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 »
It’s Not All About Clinton — The Midwest Was Getting Redder Before 2016
Here’s one of the biggest questions Democrats face in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s loss: Did Clinton have an Electoral College problem or does the Democratic Party have an Electoral College problem? CONT. Harry Enten, FiveThirtyEight Read more »
The New Republican Coalition and Its First Challenges
Democracy Corps’ new “Republican Party Project” survey of the GOP’s potential coalition exposes the very new dynamics created by Donald Trump and the 2016 election. Pay close attention because there are risks and opportunities all around. This group of Republican base voters and Trump voters was forged by their disdain […] Read more »
GOP gained ground in middle-class communities in 2016
The Republican Party made deep inroads into America’s middle-class communities in 2016. Although many middle-class areas voted for Barack Obama in 2008, they overwhelmingly favored Donald Trump in 2016, a shift that was a key to his victory. Meanwhile, Democrats had more success retaining a loose “coalition” of lower-income and […] Read more »
19 Things We Learned from the 2016 Election
OK, we can all agree that the November election result was a shocker. According to news reports, even the Trump campaign team was stunned to come up a winner. So now seemed like a good time to go over various theories floating around in political science and political reporting and […] Read more »