And then of course there was Benghazi, “that she left [the four Americans] there, that they weren’t her priority.” She was bothered by Trump’s comments on the tape, for sure. But, she said, “I’m glad how he didn’t lie about it. They caught him and he said, yeah, I said an asshole thing.” Not to mention, she said, “Bill Clinton isn’t good either on that subject.” Her vote, she concluded, was “more against Hillary than for Trump.” Trump won that one small precinct by 144 more votes than Romney had won it in 2012 – a 20% increase. And all across rural and small-town Pennsylvania, that pattern repeated itself. In Scranton’s Lackawanna County, where Obama had won 63%, Clinton won only 50%. In Michigan’s rural Marquette County, where Obama had won 56%, Clinton got only 49%. Trump became the first Republican since 1988 to win Pennsylvania or Michigan. In Ohio’s Mahoning County, home of Youngstown, where Obama got 63%, Clinton got only 50%. In Hocking County, just adjacent to Nelsonville, Clinton fell even further, getting 30%, down from the 48% Obama had gotten, and realizing Taylor Sappington’s fears. And at Tracie St. Martin’s working-class precinct in Miamisburg, where Obama had managed to get 43% in 2012, Clinton’s support plunged to 26%, giving Trump a margin of 293 votes just in that one precinct, triple Romney’s margin four years earlier. That helped provide Trump a historic claim: the first Republican majority in Dayton’s Montgomery County in 28 years. Statewide,
Alec MacGillis covers politics and government for ProPublica. MacGillis previously spent three years writing for The New Republic , five years as a national reporter for the Washington Post , and five years at the Baltimore Sun. He won the 2016 Robin Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, the 2017 Polk Award for National Reporting, and the 2017 Scripps-Howard Award for Topic of the Year. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic, New York, Harper's, and New York Times Magazine, among other publications. A resident of Baltimore, MacGillis is also the author of The Cynic , a 2014 biography of Sen. Mitch McConnell. St. Martin, who was still hard at work on the Middletown gas plant with a “great bunch of ironworkers,” was elated. “I just really needed to know that I was part of a majority that recognized we need these things that Trump spoke of,” she told me. “More importantly for me, to NOT have Hillary as Commander in Chief.” Originally published on November 10, 2016 Trump won by a whopping eight percentage points, a swing of 10 points from four years earlier. He had brought new voters out of the woodwork; he had converted some white working-class Obama voters while others had just stayed home.
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