Virginia Postrel, Columnist

Trump Is the Change Voters Wanted

Calling his supporters deplorable only reflects badly on his opponents.

November 9, 2016 at 9:43 PM UTC

Virginia Postrel is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a visiting fellow at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University and author, most recently, of “The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World.”

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Many liberals are telling themselves a story about Donald Trump’s victory that is depressing, frightening, self-congratulatory and not entirely true: that it represents the voters’ endorsement of racism, misogyny, ignorance and generally being a jerk.

Trump may indeed represent those things. But he didn’t win the presidency because American voters were ratifying his worst elements. As Amy Walter of Cook Political Report observed, “Voters did not like Trump, but voted for him anyway”: