http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/state-by-state Turnout was down in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Iowa, and Wisconsin among Democrats. It was less-down among democrats in Illinois and Minnesota. Indeed, Hillary may have lost those states because 50-100,000 Democratic male voters stayed home because they didn't want to vote for a female candidate. There is a pervasive anti-feminist strain in American politics that you do not find in the Southwest or Mountain West, and those states voted as though it was 2008 or 2012. But in states where female representation in state legislatures is low, the Democrats fared very poorly last night. Call it the Coakley Effect.
Can't explain this election with one variable. Sexism plays its part, but really this election was a perfect storm of a lot of factors. It's very similar to what's happening in Europe, and certainly there was no sex factor in Brexit. In fact this wave is carrying the likes of Marine Le Pen right now ... Another thing to think about is would Democratic males have revolted against Elizabeth Warren in the same way? Obviously we can't ever know because we have no idea what kind of campaign she would have run. But I suspect not. The real underlying force here is anti elitism. Sexism is probably a secondary or tertiary factor.
Sexism played a part. But the answer is broader than that - 1920 - Cox, loss 1928 - Hoover, win for one term 1960 - Nixon, loss 1968 - Humphrey, loss 1988 - Daddy Bush, win for one term 2000 - Gore, loss 2008 - McCain, loss 2016 - Hillary, loss That makes 8 elections over the past 100 years that matched two non-incumbents, with one party having held the White House for the past 8 years. Six times they lost immediately, and the other two times they were ejected with prejudice after a single term. You can't run as a change candidate when your party has held office for the past 8 years, and after 8 years voters want a change candidate. That is not the complete answer, either, but it is I think the largest single factor.
Hillary was a flawed candidate. But combining the fact that people couldn't bring themselves to vote for her and the fact that prople were willing to vote for a man like Trump also says a lot about attitudes towards women in the US.
Exactly. I don't think these were people saying "I hate women, I'm going to vote for Trump." It could be situations where male Democrats could choose to vote for third-party candidates in the Rust Belt, or stay home, or omit a choice at the Presidential level and vote downballot.
Trump literally shits on a gilded toilet seat. Elitism? He was born elite and will die elite. No it was "taking the country back" together with weak rust-belt turnout for Ds and a weak candidate in HRC. On paper she checks all the boxes in terms of experience but at the same time checks all the boxes for precisely what would NOT work this Nov. Trump is something different and really I see his election as a referendum on Obama and his forced leftward shift by the silent majority. It's too soon to truly grasp why the polls missed everything. The DNC berating white working class men with their YOU style doesn't work. THEM THEM THEM works. You can never make the people you are trying to move into the bad guy. Trump never criticized his base or cajoled them. He set up several THEM mega-straw-men using Latinos, Muslims, blacks and liberals who are "soft" and stuck to it and that resonated with his base. She ran on the diesel of the Obama 2012: Forward theme and got beat by a guy whose base was running on alcohol (figuratively). The Comey letter did not help and the clearing happened too late for it to sink in.
Those, in the minority, who didn't vote for Obama and got beat by him twice, now want to claim that a pig that has 35% approval and won without a majority of the votes represents a repudiation of Obama by the 'silent majority'! Obama being the person who still has over 50% approval rating! There were will be battles of different, post mortem, narratives. I hope people are bright enough to pick the right ones that fit the facts and not just their viewpoints and prejudices.
You haven't been here in awhile, have you? Jeez, just navigating comments on the internet might kill that hope forever....
Trump's numbers were down from Romney and McCain IIRC but he still flipped plenty of counties that went Obama in 2012 and those little red counties in the middle of the country add up. His favorability rating has nothing to do with it and I don't believe that the polls on Obama's favorability rating were close to accurate. It's probably more like 47 percent. I also said HRC was a weak candidate and it was an election of protectionist vs. neoliberal trade policies. All these things conspired against Hillary. There may have been some electioneering going on since part of the VRA was struck down.
Everyone needs to stop with "47%" and other nonsense like that when discussing this election compared to 2012 or 2008. Trump will get just over 60 million votes. That is 3 million fewer than George W. in 2004 and 1 million fewer than Mitt Romney in 2012. It is also just barely more than John McCain (a few thousand votes more). Hillary just failed to turn out her supporters. When uselectionatlas.org is back up and running, I will compare counties in Florida and Ohio from 2012 to 2016 to show you the vote discrepancy.
Simply saying that democrats didn't vote is a poor way to translate this - and gives you a crutch to ignore republican voters in places likes suburbia. an effective Democratic Party can't just pretend that working class voters aren't people worth winning votes from. You'll never win a majority that way
That's not what this is about at all. I don't buy into the "working class voters" nonsense at all. The Democrats and Republicans have an urban-rural divide, not a class divide. Working-class Democrats live in cities. They didn't turn out. That's on the Democrats. Working-class Republicans live in rural/exurban areas. They turned out roughly the same as they have been the last 16 years. And the reasons why one turned out and the other did not are still not fully known, but I've put forth a hypothesis about it.
I do think that it was a turnout problem. Hillary will be short 6 million from Obama's totals and Trump will barely match McCain's and Romney's numbers. I suspect that there was little party switching and that most likely there was a lot of people that decided to just sit down this election. The question after that is "Why didn't democrats go out and vote for Hillary?" My theory is that (besides the sexism and the negative press coverage) she lacks the "Rock Star" quality needed in modern elections. Trump does have it; I despise the man by I definitely see how he appeals to a significant segment of the population and has a brand name and recognition. Hillary is too vanilla, too much of your regular politician to add up anything to the numbers besides party loyalists.
