The 2016 US General Election

[astralis]

a fascinating deep dive into the shifts of candidate support at the county level.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/...ote-for-trump/

[TopHatter]

Voter turnout this year dipped to nearly its lowest point in two decades.

While election officials are still tabulating ballots, the 126 million votes already counted means about 55% of voting age citizens cast ballots this year.

That measure of turnout is the lowest in a presidential election since 1996, when 53.5% of voting-age citizens turned out.

As election officials go through outstanding ballots -- such as provisional ballots and those with write-ins -- the turnout figures will change.
But it would take another 18.7 million votes to reach the high point for turnout of 2008, when nearly 64% of voting age citizens cast a ballot.

Early results in some of the key states that propelled President-elect Donald Trump to his win reveal that more voters cast ballots this year than in 2012, even though overall turnout was down.

In Florida, nearly 9.4 million ballots were cast, compared to 8.5 million in 2012. Michigan saw 4.8 million compared to 4.7 million four years ago. And in North Carolina, the 4.7 million ballots this year was about 138,000 more than last cycle.

Full measures of turnout won't be clear for as long as several more weeks, when election officials in the various states finish tabulating and certify the results. The figures also do not include people of age who are ineligible to vote or have not registered. Link
___________

OK so I was dead wrong about the election outcome (the Electoral College outcome, that is) even though I and just about everyone else was dead on right about the popular vote by a nice margin.

One thing I was right about was predicting low voter turnout.

[Triple C]

This seems to speaks to the weakness of HRC as a candidate in activating voters and the flaws of an overreaching campaign strategy. Tse, tse.

[DOR]

Voter turnout this year dipped to nearly its lowest point in two decades.

While election officials are still tabulating ballots, the 126 million votes already counted means about 55% of voting age citizens cast ballots this year.

That measure of turnout is the lowest in a presidential election since 1996, when 53.5% of voting-age citizens turned out.

As election officials go through outstanding ballots -- such as provisional ballots and those with write-ins -- the turnout figures will change.
But it would take another 18.7 million votes to reach the high point for turnout of 2008, when nearly 64% of voting age citizens cast a ballot.

Early results in some of the key states that propelled President-elect Donald Trump to his win reveal that more voters cast ballots this year than in 2012, even though overall turnout was down.

In Florida, nearly 9.4 million ballots were cast, compared to 8.5 million in 2012. Michigan saw 4.8 million compared to 4.7 million four years ago. And in North Carolina, the 4.7 million ballots this year was about 138,000 more than last cycle.

Full measures of turnout won't be clear for as long as several more weeks, when election officials in the various states finish tabulating and certify the results. The figures also do not include people of age who are ineligible to vote or have not registered. Link
___________

OK so I was dead wrong about the election outcome (the Electoral College outcome, that is) even though I and just about everyone else was dead on right about the popular vote by a nice margin.

One thing I was right about was predicting low voter turnout.

That's an old story, Nov 11 or so.
The count thus far is 133.1 million, right on target for recent turnouts. (And, HRC's ahead by 1.8 mn.)
See: http://www.thegreenpapers.com/G16/Pr...-Details.phtml

[DOR]

This seems to speaks to the weakness of HRC as a candidate in activating voters and the flaws of an overreaching campaign strategy. Tse, tse.

HRC was "weaker" than DJT by 1.8 million votes ... that makes it organizational, not ideological, policy or personality.

[astralis]

DOR,

HRC was "weaker" than DJT by 1.8 million votes ... that makes it organizational, not ideological, policy or personality.

kinda, sorta.

HRC won a lot of "inefficient" votes-- she gained in places like CA and TX. obviously, had she known about her weakness in the swing states she would have put a lot more resources there, but she was fighting against the current there. DJT had effectively zero organization -across the US-. (her popular vote lead is over 2 mil now.)

the conventional wisdom, which i believed, was that HRC would have not done well against a conventional opponent but would crush Trump. turns out it is the other way around.

the strange thing to think is that had roughly 100,000 votes changed, HRC's popular vote margin + EC lead would have meant a completely, completely different narrative.

[Doktor]

DOR,



kinda, sorta.

HRC won a lot of "inefficient" votes-- she gained in places like CA and TX. obviously, had she known about her weakness in the swing states she would have put a lot more resources there, but she was fighting against the current there. DJT had effectively zero organization -across the US-. (her popular vote lead is over 2 mil now.)

the conventional wisdom, which i believed, was that HRC would have not done well against a conventional opponent but would crush Trump. turns out it is the other way around.

the strange thing to think is that had roughly 100,000 votes changed, HRC's popular vote margin + EC lead would have meant a completely, completely different narrative.

