Fundraising success did not produce victory, since Clinton had the largest presidential campaign fund ever amassed and outspent Trump by more than two to one. In October of 2016, Democratic identifiers surpassed Republicans 32 to 27 percent (though the proportion of independents had reached 37 percent). Nor did the distribution of partisanship propel the Democrats to victory. The key election “fundamental” – the state of the economy – had experienced sustained growth since 2008, punctuated by a recent increase in median income, but that did not carry the day for the Democrats. Leading political science theories also pointed to a victory for Hillary Clinton. Trump’s crude hunches about where and when to hold old fashioned rallies appeared to work better. It failed, especially in the critical states of Michigan and Wisconsin.
2016 DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY POPULAR VOTE TOTALS HOW TO
Clinton had her own impressive Big Data analysis operation (dubbed “Ada”) that performed 400,000 simulations a day and gave strategic advice on where, when and how to campaign or run ads. The Trump campaign itself, believing the polls, expected to lose. Clinton had a comfortable lead in the great majority of polls, forecasting victory in both the popular vote and electoral college. Nate Silver, who claims to have predicted a closer race than most other pollsters, gave Trump a 29 percent chance of winning on Tuesday morning. The New York Times on the eve of the election estimated that Clinton had about an 85 percent chance of winning. Methods, Predictions, and Interpretations of the 2016 ElectionĬonventional ahistorical survey analysis predicted that Hillary Clinton would comfortably win the election on November 8. The foci, methods and theories of APD and economic sociology are essential to such understanding. Labeling is not a substitute for analysis in a polity that has serious economic issues to address, and two parties in need of reorganization and reform. Unfortunately, there was little effort in the Democratic Party leadership or mainstream national media – two institutions that have become increasingly intertwined – to understand the forces that produced Trump. What must be recognized, however, is that elites in both parties had ignored the distress of a substantial segment of the population, until it finally erupted in open revolt in 2015–2016. Trump’s success, then, was a result of institutional change interacting with economic distress, with its greatest resonance within the party that had inherited, after 1980, much of the White working class. who threw himself into presidential politics and found an audience with serious, unaddressed grievances that saw no alternative political champion after the defeat of Bernie Sanders. Trump was a resourceful candidate, consumed by ambition and insecurity, The best tools and theories for understanding the rise of Trump can be found in the scholarship and methods of American political development (APD) and socioeconomic analysis. And such labels do not offer much enlightenment about why the nomination system in 2016 produced such a remarkable candidate, and why there was such an inversion of traditional class patterns in the general election vote.ĭonald Trump’s victory, it will be argued here, was a result of regime dynamics and post-1970s institutional change – particularly change in party rules, strategies, and coalitions – and economic change that was in large part a result of a quarter century of party policies. But no fascist, by any plausible definition of that term, has ever become a major contender for the presidency. At the level of state politics, there has been no dearth of demagogues. nor is he a “populist” if those terms are used with any historical accuracy, although he could be said to resemble a demagogue from the American past like George Wallace. The US has a rich political history, and its own appropriate political metaphors there is no need to reach for analogies in other cultures. But most of the language and many of the assumptions behind it have been inaccurate and antithetical to analysis, understanding, and party strategy. Academic and media commentators have been, since Donald Trump’s rise in late 2015, preoccupied with the choice of words to describe him and his supporters.
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