Many folks have spent many hours recently contemplating the recent Presidential election. I have been among them, and so far I have come up with what follows. I may change my mind later.

The results indicate a geographical divide exists in the United States. With the exception of the Rust Belt, we have blue states on the two coasts and red states in between. We can also see that heavily urban areas belong to the Dems while the Reps dominate in the rural areas. That division is not new. It has been around for at least three decades, if not longer. Trump won all the states he was expected to win, which includes most of the states between the coasts, but he also won what we must call The Big Three in this election: Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The Reps do not always win those three, and a reason may be that those three states are pretty heavily urban, or at least they all have several cities (well, Michigan only has one, but it is really big). So much for the urban-rural divide. Apparently, the GOP got the rural vote and enough of the urban vote to win the electoral vote. The rural folks certainly voted for Trump — not just in these three states but all over the country — but the urban vote didn’t fall completely in line for the Dems. But is this the real reason for Trump’s win?

I was starting to buy this explanation of the result until I started listening to people who analyze this stuff for a living. Granted, most of them were dead wrong in their predictions, but with the benefit of hindsight many have recovered and are assessing their own screw-up to the good of others who are still sort of in the clouds on this election. Their expert comments provided me with the aha moment I needed to develop my own theory of what happened. My realization, of course, had little to do with their actual blathering. After all, the media’s credibility is now nonexistent in any analysis of this election.

About 35% of America is comprised of people who would be attracted to Trump no matter what. These include the racists, sexists, xenophobes, homophobes, and any other group found distasteful to the liberals. As Trump himself pointed out, he could shoot someone in downtown New York in broad daylight and not lose one of those supporters. They are rock solid. But outside of that 35% he would be hard pressed to find anyone who would want him to be President. The problem for the Dems is that they were fighting the same image problem with Hillary. Most people didn’t want either one of them as President, but it was the media and not the people that provided the killer fodder that sunk the Clinton ship. The majority of the print and broadcast media told the country that the Dems would win. Get ready for another Clinton in the White House.

A short diversion before I deliver the definitive reason for Trump’s victory. In 1984, Mitch McConnell was running for his first term in the Senate against two-term incumbent, Dee Huddleston. Pretty much everyone, including the local media outlets, predicted a Huddleston win. I didn’t want to vote for Huddleston because I detested his support of a movement advocating that English be declared the official language of the United States. Why would a senator from Kentucky care about such an issue? We could count the number of Kentucky residents speaking a foreign language on our fingers (ok, maybe we needed our toes as well), so Huddleston was obviously playing politics and doing a favor for a colleague from a border state. [By the way, after Huddleston was defeated he became the chair of the English Language Political Action Committee (ELPAC), which not only advocated for English but also wished to limit immigration.] Anyway, all fingers were pointing toward a Huddleston victory. I didn’t particularly like McConnell — in fact, I didn’t like him as Country Judge Executive, the position he held in Louisville, Kentucky, before he ran for senator — but I was confident he would lose. Thus, I voted for him, but really I was voting against Huddleston. Shock! McConnell won by only about 5,000 votes. How many of my fellow Kentuckians made the same blunder I did! Here we are over 30 years later and Mitch is still in the Senate!

Thus, my explanation for the Trump victory. People didn’t like Hillary and they didn’t like Trump. The press convinced them that Hillary was going to win, so they felt that they could do their civic duty — that is, vote — and not have to sell out their integrity. They didn’t want to vote for Hillary so they cast sort of an anti-vote for Trump, being assured by the media that there was no way Trump would win. And across The Big Three only about 100,000 votes gave us The Donald. I hope it does not take as long to get rid of him as it has to get rid of Mitch.