Election 2016: not so deep as a well; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve
This Republican victory was a very republican victory.
Not the small “r” in that last “republican.” On election night I noticed, long before Trump had been declared the victor, that although a lot of states were still undeclared, there was a pattern and the pattern was that Trump was ahead in nearly all of them. The pattern held, and that pattern (and the Electoral College itself) reflected the fact that Founders set up this country as a republic, in which states retained their identities as separate entities of some importance.
But not overwhelming importance. That’s why the House was set up. That’s why there is a popular vote, and it matters. But it doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as the electoral vote, which is done through the states, mostly winner-take-all. Among other things, the Founders didn’t want huge population centers to dominate, and they wanted smaller states to have their say.
The names of the parties aren’t an accident, either. Republicans are called that because in general they believe in republican principles, and many Democrats would actually like this country to lean more towards democracy and the popular vote, and abolish what they consider an archaic and unfair Electoral College. I’m not going to get into that battle today, except to note it and to say I’m on the republican side of it.
If you look at the results of Tuesday’s election state by state, you’ll note that Trump’s victory was wide, and in some places it was deep but in quite a few states it was shallow. That is, almost all of those states that were projected to be neck-and-neck broke for Trump. It was as though a very shallow wave came ashore in those states, just enough to wet the sand. But it was enough to wet a lot of sand. In particular, in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida (in Florida the victory margin was somewhat larger)—as well as Michigan, which is still undecided but where Trump is ahead—the margins were all very close. Those states are large and influential, and had they gone the other way, Clinton would be president. But they did not, and that turned out to be very very significant, because whatever forces led to the Trump win were acting over a wide variety of close states.
It looks like Clinton has won the popular vote, however, even though the absolutely final count isn’t in yet. What does that mean, in an Electoral College system? Not much, actually, except to provide fodder for those who won’t concede that Trump actually won and who don’t like the system anyway. But if you look at Clinton’s loss you’ll see that it included enormous and very deep support in many of our largest states, in particular California, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois, and this is mainly where her popular vote total came from.
That’s not to say that Trump didn’t win large states, too; he did. Texas, Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, Pennsylvania, (and Michigan, if he ends up winning it) are large, too. Trump won Texas and Ohio handily. But the others ranged from close (Florida) to extremely close. That’s where the shallow wave effect came in.
The title of this post quotes from Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” Now I’ll quote from John Donne, who wrote “no man is an island, entire of itself.” Well, except for tiny Rhode Island, no state is an island; each is “a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” Some of the Clinton states may want to become islands, and may feel that they are already islands (islands of sanity, to their way of thinking). But they are not, and this election has reminded them of that.
” . . . the Founders didn’t want huge population centers to dominate, . . .” [Neo]
Look at RealClearPolitics national map of House representation. The blue coasts verge on insignificance. So clearly this intent of the founders is represented in our electoral system.
” . . . almost all of those states that were projected to be neck-and-neck broke for Trump.” [Neo]
To reprise Dick Morris, late decisions generally reward the challenger not the incumbent. (“If asked do you love your spouse and you have to think about it, what does that say about the state of your marriage?”)
“it was enough to wet a lot of sand. In particular, in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida (in Florida the victory margin was somewhat larger)–as well as Michigan, which is still undecided but where Trump is ahead–the margins were all very close.” [Neo]
I agree. I think way too much is being made of Trump’s PA win. Yes he did, and it is noteworthy, but he just barely won (Michigan, too). This says a lot about the electoral situation in those states. Yes they can go Republican, but it seems, for now, only under the most extreme of circumstances. Neo, your “shallow wave”, is a very apt description.
An interesting comment from Kirsten Powers that I thought was worth sharing:
Read the whole thing. The link:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/11/10/cracker-barrel-americans-elect-trump-cultural-worldview-kirsten-powers/93593088/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU-RuR-qO4Y
I think the wave has two parts:
1) Those white working class voters, particularly in the rust belt, who broke from the dems.
2) The voters who stayed home – millions! Mostly dem, but also GOP.
I think #2 was enough to give #1 the influence it had.
@T – thought of linking that too!
