Mexico, Canada and the US. This trade agreement was passed by the former President Bill Clinton. However, NAFTA resulted in the outsourcing of many jobs to Mexico. In short, Trump won Michigan and Wisconsin because he promised to create more jobs, renegotiate NAFTA. Hillary’s campaign overlooked those states thinking that they had them in the bag.

It’s important to note that Trump lost Minnesota only by 3 percentage points, and he lost New Hampshire by less than 3 thousand votes. Almost every political pundit, pollster and journalist got it wrong, because they made the same mistake they did with Brexit. They were to be out of touch with the”regular people.” It’s clear that journalists and political pundits couldn’t comprehend how anyone would vote for Donald J Trump after his many missteps.

The media lived in this bubble and believed that Hillary had an over 95% chance of winning. They believed that the only people voting for Trump were racist, sexist, homophobic, misogynistic, poor,  andwhite men. However, the exit polls showed a very different result. Trump won twice as many black votes as Romney did. Trump won 30% of the Latino vote. Trump also won 53% of the vote of white women. The exit polls show that Trump lost among people who earned less than 50 thousand dollars a year and won among those who made more than that. The journalists and political pundits were so blind in their belief that there was no way that Trump was going to win- that they would just laugh at anyone who believed otherwise.

Now that Trump has won and has a Republican majority in Congress, let’s see if he’ll keep his word and try his best to make this country “great again.”