The word “populism” is being used to explain almost every trend or event of 2016, including Brexit, the election of Donald Trump as America’s next President, and shifts in French, German, Italian, Dutch, and Austrian politics. … Reducing everything to “populism” is ignoring the real issues that motivate people. To […] Read more »
Democrats search for a path back into rural America’s good graces
… As much as anything, the 2016 election highlighted the degree to which Democrats have lost favor among voters in rural and small-town America. Heading toward Election Day, Democrats dismissed the possibility that there were enough white, working-class voters in these nonurban areas to overcome their advantages with African Americans, […] Read more »
Forget the ’60s—The Real Generation Gap Is Happening Right Now
Since the election last month, we have seen a parade of analyses examining how Clinton supporters differ from Trump supporters along the dividing lines of race, education, and geographic residence. The persistence of partisan differences by age in American elections, however, has received somewhat less attention. … Hillary Clinton may […] Read more »
Clinton won as many votes as Obama in 2012 — just not in the states where she needed them most
The final results of the 2016 presidential election look like this: Hillary Clinton got roughly the same number of votes that President Obama received four years ago en route to his reelection, but she nonetheless lost the presidency to Donald Trump, who came in at least 2.8 million votes behind […] Read more »
5 more things I learned from the 2016 election
After posting the 19 Things We Learned from the 2016 Election, I received a bunch of helpful feedback in comments and email. Here are some of the key points that I missed or presented unclearly: CONT. Andrew Gelman, Columbia U. Read more »
How Trump Broke the Blue Wall
President-elect Donald Trump’s success at breaking the so-called “blue wall” – those Rust Belt states that had voted for a Democrat in every election since at least 1992 – was the key to his victory. To help understand how he did this, I compared exit poll data from the last […] Read more »