By Marie Whitaker
Months ago I went on record with co-workers that Donald Trump would be the next President of the United States. I was in the minority.
Pundits and polls predicted that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would become the first woman elected President of our country. But this has been a wild, incredible and unpredictable campaign. The results were never going to be so easily predicted.
My Trump prediction was based on three things.
First, pundits are disconnected from a vast majority of voters in middle America. When you live in New York City or Washington, D.C. – as many pundits do – you can become blind to seeing middle America, the south and vast swaths of the country. You must accept that your vision of America, might not match the vision of the rest of America.
On Tuesday, white men abandoned Democrats in several states.
According to NBC News Iowa—which President Obama won by a comfortable 6 percentage points in his path to re-election in 2012—has proven to be one of the strongest swing states for Republican Donald Trump. NBC News Exit Poll data in Iowa revealed that only one in three of the state’s white men supported Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Iowa remains one of the least racially diverse states in the country, and thus the battle for the state’s white voters is key to victory there. Exit polls have revealed a dramatic gap opening up over the past few elections among white men in Iowa. They split between Obama and GOP rival John McCain in 2008, swung solidly toward Republican Mitt Romney in 2012 and are soundly rejecting Clinton this year.
Those who were unwilling publicly to admit they were supporting Trump used the privacy of the curtain of the ballot box to make their voices heard.
Hillary Clinton is getting only 31 percent of the white male vote in Iowa this year, a severe drop compared to President Obama’s performance among this group eight years ago.