I'm basing this analysis on the fact that Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin - former rock-solid members of the 'blue wall', that had ensured Democratic candidates a clear (if not always victorious) path to the White House for nigh-on three decades. Although your points about two-term presidencies generating less support and Hillary being an unpopular candidate hold sway, my analysis was more predicated on the realization that Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, three states that had voted for Obama in both 2008 and 2012 (iirc), switched to Trump this time around, taking the notion of any 'blue wall' with them. The fact that Hillary won the popular vote amidst a lower turnout only signifies that the American electoral system is getting ever more skewed away from accurately representing the masses of people in California and the Atlantic coast who have been swelling Democratic ranks for the past half a century without affecting the electoral college tally (i.e, these states have growing populations out of proportion to the demographics in the rest of America without the electoral college votes to show for it). But it doesn't reflect a nation-wide consensus or united view on Hillary's pros and cons as a candidate - the most dramatic example of that was the fracturing of the blue wall.
These states are all Rust Belt states, where the truly tragic death of the American blue-collar dream took place over the long, bitter years of the last four decades. All have known poverty, deprivation and the loss of the American ideal of self-reliance and mutual prosperity. To them, America wasn't as Hillary portrayed it to be - it was not 'already great'. To those former union workers left unemployed and on the dole, waiting for death as their family and friends waste away due to addiction or failing health and their once proud and tight-knit towns slowly crumble away into the dusty plains...it was dead to them a long time ago.
Make no mistake, some unique trends came up this election. One of them was Trump winning white voters without a college education by a record 39-point margin, higher than Reagan when he beat Mondale in the 1984 wipeout. Another was an equally record-breaking margin of working-class white women going for Trump over Hillary by nearly 30 percentage points. And a third was rural voters coming out for Trump in huge numbers that comfortably beat out Romney's tally in 2012. I think all those trends colluded in these Rust Belt states, and together signified what elite urban America was too self-interested to witness back when it could yet have prevented a Trump presidency - that there is no longer a way to sell globalization, automation and wealth inequality (with all their attendant phenomena, like higher immigration and job losses) to the people who have seen everything taken away from them over the cold, bitter years when they screamed for help and America did nothing. The Republicans will almost definitely take all three things even higher while in office - like I said, the poor who voted this way likely voted against their own interests, and once again played into the hands of the wealthy, as is the case with nearly all populist endeavours. But to them, this wasn't a vote for the Republicans as much as it was a vote for the one man who seemed even remotely ready to listen to their pain, and to understand that America wasn't great...but also that it could be made great again.
Racism doesn't explain why the same people that voted for Trump voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Sexism doesn't explain why white working-class women went for Trump in such record numbers. And shouting about it from the rooftops instead of addressing the overwhelmingly pressing issues of economic and political equality for *all*, not just the trendy minorities or genders that occupy news attention for that particular election cycle, seems to be something that my fellow liberals have yet to seriously recognize as a the overwhelming priority.
And, as Brexit and Trump have already proved, their delusions will only have to get more and more frantic in the months and years to come. Next year, France, Germany and the Netherlands go to the polls. Le Pen was already predicted to win the first round of voting prior to Trump - GHod knows how much higher she'll go in the polls now, especially if the Socialists continue to select leaders as deeply disliked as Hollande. AfD is hollering from the rooftops with this victory - no doubt they're going to go full gun next year, as they already have in various regional elections over the past two years. Wilders is gearing up for a major push in the Netherlands. All these countries could fall to nationalist, sometimes openly far-right populism in the next year, if my fellow urban liberal classes don't get their heads out of their asses.
Time's ticking, but I fear, with our own disunity and focus on the enduringly petty, we have already proved too unwilling to realise what's coming, and why it is coming in the manner that it is.
