From the Wall Street Journal:
He drew more white voters and Obama coalition enthusiasm wanedI said it could be done.By LAURA MECKLER and AARON ZITNER
Nov. 9, 2016 8:11 p.m. ET
Donald Trump did what many leaders of his own party said couldn’t be done: He won a national election by drawing a larger share of votes from the nation’s shrinking pool of white voters.
Mitt Romney in 2012 won white voters by 20 percentage points—and lost the presidential election by 5 points. That persuaded many Republicans they no longer could count on drawing higher margins among white voters, making it imperative to reach minority voters to broaden the party’s base.[Comment at Unz.com]But Mr. Trump showed that a Republican could win by energizing big parts of the nation’s white majority. Though the white share of the voter pool declined, as expected, Mr. Trump won those voters by a 21-percentage-point margin, exit polls showed.
That gave him a winning hand, partly because Hillary Clinton couldn’t match President Barack Obama’s vote totals in Philadelphia, Detroit and other metropolitan areas that Democrats typically rely on. The result: Mr. Trump won the formerly Democratic Upper Midwest—Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wisconsin—and he leads in Michigan, where the race remains too close to call.