Why did Trump’s lies fail so badly? Important new data provides a clue.
By Greg Sargent Opinion writer
November 19 at 9:57 AM
“I wasn’t on the ballot,” President Trump absurdly told Fox News in an interview that aired Sunday night. It got only more comically ham-handed from there. Questioned about the GOP’s crushing loss of the House, Trump repeated this formulation again and again — even after being confronted with the fact that he himself had repeatedly urged Americans to vote as if the elections were, in fact, a referendum on him.
Chances are many Fox viewers will now robotically agree that the outcome had zero to do with Trump. But even if Trump’s name was not literally on the ballot, the story Trump has been telling about this country was undeniably central to this election. With the Democratic edge in the House popular vote now swelling to nearly eight points — 53 percent to 45.3 percent — it’s clear that the country decisively rejected this Trumpist story.
A new analysis and report from the Brookings Institution may help explain why Trump’s narrative flopped so badly for the GOP. But the analysis also has important implications for Trump’s coming effort to get reelected — and hints at ways Democrats can more effectively reach beyond their current coalition to prevent that from happening.
The analysis finds that Democrats won the House by making big inroads in parts of the country that are more prosperous and more educated — which we already knew. But, crucially, it also finds that those areas are more connected to the digitalizing, professional, globalizing economy than areas held by Republicans.
At my request, Brookings analyzed data in the roughly three dozen congressional districts, or CDs, that Democrats flipped, and compared them with the totality of districts held by both Democrats and Republicans. The result:
more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/11/19/why-did-trumps-lies-fail-so-badly-important-new-data-provides-a-clue/?utm_term=.632832e34766&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1
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