Media and pollsters didn't quite see Trump's win coming
US President-elect Donald Trump (left) and Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, embrace during the former's election night event at the New York Hilton Midtown hotel in New York City on November 9, 2016. PHOTO | MARK WILSON | AFP
What you need to know:
Trump defied all odds in America, in the polls and even in international political expectations.
Could it have been because he was an outsider in American politics?
Some people suggest that even America is not yet ready for a female president.
Others contend that Trump’s victory has a lot to do with his appeal to white supremacists.
Yet others claim it has many things to do with his rhetoric against non-Caucasian newcomers to America.
I thought the majority of – or is it all – Americans are immigrants from one or this other place around the world.
I must admit that for whatever reason, I have been watching the American elections quite keenly since the process began. On the last night of elections, I watched the pouring in of votes and then went to bed still believing that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats were going to win. When I woke up early on Wednesday morning, I was shocked. From what I have now observed, I was not the only one. The media and the pollsters did not quite see it coming. Both here and around the world, there are questions but America and the world must move on.
The biggest question on most people’s minds is why – or how - Donald Trump won the American elections even when everyone – including Trump himself – expected the traditional American politician to win. The other question is, of course, how the first woman to ever have been nominated as candidate for president by one of the major political parties – for 240 years – was rejected by the leading democracy in the world.
DEFIED ODDS
Trump defied all odds in America, in the polls and even in international political expectations. Could it have been because he was an outsider in American politics? Some people suggest that even America is not yet ready for a female president. Others contend that Trump’s victory has a lot to do with his appeal to white supremacists. Yet others claim it has many things to do with his rhetoric against non-Caucasian newcomers to America. I thought the majority of – or is it all – Americans are immigrants from one or this other place around the world.
President Obama and the president-elect have already met at the start of the transition from one administration to the other. Before that point, Trump was still a candidate who had said all manner of weird things about Obama’s administration. The same was true of President Obama since we all know that up to then, he believed – like many of us did – that his candidate was on the winning lane. The meeting in the Oval office between the two seems to have negated all of the negative campaign cacophony we had seen up to then.
This is probably the lesson that we Kenyans and probably a lot of other people around the world – particularly Africa – have to learn. Were our political leaders to believe that the facilities put to their personal disposal by the State are good enough for them, I believe all would be fine. Our transitions from one president to the other tend to go wrong because most of them think only about what they can get from government.
Fr Dominic Wamugunda is dean of students, University of Nairobi.
