Lessons from the unexpected

When all the ballots are counted — some 4.3 million remained in California as of Thursday night, according to the state’s secretary of state — Hillary Clinton will have won the popular vote by well over a million votes, en route to losing the electoral college and the White House.

The result put a spotlight on the country’s deep, almost 50/50 division. Democrats, many still in shock over a result that most in either party did not expect, have been agonizing over how this happened.

They don’t need to look far from home for a big part of the answer.

Good afternoon, I’m David Lauter, Washington bureau chief. Welcome to the Friday edition of our Essential Politics newsletter, in which we look at the events of the week in the presidential campaign and highlight some particularly insightful stories.

DEMOCRATS’ TURNOUT PROBLEM

In the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory Tuesday night, a lot of attention, justifiably, centered on his ability to boost turnout in conservative, rural counties, especially in the upper Midwest.

The Wall St. Journal presciently had focused on that region about a week before the election. Census data showed that during the past 15 years, counties in the region surrounding where Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois meet had shown “among the fastest influxes of nonwhite residents of anywhere in the U.S.” — largely Latino immigrants starting to move into formerly all-white areas, they found.

Those same counties had shown great support for Trump in the GOP primaries. On election night, that area was where Trump made many of his biggest gains, accounting for his victories in Wisconsin and Iowa and the unexpectedly close result in Minnesota.

The data analysis that Trump’s campaign did, an effort that was more extensive and sophisticated than many Democrats believed, showed the same thing, Mark Barabak and Michael Finnegan reported. In the closing days of the campaign, the Republicans targeted the areas they needed most.

But there was no Trump surge overall. While he made big gains in those Midwestern counties and in other heavily white areas such as eastern Ohio, northeastern Pennsylvania and parts of central Florida, he lost ground elsewhere.

Clinton actually succeeded in one of her campaign’s key goals — eating into traditional Republican territory in big suburban counties.

In Montgomery County, Pa., for example, the largest of the suburban counties that ring Philadelphia, Clinton ran about 30,000 votes ahead of the pace that President Obama set four years ago. Among other big suburban locales she won was Ft. Bend County outside of Houston, a once-deeply Republican area that was represented in Congress by former Rep. Tom DeLay, the Republican majority leader of the House a decade ago.

And, as Seema Mehta, Anh Doh and Christopher Goffard reported, Clinton won Orange County, which since 1936 had never voted for a Democrat — the longest streak of one-party victories in California.

Those suburban losses largely offset Trump’s gains in more blue-collar, white counties. As a result, once the final votes are in, he will end up with pretty much the same total that Mitt Romney received four years ago — likely slightly fewer.

Clinton lost, not because of a Trump surge, but because she will end up with several million fewer votes than President Obama received in 2012.

Some of the Democratic drop off came in those heavily white, blue-collar counties that Trump carried. In Lackawanna County, Pa., for example, the county that includes Scranton, where Vice President Joe Biden grew up, Clinton fell some 23,000 votes short of Obama’s mark. Since she lost Pennsylvania by just over 68,000 votes — out of almost 5.8 million cast — that deficit mattered greatly.

But Clinton also got about 37,000 fewer votes in Philadelphia than Obama achieved. Similarly, with some ballots still to be counted in Wayne County (Detroit), Clinton lagged more than 78,000 votes behind Obama’s 2012 pace. As of Friday morning, Michigan remained too close to call, with Trump narrowly in the lead.

Democratic strategists had always expected that turnout among African American voters would fall once Obama was no longer on the ballot. They hoped to make up the difference by attracting suburban voters turned off by Trump’s often bombastic style.

They almost made it.

In the aftermath, Clinton aides have blamed their loss on a highly negative campaign that turned people off, on FBI Director James Comey, whose last-minute intervention in the race may have blunted their appeal to wavering voters, and on the apparent Russian-backed leaking campaign by WikiLeaks, which served as a constant distraction.

But campaigns always encounter turbulence. In the final accounting, Clinton simply failed to inspire enough of her supporters to turn out. Like John Kerry and Al Gore, she fell short.

THE TRANSITION

As Noah Bierman reported, Trump spent much of his initial post-election visit to Washington, D.C., on Thursday trying to soft-pedal the rougher parts of his campaign.

In what areas can the new president carry out his agenda most quickly? Here’s a primer on executive power and its limits.

Trump can, and almost certainly will, sharply change the country’s direction on immigration. Brian Bennett talked to some of his top advisers to look at their plans to step up deportations, bring back workplace raids and likely limit legal immigration as well.

On the other hand, as Noam Levey explained, his drive to repeal and replace Obamacare could be far more complicated and difficult than the president-elect has suggested. If the law is repealed, California could keep the system going on the state level, but it would cost a lot, Melody Petersen reported.

Trump’s victory dashed Democratic hopes for finally achieving a liberal majority on the Supreme Court. The GOP strategy of obstructing Obama’s nomination of appeals court Judge Merrick Garland to the high court paid off, David Savage reported.

Trump also faces a big decision about whether he should follow through on his promise to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton or disappoint many of his followers by dropping the idea. Del Wilber examined the issue.

On the other side of the aisle, as Cathy Decker described, Democrats have already begun a tough internal debate about how to get back on top: Should they move to the left, following the lead of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren? Can they find a way to bridge the gap with white, blue-collar workers? And who will lead the defeated party?

A FINAL FAREWELL TO OUR TRACKING POLL

The USC/LA Times “Daybreak” tracking poll of the election took a lot of criticism during the summer and fall, mostly from Democrats who were outraged that it consistently showed Trump winning the race.

The poll wasn’t perfect — it showed Trump winning by slightly more than 3 percentage points. With Clinton likely to win the popular vote by a point or so, the poll will end up about 4 points off. That’s within the survey’s margin of error, which is about all one can ask of any poll.

More importantly, the poll detected something that many other surveys didn’t — the fact that many conservative, white voters who sat out the 2012 election were prepared to vote for Trump this time around.

The result, however, surprised even the researcher who designed the poll, USC Professor Arie Kapteyn.

DETAILED ELECTION RESULTS

Maps? Charts? Data? We’ve got it. Including details on how California voted, down to the neighborhood level. Find it all on our Politics page.

Sarah Wire, meantime, looked at the changes to come in California’s congressional delegation.

LOGISTICS

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That wraps up this week. My colleague Christina Bellantoni will be back Monday with the weekday edition of Essential Politics. Check for politics updates on our Politics page and on Twitter @latimespolitics.

Please send thoughts, concerns and news tips to politics@latimes.com.