NEW YORK —Hillary Clinton told supporters Wednesday that they owed Donald Trump “an open mind and a chance to lead,” urging acceptance of the celebrity businessman’s stunning win after a campaign that appeared poised until Election Day to make her the first woman elected U.S. president.
Addressing stricken staff and voters at a New York City hotel, Clinton said she had offered to work with Trump on behalf of a country that she acknowledged was “more deeply divided than we thought.”
Her voice vibrated with emotion at times, especially as she acknowledged that she had not “shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling.”
Flanked by her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and daughter, Chelsea Clinton Mezvinsky, Clinton then made a direct plea to “all the little girls” watching: “Never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every opportunity in the world and chance to pursue your dreams.”
The speech followed a dramatic election night in which Trump captured battleground states like Florida, North Carolina and Ohio and demolished a longstanding “blue wall” of states in the Upper Midwest that had backed every Democratic presidential candidate since Clinton’s husband won the presidency in 1992.
Democrats — starting with Clinton’s campaign staff and the White House — were left wondering how they had misread their country so completely. Mournful Clinton backers gathered outside the hotel Wednesday.
“I was devastated. Shocked. Still am,” said Shirley Ritenour, 64, a musician from Brooklyn. “When I came in on the subway this morning there were a lot of people crying. A lot of people are very upset.”
The results were startling to Clinton and her aides, who had ended their campaign with a whirlwind tour of battleground states and had projected optimism that she would maintain the diverse coalition assembled by President Barack Obama in the past two elections.
On the final day of the campaign, Clinton literally followed Obama to stand behind a podium with a presidential seal at a massive rally outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia. As she walked up to the lectern, the president bent down to pull out a small stool so the shorter Clinton could address the tens of thousands gathered on the mall. Before leaving the stage, Obama leaned over to whisper a message in Clinton’s ear: “We’ll have to make this permanent.”
Clinton’s stunning loss was certain to open painful soul-searching within the party, which had endured a lengthy primary between Clinton and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who drew strong support among liberals amid an electorate calling for change.
“The mistake that we made is that we ignored the powerful part of Trump’s message because we hated so much of the rest of his message. The mistake we made is that people would ignore that part and just focus on the negative,” said Democratic strategist Chris Kofinis, who was not affiliated with the campaign.
The tumultuous presidential cycle bequeathed a series of political gifts for Clinton’s GOP rival: An FBI investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server, questions of pay-for-play involving her family’s charitable foundation, Sanders’ primary challenge, Clinton’s health scare at a Sept. 11 memorial ceremony and FBI Director James Comey’s late October announcement that investigators had uncovered emails potentially relevant to her email case.
Yet her team spent the bulk of their time focused on attacking Trump, while failing to adequately address Clinton’s deep liabilities — or the wave of frustration roiling the nation.
Every time the race focused on Clinton, her numbers dropped, eventually making her one of the least liked presidential nominees in history. And she offered an anxious electorate a message of breaking barriers and the strength of diversity — hardly a rallying cry — leaving her advisers debating the central point of her candidacy late into the primary race.
Clinton’s campaign was infuriated by a late October announcement by Comey that investigators had uncovered emails that may have been pertinent to the dormant investigation into Clinton’s use of private emails while secretary of state. On the Sunday before the election, Comey told lawmakers that the bureau had found no evidence in its hurried review of the newly discovered emails to warrant criminal charges against Clinton.
But the announcement may have damaged Clinton while her campaign tried to generate support in early voting in battleground states like Florida and North Carolina. In the nine days between Comey’s initial statement and his “all clear” announcement, nearly 24 million people cast early ballots. That was about 18 percent of the expected total votes for president.
Donald Trump’s Victory Sets Off Protests on Both Coasts
LOS ANGELES — Demonstrators opposed to the election of Donald Trump smashed windows and set garbage bins on fire in downtown Oakland, California early Wednesday, as protesters swarmed streets across the country in response to the election. The protests elsewhere were generally peaceful.
In Oregon, dozens of people blocked traffic in downtown Portland and forced a delay for trains on two light rail lines. Media reports said the crowd grew to about 300 people, including some who sat in the middle of the road to block traffic. The crowd of anti-Trump protesters burned American flags and chanted “That’s not my president.”
In Pennsylvania, hundreds of University of Pittsburgh students marched through the streets, with some in the crowd calling for unity. The student-run campus newspaper, the Pitt News, tweeted about an event later Wednesday titled “Emergency Meeting: Let’s Unite to Stop President Trump.”
In Seattle, a group of about 100 protesters gathered in the Capital Hill neighborhood, blocked roads and set a trash bin on fire.