Yet, she didn't and she failed. Might be a good thing after all. She learned that assumption is MOAFU

[TopHatter]

That's an old story, Nov 11 or so.

I hate myself and want to die :-( Seriously, I can't believe I didn't check the date on that article...

OK, newer article! :-)
_________________________

What does voter turnout tell us about the 2016 election?
BY MICHAEL D. REGAN November 20, 2016

The vast majority of ballots have been counted nearly two weeks after one of the biggest political upsets in modern U.S. history catapulted Donald Trump to the presidency.

Estimates show more than 58 percent of eligible voters went to the polls during the 2016 election, nearly breaking even with the turnout rate set during the last presidential election in 2012, even as the final tallies in states like California continue to be calculated, according to statistics collected by the U.S. Elections Project.

But among those figures were stark contrasts in key states that helped swing the election to Trump — in Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan and elsewhere — indicating the President-elect’s leap from long-shot candidate to the most powerful political position in the world may have happened in part because of apathy toward Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, especially among the Democratic base, several political scientists and organizations monitoring voter turnout told the PBS NewsHour.

While Clinton is leading the popular vote by more than 1.5 million over Trump as of Sunday, she trails President Obama’s 2012 totals by more than 2 million ballots — a chasm that may have cost her the election, said David Becker, co-founder of the Center for Election and Innovation and Research.

“Several million voters didn’t come out to vote,” Becker said. “Which is telling me that this idea of the Trump wave, a huge number of voters shifting over to Trump, is certainly not the story.”

Nationally, the number of people who voted for Trump were only slightly ahead of those who supported the last Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, in 2012.

But Becker said that while turnout in purple states like Florida and Pennsylvania had a slight uptick this year, at least 19 other states saw lower turnout rates compared with 2012, a scenario that is antithetical to presidential-year voting that tends to increase each cycle when an incumbent is not a part of the race.

According to Becker, turnout rates dropped by 1.3 percent in Iowa, 3 percent in Wisconsin and nearly 4 percent in Ohio in 2016, a combination that became a death knell for Clinton’s presidential hopes in areas where Obama performed well during his two terms.

Fourteen states installed new restrictive voting laws, which have historically targeted minorities, before the 2016 election, including in Wisconsin and Ohio. And this general election was the first since the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 that required federal approval on any state election law.

Neil Albrecht, executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, said voter identification laws hurt turnout in the city’s high-poverty districts this month, noting that 41,000 fewer people voted there in 2016 than in 2012.

However, the Brennan Center for Justice, nonpartisan law and policy institute, said there has not been enough data collected to determine the laws’ impact on the election.

Robert Alexander, a political science professor at Ohio Northern University, said many of the scenarios across the country that led to Trump’s victory also played out in Ohio, a crucial swing state.

“You saw turnout spike in more rural counties,” Alexander said. “If you take a look at a lot of the larger cities you did see depressed turnout there. It certainly was more consequential for Hillary Clinton than it was for Trump.”

He added: “Trump held firm in a lot of those cities. He didn’t lose ground relative to Romney.”

According to a Pew Research Center analysis, Trump and Romney shared about the same number of white voters during the last two presidential elections, and Clinton captured a percentage of women close to Obama. Clinton also did not perform as well as Obama with core Democratic blocs, including blue collar people.

“I don’t know if it’s so much this fleeing of the blue collar people to Donald Trump,” Alexander said. “But I think there’s a lot of blue collar individuals that the Democrats typically rely on. Those are the folks who didn’t show up.”

Clinton also pulled in a lower share of voters between ages 18 and 29 than Obama did during his two campaigns, Becker said.

Preliminary national exit polls released in the days after the election showed the contest was divided by race, gender and education, though black and Latino minorities did not turn out like they had for Obama and women did not show up for Clinton to the extent that many had predicted. While Clinton’s took 88 percent of African-American votes to Trump’s 8 percent, Obama defeated Romney among African-Americans by 93 percent to 6 percent, exit polls showed.

“Trump gave people who did show up a reason to vote for him,” Alexander said, noting that Clinton’s lead in the polls in the weeks leading up to the election was likely a factor for turnout rates. “People didn’t see that urgency. The people that did support her did not see her losing.”

