Two years after the 2016 election, there has been no single answer to the question: What happened? In an outcome that saw the popular vote and the electoral college diverge, theories abound, opinions are many and consensus fleeting. Now, a trio of political scientists have come forth with their answer […] 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 »
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 »
What the 2016 Elections Taught Us About Uncertainty
I am frequently asked what the “surprise elections” will be this fall. After all, there are always a few races whose outcome—or near outcome, the results much closer than expected—seem to come out of the blue. … The surprise outcome in November 2016 was the disparity between the state-level polls […] Read more »
Obama and Trump both bent demographic trends to win. Can Trump repeat in 2020?
The past three presidential elections have been head-snapping for many Americans: a sharp turn into what many people believed was the future of electoral politics with the elections of Barack Obama and an even sharper reversal with the victory of Donald Trump. People are still making sense of it all. […] Read more »