Hey everyone this is Jonathan K-Mart. Welcome to K-Pup. So in last week's

episode Michael Steele called President-elect Donald Trump a pragmatic populist as a way of trying to

understand how he might govern. In this episode Steele expands on his

explanation of how we got here in the first place, including why he thinks blacks didn't come out for Hillary and

you can listen to that right now.

Let's start with the white vote because the most fascinating thing to me on

election night watching John King go county by county showing you here's the

vote 2016 here's the vote 2012 and all these

rural counties that have few people but look at the turnout and when you think

about it what Donald Trump did I mean did you said he pulled white votes out of his ass I was gonna say and I

wrote that it was like he did electoral fracking I think my way of saying he was

more sophisticated it was more

it was more colorful but he did he did with his

pop his racist message the xenophobic man all these things so he

no I'm not going to disagree with that pull those votes out from places where the vote totals in these small counties was negligible in 08, negligible in 12, and off the charts in 16.

And the other thing is, he was able to turn white Obama voters around.

Okay, so let's talk about that because that's a very important point.

In essence what Donald Trump did was he reawakened the Reagan Democrats, who for the last 30 years or so have largely been out of the

political play. Some of them went down the line with Hope and Change in 08, but by

2012 had backed off. Most of them, however, stayed away from the field

once Reagan left because they didn't like the players. They weren't feeling a lot of these folks

that were coming up Bush, Clinton, etc.

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