Why did Trump win — and Clinton lose — the 2016 U.S. presidential election? That’s been debated widely, to understate the case. Nominees include each campaign’s ground game, messaging, FBI Director James B. Comey’s last-minute letter to Congress, and defections from the “Obama coalition.” Here, we offer new data to […] Read more »
Taking Trump’s Temperature Amongst His Supporters (and Opponents), Part 2
Last week, we released the results of a national poll of voters who said they supported President Donald Trump in the 2016 election, as well as focus groups of mostly Trump voters (but also some voters who either supported Hillary Clinton or voted third party last year). We found that […] Read more »
Reaching Out to the Voters the Left Left Behind
The devastating recession that began at the end of 2007 and officially ended in June 2009 was the most severe downturn since World War II. The political, social and even medical consequences of this recession have been duly noted, but even so the depths of its effects are only now […] 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 »
Trump Probably Did Better With Latino Voters Than Romney Did
In the lead-up to the election, there was a lot of talk about how Latinos would turn out in record numbers to stop Donald Trump. But not only did Trump end up winning, exit polls also indicated that he won 29 percent of the Latino vote — better than Mitt […] Read more »
The Iowa Outlier, Where Obama Voters Go Trump
In an election where a dominant narrative is Hillary Clinton trying to expand the Democratic electoral map, Iowa is a noteworthy an outlier. The Hawkeye State voted for Barack Obama for president in 2008 and 2012 by good margins, and yet most polls show Donald Trump with a slight lead […] Read more »