One more quote from the Powers article (I changed up the order to give shorten it and give this better context.):
“Perhaps more importantly, (his constant inveighing against political correctness) ultimately inoculated Trump against allegations that many believed would be his undoing: that he was a racist and misogynist who bragged of sexually assaulting women… with conservative white Americans who feel under constant assault by a cultural elite that treats them with contempt”
I doubt this win is repeatable in 2020 unless that constituency’s concerns are addressed (at least, enough so that they will stay GOP voters). Maybe even the mid-terms could reverse the tide.
Not exactly sure what point is intended in the comments. Yep, the victory was broad and shallow, not surprising. The Democrats have huge voting blocs in nearly every state. The victory was stupendous, whether broad, narrow, shallow, or deep.
Of course the Democrats, who pay lip service to democracy when it suits them, will dwell on the nature of the popular vote and sing the refrain “no mandate” endlessly.
To quote a well-known Lame Duck: ” The election is over” (There is some question as to whether he actually told Republicans “I won”, although that is widely attributed.)
Trump and the GOP have power within their grasp. I hope that they can work together to use it.
Yeah, Trump’s win was significant, but I’ve heard to word “landslide” used. If you lose the popular vote, it is by no means a “landslide”.
Although I’m very happy Clinton lost, I think the down-ticket gains are also very significant. Flyover country mattered in this election, which is good. I’m sure we’ll hear the same eruption of calls for abolishing the Electoral College that we had in 2000.
Insightful piece by Ramesh Ponnuru — “Obama’s Cultural Liberalism Helped Sink Democrats”, which begins:
The full article is here.
The GOP won control of the Iowa senate and now holds the governorship, house, and senate. There will be a big push for Constitutional carry which I very strongly support. The 2nd is my carry permit. We also need to relearn purpose of the 9th and 10th, the people and the States are sovereign.
The Electoral College is not in danger, despite the tantrums of the left, they need 3 quarters of the states and that ain’t going to happen.
Since 2010 the GOP has dominated at the state level. Kentucky was the last Confederate state to flip every branch to GOP.
Landslides – no not a landslide. Lot has been made about Trump improving on Romney with minorities, however he did not get the amount of votes total that Romney did in 2012. Landslides also mean coat tails – Senate lost 2 seats, House lost 6 seats so no coat tails. In fact those who stayed away from Trump on the senate side did 1% or greater than Trump in the state.
This was the way 2000 election ended – Bush had no coat tails, but in 2002 the GOP gained in the house and in the Senate. Most of that could be explained because the GOP ran as the security party while the Dems were in the midst of their Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.
1. This was an amazing electoral victory for Mr. Trump, especially considering all the opposition he faced. He was able to win a lot of states (albeit by narrow margins) that had not gone Republican in a long time (like 1988 or so).
2. The race was also very competitive in Maine (where he did get one electoral vote), Minnesota, Nevada, and New Hampshire. In the latter state, the incumbent Senator Kelly Ayotte was running for re-election, and she lost by just over 700 votes to the Democratic challenger.
3. Kelly Ayotte also distanced herself from Trump, and would not go on the Howie Carr radio show (a pro-Trump conservative regional radio show, sort of a big deal in New England). And where I live, multiple television ads attacking Trump were being run by Clinton’s campaign all day long on Nov. 8th, even up to two hours before the polls closed (at 8:00 PM). I think I saw one, or maybe two, paid TV ads by Trump in all those weeks.
4. Obviously, the results of this election will go under further analysis in the weeks and months to come. Would the outcome have resulted in a Republican victory with a different candidate? It’s less clear how other candidates would have appealed to the rest of the country, beyond the GOP base in the south and the west.
5. After all, in the one poll that matters on Nov . 8th, those who showed up to give Mr. Trump that victory, in states from PA to WI (and even ME’s second district) did so because they knew Trump, and they liked Trump.
@Yankee – true to all that, as I can tell.
HOWEVER, the dems made the mistake, when having the WH, House and Senate, in thinking they had a mandate for something like obamacare.
They didn’t, and it has been their achilles heel ever since.
We don’t need to make the same mistake and think we have a clear mandate, with such a thin margin for trump.
If anything, the House and Senate can claim the greater mandate, given how many (most?) outperformed trump in their districts/states, and how thin trump’s margin really was, and without a majority popular vote.
We can assert power, but we mustn’t lose the people.
