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As this is written, there has been another night of protests over the election of Donald Trump as the next president of the United States.
Commentators have been wondering if there was a "hidden" Trump vote that didn't talk to pollsters or if his secret "dog whistle" appeal to hate groups turned the tide.
In reality, it was none of those things. Trump got fewer votes this year than Mitt Romney did in 2012. What beat Hillary Clinton this year is that a lot of Barack Obama's supporters simply stayed home.
In 2012, Obama received 65,915,795 votes (Source: Wikipedia). This year, Hillary Clinton received 60,467,245 votes. That means over 5,400,000 people who supported Obama in 2012 simply didn't show up to vote.
Don't think they fled to Trump, either. Trump received 60,071,650 votes compared to Romney's 60,933,504 in 2012. That means some 867,000 fewer votes for the Republican nominee this year, too.
But it pales to the number of Obama backers who sat out Clinton's candidacy. Yes, Clinton got almost 400,000 more popular votes than Trump. But one state -- California -- was responsible for that. She beat Trump in reliably liberal California by 2,569,000 votes!
That means he trounced her in the rest of the country by over 2,100,000 votes. That is a recipe for an Electoral College nightmare for Democrats.
Whoever the Democratic nominee is in 2020, he or she is going to have to figure out how to motivate the missing Obama backers to participate again. This election did not represent a massive shift to the Republican Party. It represented a lot of disinterest by Democrats.
(Note: Vote totals are as of 10:15 a.m. Friday.)
* Editorials reflect the opinion of the publisher.