There was an interesting story about this in the New York Times today. Much like polling in the current Democratic primary, national economic growth does not necessarily align with the states that gave Trump his electoral college victory in 2016. There Are Economic Warning Signs for Trump in the Midwest
Yep. Remember how Trump railed that all the economic indicators were wrong in 2016? Well, when he became President, suddenly those same indicators were right! Amazing!
Posted this a while back, but the answers is clear. Turnout. Just go vote...for whoever gets the Democrat nomination. Whether they are your preferred candidate or not. Just vote... Registered Voters Who Stayed Home Probably Cost Clinton The Election Registered voters who didn’t vote on Election Day in November were more Democratic-leaning than the registered voters who turned out, according to a post-election poll from SurveyMonkey, shared with FiveThirtyEight. In fact, Donald Trump probably would have lost to Hillary Clinton had Republican- and Democratic-leaning registered voters cast ballots at equal rates. Election-year polls understandably focus on likely voters. Then, after the election, the attention turns to actual voters, mainly using exit polls. But getting good data on Americans who didn’t vote is more difficult. That’s why the SurveyMonkey poll, which interviewed about 100,000 registered voters just after Election Day, including more than 3,600 registered voters who didn’t vote, is so useful.The interviews took place on Nov. 9 and Nov. 10. SurveyMonkey also interviewed Americans who were not registered to vote, but I’m focusing on registered voters here. We’ll have a follow-up on non-registered non-voters. It’s still just one poll, and so its findings aren’t gospel, but with such a big sample we can drill down to subgroups and measure the demographic makeup of nonvoters to an extent we couldn’t with a smaller dataset. ... Registered voters who didn’t vote were less Republican-leaning Given how closely party identification tracks with vote choice, the disparity in turnout probably cost Clinton the election. SurveyMonkey did not ask non-voters whom they would have voted for, but we do know that more than 90 percent of self-identified Democrats who cast a ballot voted for Clinton and more than 90 percent of Republicans voted for Trump. Moreover, voters who didn’t identify with or lean towards either party were slightly more likely to prefer Clinton to Trump. That means that had the non-voters cast a ballot in accordance with their party identification, Clinton’s advantage over Trump nationally would have expanded by about 2 to 3 percentage points. That almost certainly would have been enough to flip enough states for her to win the Electoral College. The large gap in party identification between registered voters who cast a ballot and those who didn’t also helps to explain why pre-election polling underestimated Trump. Pre-election polls suggested that the gap between these two groups would be smaller than in 2012; the SurveyMonkey data suggests it was larger. The biggest reason given by non-voters for staying home was that they didn’t like the candidates.There are, of course, a lot of reasons people don’t vote. In addition to not liking their choices, some people don’t have the time to vote (they can’t get off work, for example). Others are dissuaded or prevented from voting by barriers like voter identification laws. Clinton and Trump both had favorable ratings in the low 30s among registered voters who didn’t cast a ballot — both had ratings in the low 40s among those who did vote. That’s a pretty sizable difference. So why was Clinton hurt more by non-voters? Trump was able to win, in large part, because voters who disliked both candidates favored him in big numbers,according to the exit polls. Clinton, apparently, couldn’t get those who disliked both candidates — and who may have been more favorably disposed to her candidacy — to turn out and vote. The second pattern that jumps out in the SurveyMonkey data: Non-white and Hispanic Americans were more likely to stay home than white voters. Of all voters who cast a ballot in the general election, 25 percent were black, Hispanic, Asian, or a member of another minority group. But those voters were 42 percent of those who didn’t vote. Drilling down a little further, black voters made up 11 percent of voters who cast a ballot and 19 percent who didn’t. This disparity really hurt Clinton because black voters (by 82 percentage points) and Hispanic voters (by 40 percentage points) overwhelmingly favored her, while white voters went for Trump by a 16-point margin in the SurveyMonkey poll. The turnout rate for black voters was substantially higher in 2012, the last time Barack Obama was on the ballot. According to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey,We should get the latest version of the Current Population Survey Voting and Registration data later this year. black Americans made up 13 percent of voters and only 9 percent of registered non-voters in 2012. In other words, black voters actually made up a larger percentage of voters who cast a ballot than those who didn’t in 2012, which is the opposite of what occurred last year. Whites, on the other hand, made up about the same percentage of registered voters who cast a ballot (74 percent) and those who didn’t (73 percent). The higher number of black non-voters in 2016 probably had a big impact. Next up: Younger voters were more likely to stay home than older voters. That matches a similar pattern from 2012, according to the Current Population Survey. That probably didn’t help Clinton, but it’s not as harmful as you might think because the difference in voting patterns between the oldest age cohort (a group Trump won