Big Maq Says:
November 11th, 2016 at 1:06 pm
I doubt this win is repeatable in 2020 unless that constituency’s concerns are addressed (at least, enough so that they will stay GOP voters). Maybe even the mid-terms could reverse the tide.
** *
QED via another route
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/11/the-trump-2020-re-elect-campaign-going-smoothly.php
One-third of House Representatives come from three, just three, states: CA, MA and NY.
Louisiana now has a Dem governor, a trial lawyer, of all things. He is John Bel Edwards, no relation to Edwin, and his name is always recited in full, to nominally distinguish him from that other disgusting trial lawyer, the “Two Americas” John Edwards from NC.
John Bel was elected over Sen. David Vitter, a most sound conservative; Vitter apparently lost the LA female vote because he once apologized for having his name show up in a DC madam’s phone book. Republicans clearly have higher sexual moral standards than Democrats!
A few days ago I said that Trump’s coalition is weaker than those which voted for Romney and McCain. Some commenters objected.
Here’s a spreadsheet I put together to explain my point. One can see immediately by the Dem and Rep columns that Trump’s number right now is tightly clustered with McCain and Romney.
However, those numbers shouldn’t be compared directly since the US population has grown steadily. So I normalized the Dem/Rep vote counts to the 2016 population, based on the reasonable assumption that the pool of voters grows at roughly the same rate as the population.
Year.Dem...Rep...US.Pop.ND....NR2008 69,50 59.95 304.09 73.91 63.76
2012 65,92 60.93 312.86 68.14 62.99
2016 60.47 60.07 323.41 60.47 60.07
* Decimal numbers are in millions
* ND -- Normalized Democrat vote
* NR -- Normalized Republican vote
With the normalization one can see that Trump’s number is about 5% smaller than McCain’s and Romney’s — even though Trump was running against a far weaker opponent in a more favorable year.
The real story of Trump’s victory is the utter collapse of normalized Dem votes from 74 mil (2008) to 60 mil (2016).
However, I will grant that by accident or design Trump voters were more efficiently located to maximize electoral votes.
huxley:
I recall that right after the Romney loss people were talking about millions fewer Republicans voting for him than for McCain. But over the next few weeks, as I tracked it, the votes came trickling in (absentee ballots and the like) until he had made up those votes and then some. Wait a month or so; it could change.
It is true that not all 2016 votes are yet counted, though I doubt they will increase enough to make Trump competitive with McCain and Romney.
4. Obviously, the results of this election will go under further analysis in the weeks and months to come. Would the outcome have resulted in a Republican victory with a different candidate? It’s less clear how other candidates would have appealed to the rest of the country, beyond the GOP base in the south and the west.
Yankee: See my analysis above.
Trump did find some new voters to pull the R-lever, while losing more voters who sat on their hands (like me), or in a few cases voted for Hillary.
So the question is how many Trump voters would have been in the “burn it down” column if a more moderate Rep candidate prevailed in the primaries. I don’t know. I rather think at least 80% of them would have still voted Rep.
We are of course speculating here. My sense is that a less crazy, more moderate Rep candidate would have pulled in almost everyone who voted McCain or Romney, and a fair number of disaffected Dem voters, swing voters and independents.
In which case the 2016 number would have been comparable to McCain and Romney, with the result Hillary would have been routed, not edged out in the EC.
And we would know we had a basically stable POTUS who could be trusted to lead conservatively and not tank the economy, launch nuclear missiles, or other misbehave in a spectacular manner.
With Trump all we can do is hope he is a better man, better leader and better conservative than he has demonstrated thus far.
Huxley:
Stop talking sense! La La La La La. 🙂
huxley:
I don’t know why you say Trump won’t reach the totals of McCain or Romney. Maybe you have some other definition of “competitive”?
Trump has a total of 60,072,551 as I write this. McCain’s total in 2008 was 59,948,323. And Romney’s in 2012 was 60,933,504 (the figures are according to Wiki). So Trump has already passed McCain.
Trump needs to close a gap of somewhat less than a million votes between him and Romney. After the end of the 2012 election, Romney gained about 2 million votes by the time they were all counted (see this), so it’s likely that Trump will indeed surpass the Romney total when all is said and done, by post-election gains of up to 2,000,000.
neo: I was commenting in terms of the normalized values in my earlier post.
