Republican voters who supported President Barack Obama's reelection bid in 2012, but then switched back to the GOP this year to cast their ballot for Donald Trump were a decisive factor in the real estate mogul's victory, The Wall Street Journal reports.
These Obama Republicans were only 4 percent of the overall voters but they lived disproportionately in the Great Lakes area, including states such as Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan, which switched from Democratic to Republican this election.
These voters are very dissatisfied with the direction of the country, and while 29 percent of the overall public say the nation is on the right track, only 10 percent of these Obama Republicans thought so.
An analysis of Wall Street Journal/NBC News surveys shows that these voters had thought Obama would bring the desired change, and when this didn't happen as they wanted, they put their faith in Trump's message that he would bring working class jobs back.
This was illustrated by Trump's surge in working-class areas, such as Mahoning County, Ohio, according to the Chicago Tribune.
In that county, where organized labor is a strong political force, Obama won by a 28-point margin in 2012, but Clinton captured the county by only a mere 3 percentage points.
The Tribune notes that although Clinton did manage to maintain an alliance of women, young voters and nonwhites, concentrated largely in urban areas, her support there was not strong enough to offset Trump's appeal in rural areas in key states.
This is how, for example, Ohio slipped through Clinton's fingers. Obama won 420,000 votes in Cleveland and surrounding Cuyahoga County in 2012, while Clinton managed to capture just 383,000.
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