The Oakland protest grew to about 250 people by late Tuesday evening, according to police. Officer Marco Marquez said protesters damaged five businesses, breaking windows and spraying graffiti.
Police issued a citation for a vehicle code violation, but did not make any arrests.
A woman was struck by a car and severely injured when protesters got onto a highway early Wednesday morning, the California Highway Patrol said. Protesters vandalized the driver’s SUV before officers intervened. The highway was closed for about 20 minutes.
Marquez said the department is fully staffed for the possibility of another protest Wednesday evening.
Oakland is a hotbed of violent protest in the San Francisco Bay Area. Protesters briefly shut down two major freeways, vandalized police cars and looted businesses two years ago when a Missouri grand jury decided not to indict a white police officer in the fatal shooting of a black teenager in Ferguson.
And nearly 80 people were arrested after a night in 2010 that saw rioters using metal bats to break store windows, setting fires and looting after a white transit police officer, Johannes Mehserle, was acquitted of murder and convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the slaying of Oscar Grant, an unarmed black man who was shot dead on a train platform the previous year.
Elsewhere in California, police said at least 500 people swarmed on streets in and around UCLA, some shouting anti-Trump expletives and others chanting “Not my president!”
Smaller demonstrators were held at University of California campuses and neighborhoods in Berkeley, Irvine and Davis and at San Jose State.
Angst Over the Economy Helps Trump Flip Great Lakes States
WASHINGTON (AP) — A fractured, discontented electorate handed Donald Trump the presidency, allowing him to breach a region that Democrat Hillary Clinton was banking on in her bid for the presidency.
Key battleground states Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin had voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election for a generation. Ohio, Minnesota and Iowa have been part of winning Democratic maps, as well.
Trump outperformed expectations in all of them, moving most into the Republican column after President Barack Obama twice swept the region.
Exit polls and unofficial returns reflected deep racial, gender, economic and cultural divides nationally and across the Midwest and Great Lakes region, helping drive Trump’s success. His soaring popularity among white voters without a college degree was essential to his capturing the Rust Belt.
“The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer,” Trump said in his acceptance speech, alluding to his economic populist message that helped him shift much of the old industrial territory.
Trump’s support Tuesday skewed older, more male and overwhelmingly white. His supporters said they were deeply dissatisfied with the federal government and eager for change, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for national media outlets.
Nationally, he won almost 7 out of 10 whites without college degrees.
Trump’s surge in working-class regions was evident in places such as Mahoning County, Ohio. Obama won Mahoning, where organized labor still acts as a political force, by a 28-point margin in 2012. On Tuesday, Clinton won it by just 3 percentage points and fell short of Obama’s vote total by more than 20,000.
Obama won nearby Belmont County, in the coal country along the Ohio River, in his first election. It shifted to Romney in 2012, and on Tuesday Trump won almost 70 percent of the vote.
Across Ohio, nearly half of all voters said international trade hurts the country’s jobs situation, and two-thirds of them backed Trump. Two-thirds of the state’s voters said the job situation in Ohio had deteriorated or remained static over the past four years, and three-quarters of them voted for Trump.
It was a pattern that repeated across the region.
Clinton did refashion an alliance similar to Obama’s — women, young voters and nonwhites — but it wasn’t large enough. Her support was concentrated in large cities, the Northeast and along the West Coast. But even in some key urban areas, Clinton fell short of Obama’s benchmark.
The president won 420,000 votes in Cleveland and surrounding Cuyahoga County in 2012; Clinton won just 383,000.
The urban drop-off was a critical blow to Clinton, as Trump ran up resounding margins in small towns and rural areas, while adding victories in many suburbs.
Less clear in the results is just what voters want out of government. The same electorate that was so unhappy with government gave Obama a 53 percent approval rating and returned Republican majorities to Congress.
GOP control of Capitol Hill would, in conventional circumstances, be a luxury for a newly inaugurated Republican president. But Trump has clashed on personality and policy with the party’s congressional leaders.
He’s pledged to protect Social Security and Medicare. Those programs benefit voters age 65 and older, a cohort that Trump won with a narrow majority, but they are also targets of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s long-term plans for a leaner federal budget.
Congressional Republicans also have opposed ambitious spending proposals for infrastructure that Trump outlined in his acceptance speech. Similar to what Obama and Clinton have endorsed, Trump promised to “put millions of people to work” by rebuilding “our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals.”
The president-elect, meanwhile, did not mention at all his signature immigration proposals that defined much of his campaign: building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and deporting millions of workers in the country illegally. Majorities of voters nationally said they oppose both ideas.