The left, mainstream media, pundits and almost every poll were certain Hillary Clinton was going to win the election. Ultimately, a “Chinese monkey king” ended up doing a better job predicting the election results than the experts. What did they miss, and why did they miss it? Why did so many voters desert Clinton and vote for Trump?

Many on the left cling to the idea that Clinton lost due to voter suppression of minority voters — despite the millions George Soros funneled into organizations to combat this allegation from occurring. A writer for Salon wrote a lengthy piece rambling on and on about how the GOP kept minorities from voting, but without any direct evidence that this had happened. The logic in this article and others is: The Democrat should get the most minority votes; Clinton got fewer votes from minorities than she should have gotten; therefore someone must be keeping minorities from voting for Clinton.

But that isn’t the reason.

Why Trump? Why Not Clinton?

First, the mainstream assumed that Trump was a racist and that he would draw an even lower percent of black and Latino voters than Republicans usually get. In fact, a larger share of blacks, Latinos and Asian-Americans voted for Trump than had voted for Romney. The only Republican candidate to do better with those three groups was George W. Bush in his first election in 2000 and his reelection in 2004.

Revealingly, Trump received about the same share of the white vote than Romney did four years ago, yet it now appears he received about the same or slightly fewer votes than Romney did then.

Second, exit polls reveal that key Democratic constituencies failed to show up to vote for Clinton. She received fewer votes from blacks, Latinos, Asians, Millennials and lower income voters than nearly every observer expected. Younger blacks didn’t think Clinton indicated enough support for Black Lives Matter or criminal justice reforms. Additionally, she didn’t have the star power Obama had as the first black president.

For example, Clinton lost some of the traditional support for Democratic candidates from lower middle class and working class voters. Only 52 percent of voters making $50,000 or less annually voted for her, down from 60 percent for Obama. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) recognized during the race that Clinton was in trouble in Michigan. She observed that middle class voters were discouraged that their economic situation had gotten worse, not better, under Obama.

As long as the left ignores the real reasons Clinton lost, they can expect another loss in 2020. The voters clearly demonstrated they don’t buy into fake stories of racism.

Similarly, millennials were disgruntled by Clinton’s lack of ethics, especially the way her campaign created the caricature of “Bernie Bros” as racist and sexist. They had favored Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary and disliked her ties to Wall Street and her interventionist foreign policy.

Some Millennials voted instead for third-party candidates, bolstering Libertarian Gary Johnson to 3 percent of the vote, an increase from his 1 percent in 2012. Johnson and the other third-party candidate, Green Party’s Jill Stein, took enough of the vote away from Clinton in four swing states to tip the race to Trump. Ironically, Clinton’s husband may have the won election as president in 1992 due to third-party candidate Ross Perot taking away votes from George H.W. Bush.

The Conclusion

The evidence suggests that a lot of minority voters accepted Trump’s message and broke away from the Democratic party. Enough voters in groups the Democrats expected to hold voted Republican to give the election — and the crucial battleground states — to Trump.

Ironically, part of Clinton’s problem is the narrative she and the left created about white racism. Clinton seems to have lost some of the black vote because she didn’t embrace the radical Black Lives Matter agenda enough. The left has manufactured such absurd levels of racist accusations that it’s backfiring on them, hurting Democrats who don’t breathlessly push the spin.

As long as the left ignores the real reasons Clinton lost, they can expect another loss in 2020.