Donald Trump’s America was always there, just beneath the surface. You glimpsed it in the crowds, furious but patient, waiting to see him, no matter how long they had to stand in the sun. You heard it in the words of his admirers, who saw him not only as an improvement on our current leaders but as an antidote, a bend in history, an agent of revolution. In the final weeks, there were the accelerants to his fire—the intervention of F.B.I. director James Comey in the Presidential race, a surge in health-plan prices under Obamacare—but none of them alone created his path. Only the people themselves could do that.
Clifton, Virginia, is a picturesque Washington, D.C., suburb less than thirty miles from the White House. The route into Main Street winds between stately, colonnaded homes and equestrian farms. The median household income in the surrounding area is $174,233, nearly triple the state average. Nearby suburbs are becoming more Democratic, as immigrants and yuppies move from the city, but Clifton has remained a proud pocket of limited-government conservatism; in 2012, the Clifton precinct favored Mitt Romney over Barack Obama by twenty-three percentage points.
For weeks, one of the main pieces of conventional wisdom about this election was that prosperous, traditional Republicans would, in the end, turn away from Donald Trump. In Clifton, it soon became clear, that was not the case.
more here.