I played a little with the information here: http://www.electproject.org/home/voter-turnout/voter-turnout-data If anything it looks like turnout in swing states went up, meaning that there was actually some shy/new Trump supporters in several critical states.
That people didn't vote because she's a she? Do you ever talk to people who don't live in cities or suburbs?
Of Ohio's 88 counties, the following were blue (and all but one was significantly so): 1. Cuyahoga (Cleveland) 2. Summit (Akron) 3. Mahoning (most of Youngstown) 4. Franklin (Columbus) 5. Lucas (?) (Toledo) 6. Athens (Ohio University) 7. Hamilton (Cincinnati)
Trumbull County Ohio (the "suburbs" of Youngstown), which, IIRC has gone blue for several cycles because of heavy union Democratic alignment went very red this time, at the same time as its sister county (Mahoning) went blue. Trumbull County contains heavily industrial suburbs like Warren, Niles, Hubbard, and - probably most significantly - Lordstown, full of working class union members. Lordstown contains a GM assembly plant which has been hammered repeatedly by layoffs over the course of three decades. That it still builds something is almost amazing. It's been close to shuttering a few times. Recently a bunch of people from other GM plants were brought in to re-stock the third shift. Candidates always stop at the Lordstown plant. Something very much changed this cycle.
County performance can be terribly deceptive though-- in New Mexico you pretty much know what counties will be red and which blue. The question is whether you can carry the northern counties by a large enough margin to counteract the southeastern counties that are gonna go very red. Then the matter of how the central counties go comes into play, because the margin there will not be large. If you don't get all the voters out where you are sure to win, you will probably lose-- and it kinda looks like that's what happened where Hillary lost the election.
I wasn't particularly trying to say anything by posting this list, and I'm wondering precisely what you were trying to read in to my posting of them. Ohio has 88 counties in that relatively small land area. The great majority of them are rural/ex-/suburban. However, I will add the following information: the blue counties there do not represent the totality of all "urban" counties (or counties with significant urban/inner suburban populations). One of them isn't urban in any way. The vast, vast majority of the counties that went red went very red. The ones that were close, but still red were heavily urbanized, but by old rust-belt industrial suburbs that have nearly all diminished greatly in population and importance (Lorain [W/SW suburban Cleveland] comes to mind; Montgomery [Dayton] is another).
I keep playing with the stats I downloaded, focusing in the Flip States: Main story, Florida cast 1 more million votes than in 2012. I will have to check the county numbers to see where they came from. MI cast 69k more, NC 244k, OH -181k, PA 233k, WI -143K. We will have to check too how they were distributed.
Explain to me why Donald Trump won Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania with fewer votes than Barack Obama won them. In Wisconsin, Trump won fewer votes than Romney. In Michigan and Iowa, Trump got fewer than 100,000 more votes than Romney. Trump got 20,000 more New Hampshire-ites than Romney. North Carolina's population has exploded, and Trump got only 160,000 more votes than Romney. Trump will get 90,000 fewer voters in Virginia than Romney. His current vote total in Minnesota is 1,000 votes more than Romney. Trump got 50,000 fewer votes in Michigan than George W. Bush in 2004. Trump got 80,000 fewer votes in Ohio than George W. Bush in 2004. Trump got 130,000 fewer votes in Arizona than George W. Bush in 2004. As of right now, Trump is on pace to have 20,000 more votes in Virginia in 2016 - Virginia, one of the fastest-growing states in the country - than George Bush in 2004. Let's check some other non-battlegrounds. How about Texas (90% in)? Republican vote share in Texas, 2000-2016: 2000: 3,799,639 2004: 4,526,917 2008: 4,479,328 2012: 4,569,843 2016: 4,681,590 So in Texas, the biggest Republican electoral prize, the Republicans cobbled together 150,000 new voters from 2004-2016. How about Georgia (93% in)? 2000: 1,419,720 2004: 1,914,254 2008: 2,048,759 2012: 2,078,688 2016: 2,068,623 Georgia, perhaps the fastest-growing Southeastern state in the country, managed to lose Trump support from 2012-2016. I have already made clear that I believe the Republican Party is literally dying. Donald Trump exceeded typical Republican vote totals in Florida by a substantial amount. He didn't do a damn thing to add voters to the party in most other states. And he'll get fewer votes than Dubya or Romney in the end. That I get. Democrats didn't show up. There's no explanation for why she'll underperform Obama (although overperform relative to Kerry) in terms of vote totals aside from parts of her base not showing up. There are many hypotheses. Since Hillary got more votes in Georgia and Florida than 2012, and Nevada, and Texas and Arizona, she's not underperforming there. So it was the Rust Belt states. They had a lot of Obama voters not vote. They didn't turn to Trump (as I show already), so what did they do? They either voted third-party or stayed home. Why did they stay home? I posit it was because there are voters in these states who are uncomfortable with female political leadership. Trump's support among men was double Romney's, while Hillary's support among women was the same as Obama's, according to exit polls. If you disagree, provide a reason. Show me the math. Stop being lazy.
You reproduce numbers, but you leap to a conclusion that those numbers do not necessarily support, but you act almost as if they do because you thought of it. Or something. The numbers are the numbers, but you've offered no numbers that yield the insight you claim to be true. Yelling at people to produce numbers to "prove your insight wrong" is, frankly, dumb, because you have not proven your hypothesis. We probably won't know for a while, if ever, why the Rust Belt turnout was down.