Michael Smerconish is breaking down the strategy behind Donald Trump's convincing win on Election Day ... and he says Trump pushed all the right buttons.
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PeopleTranscript
00:00How did people miss the boat in such a profound way here?
00:07Because no one in media talked about this scenario.
00:12When I was asked what I thought the outcome would be, I was saying for the last several
00:16days, my head says Trump and my gut, not my heart, but my gut tells me that it's Kamala
00:23Harris.
00:24And when I would say that my head tells me it's Donald Trump, I simply meant that the
00:28pollsters had blown it in 2016 and 2020 relative to his standing.
00:34The biggest shock to me is that I'm one of those who would often say that he had a very
00:39high floor, but a very low ceiling, meaning that we thought that he was capped somewhere
00:44in the 45 or 46% range.
00:47That was okay in 2016 because you had Gary Johnson and Bill Weld and a very robust third
00:52party effort.
00:53There really wasn't one this cycle.
00:55The biggest shock to me is that he broke 50% in the national polls.
01:00Do you attribute that to the fact that he turned more voters or just that Kamala Harris
01:08didn't mobilize, didn't motivate enough people to come out and vote?
01:13Charles, he was so dark in the last couple of weeks of the campaign.
01:17I never understood it.
01:18I'm in the suburbs of Philadelphia.
01:21This is the epicenter.
01:23I'm in Bucks County as I speak to you, and everybody wanted to know how will Bucks County
01:27go.
01:28Bucks County went for Trump, Pennsylvania went for Trump, and the nation went for Trump.
01:33He was so dark in the last couple of weeks.
01:35I would say, why does he say that?
01:38Why does he make the comment about media shooting through the glass?
01:41Why does he make the comment about Liz Cheney and the nine barrels that are trained on her?
01:46He's not earning any support among my neighbors, but my neighbors were never the intended audience
01:52for those comments.
01:53I think there was a method to his madness.
01:56He was seeking to get the 80 million who were eligible to vote in the 2020 cycle but didn't
02:01off the couch and out to vote.
02:04We're not going to know until the dust settles from some of these numbers, but my suspicion
02:07is you've got a lot of very low interest voters who came out and voted for Trump or wouldn't
02:13have come out at all.
02:14In some ways, the media and the Democrats repeated a mistake from 2016 when Hillary
02:23Clinton talked about the deplorables, that there are a lot of people who were saying
02:28that the Trump supporters, Trumpers, were racist and misogynist, and they were using
02:34all sorts of words that I think may have animated these voters to go to the polls.
02:40I totally buy into that.
02:41I had radio callers today.
02:43I've just finished my three-hour radio program, spoke to folks all across the nation.
02:48I posited, Harvey, that very idea.
02:51Are there some among you who feel like begrudgingly you voted for the guy, you don't like the
02:56guy, but you didn't want to be told by the media for whom you should be casting your
03:00ballot?
03:01Several answered that and said, yeah, I'm in that category.
03:04I felt like I was browbeaten.
03:06I was told so often that those who had any kind of a liking for him were, to use President
03:11Biden's word, garbage, and they kind of drew me to support him.
03:15Now, whether that person would eventually have supported Trump anyway, I don't know,
03:20but I think that there's something to it.
03:22I mean, the media really was, and the media is whatever you want it to be today, conservative
03:26outlets, liberal outlets, but the so-called dominant media were so far in on this case
03:33that they may have ended up helping Donald Trump when really they were seeking to hurt
03:38him.
03:39What I don't get is that the media that were really advocates for Kamala Harris, they were
03:46using their wishful thinking and masquerading it as political analysis, and it was never
03:52really analysis.
03:54It was just what they wanted, and they never got to the root of why Donald Trump draws
04:00in voters.
04:01Right, and I think at the root, immigration was driving that bus, and it's a fallacy to
04:07think that when Trump talks tough about the border, he's alienating Hispanics who are
04:13here.
04:14To the contrary, I think the data suggests that Hispanics who are here are often of a
04:19mindset that they played by the rules, and they're at the top of the list of the people
04:23who resent open borders and individuals who are coming in and not doing what they had
04:28to do to earn their status.
04:30So I think they end up being, as a group, among the most concerned about border security,
04:37and that was to his benefit as well.
04:38You put together education, the cultural issues, gender, huge gender divide, and now factor
04:45in the demographic changes that are taking place in the country, we're in a tumultuous
04:50period and the future is not yet certain.
04:53That's what I think.