by 12 percentage points in the SurveyMonkey data) and youngest (a group Clinton won by 30 percentage points) voters isn’t as large as it is between racial groups. Overall, the age breakdown of 2016 voters looks about the same as four years ago. More harmful for Clinton was which young voters stayed home: minorities. Among white voters, voters 18-29 years old made up 30 percent of voters who did not participate in the November election. Among young Hispanic voters, that climbs to 43 percent. Among young black voters, it was an even higher 46 percent. That generally matches the findings of the voter data released in some Southern states showing that young black voters were especially likely to stay home in this election. Younger black voters were far more likely to support Bernie Sanders in the primary, suggesting that there simply was not the enthusiasm for Clinton’s candidacy as there was for Obama’s in 2012. Clinton’s favorable rating, for instance, was about 10 percentage points lower among the youngest black voters compared to the oldest black voters in the SurveyMonkey poll. Perhaps most important is the group that voted in much larger numbers than in 2012: white voters without a college degree. (Trump won this bloc 63 percent to 32 percent.) Generally speaking, college graduates are more likely to vote than non-college graduates, even when controlling for race. According to the Current Population Survey, whites without a college degree made up 44 percent of voters who cast a ballot in 2012, and 58 percent of registered voters who didn’t vote. These may have been some of the “missing” white voters that RealClearPolitics Sean Trende has written about, but in 2016, they weren’t missing. In the SurveyMonkey data, white non-college graduates made up 48 percent of 2016 registered voters who didn’t vote, substantially lower than 2012. They made up 47 percent of voters. It’s pretty remarkable that a group of voters that is shrinking as a percentage of the population made up a larger share of the electorate in 2016 than in 2012. But Trump made a clear appeal to this group, and some voters who stayed at home in previous years may have felt they had a greater voice in 2016. Simply put, Trump got more of his voters to turn out than Clinton did. That’s quite a turnaround from the pre-election conventional wisdom that the Clinton campaign had the better turnout machine. Of course, Clinton’s turnout operation may well have nudged many reluctant voters to the polls, but either way, it wasn’t enough. The polling numbers from SurveyMonkey indicate that Clinton was hurt dearly by the voters who decided not to vote.
Why do you think everybody is doing better? A lot of those same people have still not gotten a raise. What are you basing this on?
That’s a good read and compelling analysis, @Rashmon. I think the underlying factors in that story are apathy and complacency. Everyone assumed Clinton’s victory was a foregone conclusion, so disenchanted voters felt they could sit on their hands without adversely affecting the outcome. Hopefully, that was a ‘lesson learned’ moment. Especially now with many forecasting another Trump victory, I hope it’s finally hammered down the point of how valuable each vote is.
If you saw the movie Get Out, you're the real racist? If you can't be cogent, at least aim for coherence.
If the Dems nominate Bernie, Trump will lose and lose big, no matter what is happening with the economy. The swing vote that got Trump elected in 2016 will not be there in 2020 if he runs against Bernie. Surely he would get all of the Clinton Dems, but additionally Bernie would wake the sleeping giant - all the disenchanted people who have lost faith in the system and didn't come out to vote in 2016. The election would not be close. It's during the debates where Trump would be exposed like the self-serving con-man that he is. He wouldn't have Clinton's dirt to hide behind.
Sanders and Warren more moderate then Trump? In behavior... sure... but not in policy (assuming to you assign a specific policy doctrine to Trump which is difficult to do). The vast majority of the voters in the US (the ones that will win you an election) do not live on the fringes, they live in the middle with relatively minor differences separating them. Warren hasn't traditionally been a leftist (she was more of a normal liberal), but she has moved pretty far left during this primary run. Bernie certainly is pretty far to the left and always has been. Neither of the candidates are remotely close to moderates by American standards, they are both more closely aligned with left wing radicals than Trump is aligned with right wing radicals. I don't think Sanders/Warren have a legitimate chance to beat Trump if they make it out of the primaries, so the Dems best shot is to have someone that appeals to the middle 75%-80% of voters, not the fringes that make all the noise during primary season. I certainly hope not, he would literally be the worst candidate out of the entire field of Democrats... give me anyone over him.
This is an interesting point for the Warren fear mongers. If she does "wreck the economy", it'll be through the numbers that have enriched the ultra wealthy and the states she's most popular in. People in Red States will definitely benefit through her heavy handed redistribution of wealth, though they're less appreciative if "everyone benefits" and they get more minority neighbors. Im not sure progressives can message that reality nor do I think they want to for the sake of their slower voters. Ultimately people like her will have to message to the zombie populist voters whether they truly have benefited from the Trump economy or if they're more okay with feel good stories of temp Carrier jobs that stick it to the bean counters.
