Debunking Bad Theories about Why Trump Won
Trump’s surprise victory has left a lot of people scratching their heads and trying to come up with an explanation. Love him or hate him, though, we’re all better of figuring out objectively understanding what actually happened. I don’t claim to know all of the answers, but I can recognize a bullshit answer when I see it.
Myth #1: The Electoral College Sunk Clinton
Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by over one million votes. So doesn’t that mean that the Electoral College prevented her from winning the Presidency?
Not really. Had the election been a nationwide popular vote, both Trump and Clinton would have campaigned differently, attempting to goose turnout in their highest performing big cities, instead of focusing on “swing states.” We don’t know how that would have turned out.
A more sophisticated version of this argument states that the Electoral College biases outcomes against certain states. Slate has a chart showing that smaller states have disproportiate power compared to larger states. California, for example, has a population 66 times bigger than Whyoming. But in terms of electoral votes, it only gets 18 times as much say. In other words, voters in Whyoming have three times as much influence per person on the Electoral College compared to California. Surely this hurt Clinton, right?
Not exactly. While this aspect of the Electoral College certainly is unfair, and I believe it should be changed, fixing it wouldn’t have made Clinton President. With the Electoral College as is, Trump won 56.8% of the available electoral votes. If you re-weigh the Electoral College to apportion votes fairly (say, by making 316 million electoral votes, and giving a state one vote per resident), then Trump would have won with…56.3%. It would have made almost no difference at all.
Myth #2: White Women Were Trump’s Secret Weapon
Many on the left are blaming white women, who voted for Trump by 10 points, for tipping the election to him. But white women have been voting GOP by similar margins for decades now, and gender is one of the least predictive demographics for voting behavior.
But even if you really want to blame white women for this one anyway, the evidence just isn’t there. In fact, white women became more Democratic. A quick glance at the exit polls shows that white women voted for Trump by a smaller margin than they voted for Romney four years ago, while nearly all other demographics became redder. Latina women became 11 percent more Republican relative to 2012. Who would have thought?
Myth #3: Turnout Was Way Down
Our election systems are pretty antiquated in some places, so it takes time to count all the ballots. That has lead to misleading articles claiming turnout is hugely down compared to 2012. In reality, turnout was nearly the same. Turnout for some key parts of the Democratic base was down — African Americans and women, for example, made up slightly smaller shares of the electorate. But nationwide, there wasn’t a huge dip.
Myth #4: White Voters Decided to Vote as a Bloc for Trump
White voters were a smaller share of the electorate than 2012, and Trump received a smaller share of those than Romney did. So how did Trump win? He won some minority groups by larger margins than Romney. Additionally, many minority voters left the Presidential vote blank or voted 3rd party. Overall, Trump won white voters by 21%, while Romney won them by 20%. Not a huge shift there.
Conclusion
So why did Trump win? There was obviously a combination of factors, some of which we may not know for some time. My theory? Clinton just was a terrible candidate and paid the price.