Trump has to reach ~63 mil to be competitive with McCain and Romney as I see it.
That’s 5% more from where he is now. Perhaps he will, but I doubt it.
Sorry. I do forget that unless I specify everything absolutely all the time, you will jump on me for the slightest misstep, if what I say is at odds with your view.
Noted.
These kinds of arguments are always apples and oranges. But since we can’t subject history to reproducible experiments we do the best with what we can.
IMO the stronger prong of my argument against Trump is not whether his raw or normalized vote totals are comparable with McCain or Romney, but that he achieved his unimpressive numbers against a far weaker candidate, with the advantage of the third-term curse, and with the rancid fruits of the Obama-Clinton years (Obamacare! Iran!) starting to bloom.
Do any Trump supporters or huxley detractors wish to argue Trump would have done as well against Obama, had Obama been able to run for a third-term, as Trump did against the tired, scandal-ridden pantsuit, Hillary Clinton, in 2016?
That’s the real measure when it comes to comparing Trump to McCain and Romney. McCain and Romney went up against the 21st century Democrat black messiah. They lost but gave it a good shot.
Trump would have been roadkill, street pizza, had he run against Obama in 2016.
Tell me different.
There has been some discussion of vote counts here.
I read an article yesterday (in the “blog” section of American Thinker) claiming that absentee ballots are not counted unless they number greater than the difference of the regular vote. For example, candidate A wins by 5,000 votes over candidate B, but there are only 2,000 absentee ballots which, even if 100% are for candidate B, will not change the outcome of the election, so they are not counted.
The author was using this as an argument against the “Hillary won the popular vote” complaint, claiming that we will never know if she did or not because uncounted absentee ballots generally favor Republicans by 2 to 1.
I know that it’s the 50 states which set their individual election rules, but does anyone know if this claim about counting absentee ballots is true? I, for one, would be quite upset if so. My mantra is that every vote counts and every vote should be counted.
Fascinating discussion as always, thanks to you all.
(Rhode Island isn’t actually an island, of course, but the state of Hawaii is a collection of them… 🙂 Hawaii’s relative isolation out there in the Pacific does affect a lot of cultural and commercial aspects of life, and it’s got its own political dynamic as well.)
huxley:
It’s not about a slight misstep, agreeing with me or disagreeing. I wasn’t even really caring about that so much. It was just that the total Romney vote count was a special interest of mine in 2012, because people kept harping on the “missing 2 million” (I think it was 2 milliion). That protest about Romney went on for years (I tried to correct it every now and then for months)—that he failed to get GOP votes. But he got them; the people saying it were just using incorrect data.
” I, for one, would be quite upset if so. My mantra is that every vote counts and every vote should be counted.” – T
I’m with you on that.
I cannot believe that counting them is a cost issue, as the incremental cost has to be rather minuscule vs the cost borne through to the point of collecting those ballots.
Having a policy like that might make sense if one wants to discourage all but the most ardent supporters to vote absentee.
@T – this from NYT in 2012 re: absentee ballots does NOT mention states not counting them because of margin of win rules, though they discuss several other reasons for those votes not being counted…
“In the last presidential election, 35.5 million voters requested absentee ballots, but only 27.9 million absentee votes were counted, according to a study by Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He calculated that 3.9 million ballots requested by voters never reached them; that another 2.9 million ballots received by voters did not make it back to election officials; and that election officials rejected 800,000 ballots. That suggests an overall failure rate of as much as 21 percent.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-by-mail-faulty-ballots-could-impact-elections.html
“One metric puts into perspective how unpopular Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were with voters”
“In 14 states, down-ballot candidates received more votes than presidential candidates – even when you factor in third-party candidates. “
http://www.businessinsider.com/more-votes-for-down-ballot-than-president-2016-11
These states were:
Alaska
Indiana
Kansas
Missouri
Montana
New Hampshire
North Carolina
North Dakota
Oregon
Vermont
Washington
Wisconsin
West Virginia
Wyoming
“The reason why 2008 and 2016 appear to have record-breaking turnout is because the US population has increased, so there are more voters overall. But when you look at voter turnout as a percentage, it’s actually decreased or stagnated in the last century. “
http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-voter-turnout-records-history-obama-clinton-2016-11
.
