Throughout the past year, I've been asked countless times, "What are you planning on studying in college?" Usually, when I say political science, I hear something along the lines of, "Oh, wow. So how do you feel about this election? It was crazy, huh?" I never really knew how to respond, because I never felt like I had the credibility to comment on political trends. When I first met my adviser, Samara Klar (an assistant professor of political science at the University of Arizona), I asked her how she chose to respond to the many Americans desperate to understand what happened in 2016. She thought for a moment and gave an answer so simple, and yet so profound, that it really opened up the way I thought about the election. She said, "Clearly, the polls were wrong. But if we look historically at demographic trends, the answer is simple. Republicans voted for Republicans. Democrats voted for Democrats. What matters more is how many Americans turned out to vote."
In the weeks following the election, I found political scientists attributing the outcome to 4 main demographic groups: white women, the working class and people without college degrees, moderates, and millennials/progressives (I understand that the being progressive is not synonymous with being a millennial, but I'll get to that later). In writing each blog post, I tried to attach each demographic group to each isolated factor. In this post, I will try and tie up all of those loose ends, and draw a clearer connection between how those elements impacted the outcome.
Note: I am about to give a lot of exit poll and voting statistics. Here are the places I gathered my statistics from: CNN 2016, CNN 2008, New York Times 2008, and Washington Post 2012. If I use a different source, I will mention it in the post.
To begin, I'd like to start with white women. The reason I specifically have chosen "white" women is because minority women overwhelmingly supported Clinton in similar numbers as they did with Barack Obama. Clinton won 94% of the black female vote, a number only 2% lower than Obama, and 69% of Hispanic women, a number 1% higher than Obama. Additionally, their turnout was about the same as in 2008. But, to be clear, Clinton did win the white women vote as well. The important note here is that Clinton didn't get the voter turnout of white women that she expected.
In looking back at posts I've already written, I attribute women not overwhelmingly supporting Clinton in the way many thought they would to a combination of the email scandal, media coverage, woman (women part one), and polls. The email scandal, in addition to Clinton's responses to scandals in the media, furthered this idea that Clinton was untrustworthy and corrupt. This matters more so in how women turned out to vote because, as I mentioned in week 7, women have higher expectations of how Hillary should behave. After talking to my adviser following week 7's post, she mentioned that in her own findings, she noted that "women are more likely to punish other women for identifying with the opposing party than they are to punish men for it. So, to put it simply, women prefer men from the opposing party to women from the opposing party! But what’s really interesting is that I only find this discrimination among women over the age of 40. Millennial women do not punish other women any more than men for identifying with another party." So, potentially, Republican women over 40 may be less likely to vote for Clinton (compared to someone such as Obama) because she is a member of the opposing party. My final point, polls, I will hopefully be able to talk about later, so stay tuned!
The second group I mention is made up of the white working class and white people without college degrees. I don't group these two together because I think they are the same thing. In fact, 43% of "the white working class" has either some college experience or a college degree. I group them together, rather, because they tend to fall in the same voting patterns. In 2016, Clinton lost 11% of both the "working class" and Americans without college degrees compared to Obama's totals in 2008.
In my primaries post, I mentioned how Trump was able to discover that his rhetoric, albeit controversial, worked for him. It especially worked for him with working class voters, because he was able to focus on things like jobs and "draining the swamp". Joan C. Williams, a professor at UC Hastings, explains (in more detail) why he appeals to working class voters in this interview with the Harvard Business Review. Donald Trump's use of social media also helped him connect to these voters, who had abandoned traditional media, feeling it was out of touch and untrustworthy. Donald Trump, however, was considered trustworthy, as I mention in my personalities post. All of these element contributed to Trump's success among working class voters. To learn more about why those votes in particular were important, I recommend this New York Times article on the necessity of working class voters to Democrats (and how, in losing their support, Trump won the election).
For the sake of spreading this information out, I will be back next week with moderates and millennials/progressives. Have a great week!