For many supporters, Trump is a thing called hope

(AP) — On election night, when Donald Trump claimed victory in her home state of Wisconsin, Shay Chamberlain was so excited she screamed and fell over.

In his victory speech, Trump called people like Chamberlain and her family America's "forgotten men and women" — the blue-collar workers in the manufacturing towns of the Rust Belt and the coalfields of Appalachia who propelled him to an improbable victory.

[...] the Republican's overwhelming backing among whites with less than a college education is at least partly a reflection of how little the economic recovery since the Great Recession has benefited them.

[...] they also turned to him to hold back the tide of social change: same-sex marriage, transgender rights, a society growing more racially diverse.

[...] Trump won battleground states that had voted for Obama twice.

Thousands of registered Democrats, including many former union workers from the mines and factories, crossed party lines and sided with Trump.

Scott Hiltgen, a 66-year-old small business owner in Wisconsin, called Washington a "cesspool" of career politicians, aware of and indifferent to the plight of the American worker.

Middle-aged white men with only high school degrees — the core of Trump's support — saw their inflation-adjusted incomes plummet 9 percent from 1996 through 2014, according to Sentier Research, a data analytics firm founded by former Census Bureau officials.

White male college graduates in the same age bracket, by contrast, saw their incomes jump 23 percent.

The Great Recession wiped out millions of middle-income jobs in manufacturing, office administrative work and construction, and those jobs haven't returned, even as the nation now has 6.5 million more jobs than it did before the recession began.

In many parts of the country, they have been replaced with lower-income work in restaurants, hotels, and in home health care.

Miners streamed into a convenience store on a highway between one struggling, West Virginia coal town and another on Wednesday morning.