Last May, after Donald
Trump at last secured the Republican nomination for president, I wrote
about what I thought was Trump’s best scenario for victory, and I compared
the coming campaign to a movie theater.
Imagine that you’re standing in a multiplex, holding a ticket for either
of two movies that are about to start at the same time. The first is a
plodding, predictable flick you’ve sat through twice before and didn’t like.
The second is a film that every reviewer agrees is one of the worst things to
ever hit the screen, but you haven’t seen it, and there’s at least a chance
they’ll turn out to be wrong, because they’re wrong about everything all the
time.
How many of us are going to take our chances on the second movie?
The answer, it turns out, is enough to make Trump the 45th president of
the United States — and the least likely in our history.
I was in Yahoo’s New York studio Tuesday, with Katie Couric and the
author Evan Thomas, among others. Like most everyone else, we’d been hearing
all day that Trump’s late surge seemed to have fallen short (just as we heard,
on Election Day in 2004, that John Kerry was easily sweeping George W. Bush out of office).
Then the last state exit polls started trickling in, and you could see it
immediately; Trump was winning college-educated white women in Florida, and
Hillary Clinton was winning women overall in Ohio by a smaller margin than
President Obama had won them four years ago. Even if the numbers weren’t
entirely reliable (and I’m sure they weren’t), they couldn’t have been wrong
enough to offset Trump’s historic margin among white men.
By the time Wisconsin fell into Trump’s column a few hours later, it was
clear that Clinton’s path to the presidency, so wide and promising when the
night began, had narrowed to a chokepoint. The celebration that night would be
a few blocks away on Sixth Avenue, rather than at the convention hall a mile
down the Hudson.
By Matt
Bai.
Full story at Yahoo News.
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