Why Trump won?

As the United States wakes up to a world in which Donald Trump has become the president-elect of the United States, many people are wondering — what just happened?

While the race might be covered as a sweeping triumph for Trump , it also was an extremely tight race that he only just edged out.

Trump currently trails in the popular vote, and he only won the Electoral College because of very narrow victories in a few states. So it is not necessarily that the American people as a whole swung toward Trump — Hillary Clinton’s national coalition was about the same size. This is not very different from how India's Modi was able to become Prime Minister winning less than 32% of the votes.

However, this is an utterly devastating result for the Democratic Party nonetheless, handing over unified control of the federal government to Republicans, who already dominated in the states. And Trump pulled this off due to his strength among white voters.

The technical reason Trump won the presidency is that he won very narrow victories in just a few key swing states.

Pennsylvania appears to be the state that put him over 270 — he’s currently holding a 1.1-point lead there. But he also won Wisconsin for good measure (by about 1 point).

Furthermore, while it’s clear that Trumpism has more legs than anyone thought, when making broad, sweeping conclusions about what the “American people” believe, it’s important to keep in mind that each candidate got a bit under 48 percent of the popular vote — they’re about evenly matched.

But the geography and math of the Electoral College ended up working to Trump’s benefit. The white working-class voters who strongly backed Trump are overrepresented in Electoral College math, while Clinton’s nonwhite and urban backers tend to be packed into a few key states. If results in just Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan all shifted just 1.2 points, Clinton would have eked out a narrow victory. But they didn’t.

The US is growing increasingly diverse, but white voters still make up more than 60 percent of the population and an even greater share of the electorate, particularly as far as state elections go.

So while the Democrats did indeed see increasingly diverse states like Arizona, Georgia, and even Texas shift several points toward Clinton this year, it simply wasn’t enough. There are so many white voters in those states that a candidate who wins them overwhelmingly will continue to have the edge. Take Florida, where an apparent surge in Hispanic turnout ended up being dwarfed by a surge in rural white turnout.

So the bigger picture is that if Democrats can’t figure out how to better appeal to white voters, they seem set to become the nation’s opposition party for some time to come.