2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumThe Numbers: How Hillary Clinton Lost
The Numbers: How Hillary Clinton LostKevin Drum
Mother Jones
The quickest way to get a sense of what happened is to compare the exit polls from 2012 and 2016. What we're looking for is demographic groups that differ from -4% by a significant margin. As it turns out, there aren't very many. Clinton underperformed Obama across the board. She did somewhat better than -4% with seniors, college grads, married voters, and high-income voters. She did worse with low-income voters, union households, and unmarried voters
This was not a "white revolt." White men followed the national trend (-4% compared to 2012) and white women did better for Clinton (+1%). Black men and Latino women underperformed for Clinton by significant margins.
The big surprise here is that Clinton did so much worse with unmarried voters. She underperformed Obama among unmarried men by a whopping 10 points, and among unmarried women by 5 points. What's up with that? I would sure like to see a crosstab of unmarried men by age, race, income, etc. Latino voters are also a surprise. Clinton only did slightly worse than Obama, but surely she should have done much better.
The big takeaway here is really "Clinton underperformed Obama across the board". This isn't a simple case of white guys suck. To be clear, all the white guys who voted for Trump do legitimately suck, but Hillary Clinton lost because people across demographic divisions did not turn up for her, especially voters of all races and genders who are at the low end of the economic spectrum.
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Skinner
(63,645 posts)I agree that the big problem here is that she underperformed (almost) across-the-board. But there are some interesting takeaways here.
Not only did she underperform compared to Obama among Latino voters, but she underperformed Latinos by a larger margin than Whites or African Americans.
White -2
Black -5
Latino -6
Furthermore, Latinos are the only demographic group in which Hillary underperformed WORSE among women than men:
White men -4
White women +1
Black men -7
Black women -2
Latino men -3
Latino women -8 <-- WTF?
And among all demographic groups the biggest change is among unmarried men at -10. I know we're not allowed to say that Hillary's gender had anything to do with the outcome. But surely it is not a coincidence that she underperformed worst among the one demographic group that is made up entirely of men with no connection to women.
portlander23
(2,078 posts)We need to be careful not to reduce Hillary Clinton to a gender disassociated from the person. I think a lot of this result has to do with Hillary Clinton specifically. If you run a thought experiment and say Elizabeth Warren was running coupled with a much stronger economic message, I want to believe things would turn out differently.
Of course this is what I want to believe; Warren didn't run and we have no data. We have no data from any other woman running for president in the Democratic Party either.
What we can say from the results we have is that you can't pin everything entirely on men nor can you ignore the impact of economic anxiety. This is not to say misogyny isn't a big factor, but it's not the only factor.
Grey Lemercier
(1,429 posts)portlander23
(2,078 posts)Votes being stolen shouldn't change the results of exist polls. People who left the building told pollsters what they did. If their votes were stolen, they wouldn't know that at the time.
By the same token exit polls won't measure voter suppression - these people didn't get to vote and wouldn't take part in the poll.
Finally, the exit polls we have in the US are different than polls in other nations where their primary goal is to verify the legitimacy of the vote. Our polls have tons of questions designed to tease out numbers like these.
So, the polls aren't perfect but the trends are probably accurate within the margin of error.
