In trying to explain Donald Trump’s stunning victory last week, observers have offered numerous explanations. … One way of testing various explanations against one another is to examine county-level vote returns, where contextual information — education levels, racial composition and so forth — can help sort out statistically which factors […] Read more »
How the Election Revealed the Divide Between City and Country
The earthquake that elected Donald Trump has left the United States approaching 2020 with a political landscape reminiscent of 1920. Not since then has the cultural chasm between urban and non-urban America shaped the struggle over the country’s direction as much as today. Of all the overlapping generational, racial, and […] Read more »
16 For ’16: Bite-sized observations on a wild election
Now that we’ve had a week to digest the results of the 2016 election, here are some observations about what happened and what the results might tell us about the future: 1. Electoral map tilts to the GOP In close elections, the Electoral College will probably continue to tilt to […] Read more »
The Obama Coalition Falls Apart
Political coalitions are tricky things to manage in the United States. Ours is a country of more than 320 million people but only two major political parties—so each side’s voting bloc tends to be unstable at the margins, where national elections are actually won and lost. It is hard to […] Read more »
Trump’s coalition won the demographic battle. It’ll still lose the war.
Here’s one way to think about the 2016 election. We are witnessing a great race in this country between demographic and economic change that’s driving a new America, and reaction to those changes. On November 8, with a tremendous burst of speed, reaction to change caught up with change and […] Read more »
‘Demographics Aren’t Destiny’ And Four Other Things This Election Taught Me
The 2016 election is in the books. Donald Trump won; Hillary Clinton lost. But it will take a while — weeks and months — to sift through the results, so be wary of any stories drawing sweeping conclusions about the country (it’s still the same nation that elected President Obama […] Read more »