As the election results came in on Tuesday evening, the Clinton camp thought they were winning until all of sudden they weren’t. The Trump camp thought it was a long shot until the blue wall began to crumble. In short, all the polls and pundits were wrong.
What happened? Now that the details of the vote are available, it becomes obvious. Because Trump was an unconventional, populist candidate it was widely thought he couldn’t get as many votes as the usual Republican candidate, and until near the end this seemed plausible since he never exceeded a ceiling of 43% of the electorate.
When all the votes were counted, however, they totaled almost 120 million and Clinton got 59.9 million and Trump got 59.7 million, narrowly losing the popular vote. He outperformed the assumptions, but not the norms. Here are the numbers for the last four races in millions
Total Dem Rep
2016 Clinton/Trump 120 59 59
2012 Obama/Romney 129 65 60
2008 Obama/McCain 131 69 59
2004 Bush/Kerry 122 51 50.5
Note that the total vote was the lowest in the last 16 years, suggesting two unpopular candidates had its effect, but also note that Republican votes in the last four races including Trump are fairly consistent. On the other side, Clinton received six million less votes than Obama in 2012 and ten million less than the president in 2008.
This clearly mattered, because she lost four crucial sing states by a total of just 227,000 votes. If she had received 126,000 more votes in Florida, 12,000 in Michigan, 68,000 in Pennsylvania and 27,000 in Wisconsin, she would have won the White House with 303 electoral college votes instead of just 228.
The demographics, courtesy of Pew, of her failure are also interesting. The stereotype of the Trump voter, to put it harshly, is of some ignorant, impoverished, middle-aged, white trash yokel. But the numbers tell a different story.
In fact, Clinton won voters earning less than $50,000 a year and lost all other economic strata. Trump’s voters weren’t on welfare or living in a shack in a ‘holler’ but solidly working and middle-class families who have gotten squeezed by the globalization he ran against
Hillary actually underperformed across the board. Democrats won hispanics by +44 in 2012, but Hillary’s margin was +36. Predictably, Obama’s margin with black voters was +87, hers +80. Whites preferred the Republican by +20 in 2012, but Trump got only +21, so Obama’s race can’t be blamed for the underperformance of Democrats.
In 2012, women preferred the Democrat by +11, but Hillary trying to become the first woman president could only increase that margin to +12. Men preferred the Republican by +7 in 2012, but Trump got +12.
Much was made of Trump’s appeal to less educated voters and there is something to it, but it’s not the whole story. Those with a college degree or higher preferred the Democrat by +2 in 2012 and chose Hillary by +9, while those with some college or less chose Obama by +2 in 2012 but went for Trump by +8 this time, a crucial ten percent shift.
Voters 18-29, the dreaded Millennials, are understandably testy having been born into the world of 9/11, terrorism, war in the Middle East, the crash of 2008 and the agonizingly slow recovery, not to mention a rapidly and unpredictably changing economy, poor job prospects and huge student debt.
In 2012, voters of this age favored Obama over Romney by 60% to 36%. This time Clinton got them by a slightly eroded margin, 55% to 37%.
Unless Democrats can persuade middle-class and working white voters and Millennials that they have a program to improve their economic prospects, they can look forward to becoming a permanent minority party, both literally and figuratively.