No one looks like bigger fools the day after President-elect Trump’s triumph than American’s political reporters, and especially those working for the major California newspapers who completely misread this election. Cocooned in their little world of liberal elitism they completely missed the real anger that was out in the country and that led to Tuesday’s astounding results.
Most of California’s daily newspapers seemed to be vying to the Isvestia of the Hillary Clinton Administration with one fawning story and opinion editorial after another. The Los Angeles Times even went so far as to publish its own state by state “analysis” of the Electoral Votes showing Clinton with 352 votes, just about 120 more than she actually got. The accompanying story said their analysis was “based on public polling, state vote histories and the reporting done by our campaign staff.”
Instead of their “own campaign staff”, the Times should have looked at its own USC Dornsife/LA Times poll, the only poll in America that constantly showed Trump winning. But because this poll did not match the political bias of the political reporters, it was ignored, and in one case denounced.
A blog called CalBuzz written by two retired reporters took on this poll for daring to say Trump might win, writing on October 21 of the LA Times/USC Dornsife poll, “This poor excuse for a survey has been so wrong so persistently – and has been so constantly cited by Donald Trump as evidence of his campaign success.” Of course this poll was exactly right and California’s media establishment exactly wrong.
So what was the real story of this election missed by the political and media elites of California? Go to Harlan County, Kentucky. This is coal mining country, the very epitome of the Democratic Party that once celebrated “The Coal Miner’s Daughter” and worked to make life better for the struggling working class. Until 2004, Harlan County, dominated by the United Mine Workers, had voted for every Democratic candidate for President but one since Kentucky became a state in 1795.
On Tuesday, in one of the most historically Democratic counties in the United States, Donald Trump got 84.9 percent of the vote.
The smug California political class, and the reporters and editorialists that cover them, had no idea how unhappy working people are throughout this country. And now the elites will sit around their Beverly Hills and Silicon Valley mansions and wonder how they will survive four years of President Trump. It will not be easy.