Hillary couldn’t find Wisconsin, Le Pen couldn’t find Provence.
Via Washington Examiner:
France voted Sunday, and Emmanuel Macron defeated Marine Le Pen by 66 to 34 percent, more than suggested by the polls (which were right on target in the first round of voting on April 23). Le Pen’s showing was considerably stronger than her father Jean-Marie Le Pen’s 18 percent in the 2002 runoff against Jacques Chirac.
One likely reason is the elder Le Pen’s defense of the Vichy regime and characterization of the Holocaust as a “detail” of history, comments for which Marine Le Pen threw him out of her Front National party. Another possible reason is that France has been plagued by Islamist terrorist attacks in recent years much more than was the case 15 years ago.
In a Washington Examiner column last month, I characterized recent political results in Britain, the United States and other nations as fights between the capital and the countryside. You might characterize the results in France that way too — except that Le Pen was unable to carry the countryside.
Instead, the results show that she was rejected overwhelmingly in the capital, but was competitive in the rest of France only in areas that have been particularly aggrieved by events recent and historic, and was rejected 2-1 in the rest of the country. Calculating from the national returns as reported in Figaro, I get the following.