Graphic from BI on historic turnout percentages to 2012:
https://static1.businessinsider.com/image/58239ee346e27a2e008b5d42-960/bi-graphics_voter%20turnout.png
For some reason, from 1970s to about 2000 voter turnout had only been hovering around 55% +/- 2%, if I’m eyeballing it correctly.
Using that as a baseline for historic turnout, looks like 2016 is within “normal range”.
But, in the era of more sophisticated, targeted GOTV operations, it is the lowest since 2004.
.
538 uses a similar chart to the business insider, but says this…
“About 57 percent of eligible voters cast ballots this year, down from 58.6 percent in 2012 and 61.6 percent in 2008, which was the highest mark in 40 years.”
.
There may be some room for the relative popular vote count, though it seems clinton may well retain her lead…
“…more than 4 million votes remain uncounted, more than half of them in California”
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/voter-turnout-fell-especially-in-states-that-clinton-won/
room to grow
The complete list of presidential choices by state (other than write-in):
http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2016/2016presgecands.pdf
@huxley – more stats than you can shake a stick at for 2012…
http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2012/federalelections2012.pdf
It doesn’t really matter who got the popular vote because that’s not what they were after. If that had mattered they would have campaigned totally differently. Both would have spent a lot more time and money in the most populous states and a a lot less in the others. Who knows how many votes they would have gotten if they had tried.
Since there’s no way to know who would have gotten the popular vote, all the conjecture is just pure guesswork. Would Trump have gotten another 10 or 20% of New York or California if he had run adds and had rallies there? It’s fun to talk about but it really doesn’t matter as to the legitimacy of the winner.
The other point I’d like to make is that only a very small percentage of the Trump voters were actually for him. And a lot of them didn’t care about Clinton one way or the other either. I think the vast majority were voting against the ruling elite and Trump and Clinton just happened to be the candidates that were available. To me this was America’s Brexit vote and the polls missed it for the same reasons they missed the Brexit vote.
The only thing this vote was a mandate for was to get government out of people’s daily lives. They just want to get back to the days of making a living, being left alone and trying to make their children’s lives better than theirs. The government, except for a very few exceptional years has been intruding more and more into everyone’s daily lives and screwing things up royally.
All Trump has to do to be successful is to let the people get back to ignoring the government except for every April 15th. Will he do that? Your guess is as good as mine but he’ll be a lot more likely to do it than Clinton or Obama. We should know pretty soon.
Irv
a) no body is speculating that the popular vote wouldn’t be different if the election were held on that basis.
b) it absolutely is important to understand that trump had not received an overwhelming majority of votes, nor did he attract an unusually large number of votes vs prior GOP candidates (relative to eligible votes). Why? Because it speaks to the nature of his win.
Does he have a mandate to implement all that he promised – IOW were people voting FOR those policies (whatever interpretation that may be of what he actually promised), or were they largely AGAINST clinton (and obama’s dem policies)?
We can get clues by the size of margins, the margins proportionate to the electorate, and margins compared to other GOP candidates (i.e. trump’s coattail effect).
As mentioned before, it looks like trump simultaneously added prior dem voters from the rust belt, while lost as many or more other prior / likely GOP voters.
All point to an electorate largely AGAINST clinton, and somewhat more pro GOP than pro trump.
.
“All Trump has to do to be successful is to let the people get back to ignoring the government except for every April 15th. “
That’s a very conservative view of the world, and one I’d like to see.
I don’t think the rust belt trump voters want that. They want a little more active government, but on their behalf.
trump won within the margin of error of most polls, it seems.
So why the surprise?
Some here have said “enthusiasm!”.
I think they are onto something, but not in the way they are thinking.
trump’s numbers don’t seem to fit a “greater enthusiasm” model, in the sense that he drove any more voters to vote for him than Romney had achieved (as a proportion of the eligible voters).
INSTEAD, enthusiasm plummeted for clinton vs obama in 2008 and 2012.
The polls give us incomplete information.
There ought to be polls that measure “enthusiasm” relative to some baseline, as an indicator of turnout. Perhaps, it could be published alongside the regular polls.
Baking that information into the “likely voter” count and leaving a “margin of error” to account for the differences +/- leaves too much off the table for the rest of us to have clear expectations – i.e. it leaves those in the media to set, through their filter.