TRUMP

168 ANATOMY OF A MONSTROSITY
less than a quarter of white men without college degrees voting for
Clinton. 533 But gender doesn’t explain everything: the majority of
white women voted for Donald Trump, meaning that Hillary Clinton
did not capture most of the voters who shared her own demographic
characteristic. If the story of the election is about gender, it
is a complex story, in which large numbers of female voters decided
to vote for a man who has confessed to sexual assault against the first
female major-party presidential contender…
4. COULD BERNIE
HAVE DONE IT?
Bernie Sanders did not necessarily look like the “pragmatic”
choice as the Democratic nominee. He calls himself a socialist. He is
Jewish. He is old. These traits do not scream “electability.” But after
Clinton’s loss to Trump, some began to think that there were good
reasons why Bernie Sanders would have made for a more effective
Democratic candidate. He had a populist appeal that was targeted
toward voters in Rust Belt states, focusing heavily on the negative
consequences of globalization for U.S. manufacturing, and the breadand-butter
issues affecting the American middle class. Since Hillary
Clinton was seen by many as elitist, corrupt, and in the pocket of the
wealthy, Bernie Sanders’ anti-big business, anti-Establishment campaign
might have been able to make the crucial difference in tipping
the election from Trump.
Certainly, against Sanders, Trump would not have been able to
run quite the same campaign. He would not have been able to direct
quite so much fire at trade deals and the disappearance of American
jobs, because these are precisely the same issues that Sanders himself
has been concerned with over the course of his many decades in gov-