WASHINGTON — The unraveling of the coalition that was supposed to carry Hillary Clinton to the White House had a lot to do with voters like Jim McAndrew in counties like Northampton, Pennsylvania.

McAndrew, 69, a retired steel worker, voted Democrat in every presidential election for half a century. This year he stayed home. And Northampton County, a heavily White, heavily Democratic, largely working class area that backed President Obama in 2008 and 2012, went for Donald Trump, a Republican.

McAndrew, who voted for Obama in the two previous races, was intrigued by Trump, but decided eventually that “all he does is insult everybody … women, Black people, White people, rich, poor. He’s an idiot.” He considered Clinton, but was concerned by the scandal over her handling of classified material on a private email server as secretary of state.

“I hated both of them, so I just said, ‘the hell with it,'” McAndrew said. His wife, also a life-long Democrat, went to the polls without him – and voted Republican.

“First time ever,” he said.

Trump’s ability to flip reliably Democratic counties like Northampton helped drive his victory in the presidential election this week. It was critical to his win in Pennsylvania and other Rust Belt states, a bulwark in the Democrats’ electoral strategy for winning the White House, and it helped fuel his victories in critical swing states, such as Florida and North Carolina.

It’s not that Trump’s economic populism and “America First” messages generated widespread enthusiasm; he won some of those counties with far fewer votes than Mitt Romney captured as the Republican nominee in 2012. Nationwide, Trump’s 59.7 million votes are about 1.2 million behind the 60.9 million Romney got when he lost four years ago, based on initial projections.

But Clinton’s troubles holding on to Democratic voters were far more stark. Some crossed party lines for Trump or backed an independent.

Many just stayed home.

Clinton won the popular vote with 59.9 million votes, 6 million fewer than the 65.9 million Obama won in 2012. And her weakness in traditionally Democratic areas helped cost her the electoral college that chooses the winner of the election.

Clinton came across as a status quo candidate unlikely to shake up the Washington establishment, says Mike Sly, 74, a retiree and independent voter in Pinellas County, Florida, who backed Obama in 2012 and voted for Trump this year. Clinton’s message failed to convince him that she would address his concerns about the state of the economy and rising health insurance premiums under Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

Clinton’s loss in Florida, a key battleground state, stemmed partly from her inability to hold voters like Sly in white, middle- and working-class areas that previously went Democrat. In vote-rich Pinellas, a beach community popular with retirees in the Tampa Bay region, Trump won 48 percent of the vote, besting Clinton’s 47 percent. In 2012, Obama won 52 percent.

Nationally, initial projections show low voter turnout of just over 55 percent, the worst since the contested election of 2000, when Republican George W. Bush defeated then-Democratic Vice President Al Gore. In Obama’s first victory, turnout was more than 62 percent.

Clinton beat Trump among Black and Hispanic voters, but her effort to forge a winning coalition by leveraging that strength in diverse, urban areas was upended by Trump’s strength among Whites. Meanwhile, Trump still managed to hold roughly the same level of minority support that Romney got in 2012.