The 2016 election is nearly two years behind us, but debates continue to rage over what lifted Donald Trump to a victory that surprised so many political observers. All elections generate narratives that try to explain the outcome, but often those do not square with polling and other political science […] Read more »
Getting to Know White Voters
There are LOTS of opinions and narratives out there about white voters. Hillary Clinton lost because white women abandoned her. White, non-college educated voters are Trump’s base. They are never coming back/will come back to Democrats. Donald Trump’s testosterone-laden presidency alienated lots of white, college-educated women who held their noses […] Read more »
A Few Political Consequences of the Democratic Surge Among College-Educated Whites
The Pew Research Center recently released an informative report on the composition of the American electorate, based on a survey of citizens whose electoral participation (or lack thereof) in 2016 was confirmed by matching their names to state voter turnout records. … The national exit poll estimated that Clinton had […] Read more »
The White Strategy: Trump’s winning coalition and its weaknesses
In the aftermath of the 2012 election, when just about everyone assumed Mitt Romney lost because he didn’t win enough Hispanic votes, the election analyst Sean Trende produced a dissenting take. A close look at the results across the Midwest and Appalachia revealed a large population of what Trende called […] Read more »
How Well Do You Understand the Trump Coalition?
There’s a popular portrait of a “Trump voter.” He’s a white man without a college degree, and so loyal that he would stick by Mr. Trump no matter what. There’s a reason the stereotype exists: Mr. Trump’s strength among white working-class voters, particularly men, put him over the top in […] Read more »
An examination of the 2016 electorate, based on validated voters
… This report introduces a new approach for looking at the electorate in the 2016 general election: matching members of Pew Research Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel to voter files to create a dataset of verified voters. … Consistent with other analyses and past elections, race was strongly correlated […] Read more »