DHAKA: Donald Trump has beaten rival Hilary Clinton in a bizarre race to the white house and became the 45th American president.

Trump, a man with no background in politics, who has never held elected office, has overturned the rules and defied the polls, which at the start of the night had forecast a ‘fairly easy victory for Hillary Clinton’.

Hillary Clinton just could not hold onto the Obama coalition. And that proved to be a large part of her undoing.

African-American, Latino and younger voters failed to show up at the polls in sufficient numbers Tuesday to propel Clinton into the White House.

Clinton conceded the race after 2:00am ET. Before polls closed her campaign had been confident of victory. In the end, however, she lost even some states thought to be safely in her column, like Wisconsin. She trailed in others, like Pennsylvania and Michigan.

While she won the key demographic groups her campaign targeted, she underperformed President Obama across the board, even among women, according to exit poll data.

President Barack Obama issued several personal pleas to African-American voters to back Clinton in recent weeks.

“If we let this thing slip and I have got a situation where my last two months in office are preparing for a transition to Donald Trump, whose staff people have said that their primary agenda is to have him in the first couple of weeks sitting in the Oval Office and reverse every single thing that we've done,” Obama said last week during an interview on a syndicated radio program.

But not enough African-Americans, along with Latinos, heeded the call.

Some 88 percent of African-American voters supported Clinton, versus 8 percent for Donald Trump, as of very early Wednesday morning.

This lowered turnout happened even after Trump repeatedly made sweeping comments about how black communities were in the worst shape ever. Referring multiple times to “inner cities”.

Only 65 percent of Latinos backed her, while 29 percent cast their votes for Trump.

Beyond the Obama coalition, Clinton was also not as popular with white voters as Obama was.

She won only 37 percent of the white vote, compared to Obama’s 39 percent. Surprisingly, Trump also garnered a slightly smaller share than Romney, capturing 58 percent of the vote to Romney’s 59 percent.

Asian voters, which made up a tiny 4 percent of the electorate, were also less supportive of Clinton than of Obama.

She won 55 percent of voters age 18 to 29, compared to 37 percent who cast ballots for Trump. But Obama secured 60% of these young voters to Romney’s 37 percent.

When it came to women voters, Clinton won 54 percent compared to Trump’s 42 percent.

Even though 70 percent of voters said that Trump’s treatment of women bothered them, they still did not flock to the woman who could have broken the glass ceiling. Obama won 55 percent of the women’s vote in 2012.

Source: CNN.com

BDST: 1616 HRS, NOV 09, 2016
AP/BD/SMS