Clinton contends that a letter sent by FBI director James B. Comey to Congress about the agency’s inquiry into her use of a private email server lost her the election.

But Becker said the difference in votes between Obama and Clinton may have been due to Obama’s “remarkable” ability to turn out voters. The president has been lauded for bringing people to the polls despite the fact the U.S. is ranked among the worst in developed nations in voter turnout, according to one analysis. And his takeaways from this year’s election are one of disenchantment among both Republicans and Democrats.

“I think there’s warning signs in both parties,” Becker said. “Obviously Democrats are losing votes and Republicans aren’t really building their base. The numbers they’re getting are holding pretty consistent. That should be troubling when the electorate is on the older side.” Link

[Triple C]

DOR,

HRC's apparently large popular vote margin is deceptive in light of a growing population of voters. Moreover, midwestern voters who went for Barrack Obama in 2012 were either MIA or "defected" this time around. While white nationalists and alt-righters were going to vote DT no matter what, I suspect economic populism was key, and HRC's image as the responsible adult was a negative asset.

So much for the Democratic Party's better discipline in containing the crazies, eh, Atsy? :P

A point of note: HRC had during her campaign repeatedly transferred field operations and funds to Georgia, Utah and Arizona at the expense of midwestern states, even though there were no convincing tactical reasons to do so.

[Albany Rifles]

I hate myself and want to die :-( Seriously, I can't believe I didn't check the date on that article...

Don't beat yourself up....that's our job!

[astralis]

triple C,

So much for the Democratic Party's better discipline in containing the crazies, eh, Atsy? :P

well, they contained them alright, contained them to the point where they decided to defect! and as it turns out, Trump was the one GOP figure they could actually defect to, because he sold them on economic nationalism.

somehow...just somehow...i highly doubt they're going to be better off in four years' time. but we'll see.

A point of note: HRC had during her campaign repeatedly transferred field operations and funds to Georgia, Utah and Arizona at the expense of midwestern states, even though there were no convincing tactical reasons to do so.

she wanted the big win, and also potentially to influence downballot races. OTOH the funds spent there, outside of AZ, weren't all that significant.

[antimony]

I hate myself and want to die :-( Seriously, I can't believe I didn't check the date on that article...

Serious advice, got to the range with your guns and let loose at least 300 rounds. After that go for a run. You wi;ll soon want to die, but for different reasons

And if you do not have guns
1. What's wrong with you?
2. Get some

[Triple C]

triple C,

well, they contained them alright, contained them to the point where they decided to defect! and as it turns out, Trump was the one GOP figure they could actually defect to, because he sold them on economic nationalism.

somehow...just somehow...i highly doubt they're going to be better off in four years' time. but we'll see.

Or they just decided to be MIA. In any rate, I'm deeply skeptical of the Keynesian infrastructure-build + tax cuts + bigger military "plan" that President-elect Trump has on his platform, and there isn't anything from his Cabinet indicating he'll back off from it.

OTOH the funds spent there, outside of AZ, weren't all that significant.

That's interesting. That's stuff you heard from the inside or printed?

[JAD_333]

HRC was "weaker" than DJT by 1.8 million votes ... that makes it organizational, not ideological, policy or personality.

Organizational...you hit the nail on the head, assuming you meant what I have in mind.

Organizationally, both campaigns aimed to win the Electoral College vote. The strategy was to campaign heavily in swing states and pay little attention to solidly red or blue states. They went head to head using that strategy, and Trump came out on top.

End of story? No. Now the fact that Clinton is well ahead in the popular vote has become, for some Clinton die-hard supporters, proof that she really won. It has also once again stirred up talk of getting rid of the Electoral College in favor of picking presidents by a popular vote. Presumably, these voices believe that if that had been the case Clinton would be the president-elect today.

That's utter bullsh_t, because both candidates would have campaigned much differently if a popular vote determined the winner. They would have focused almost exclusively on a handful of heavily populated states like California, Texas, and New York, states which saw little campaigning this election cycle because they were already in the bag, so to speak, for one or the other.

Who knows how the popular vote would have turned out had their organizations been geared to win a popular vote. IMO, Clinton's popular vote lead is considerably less significant than her organizational defeat in capturing the main prize, a majority of the electoral vote.

[Triple C]

JAD,

Yes, but... a president with a smaller share of the popular vote from a low turnout election is not an insignificant event. The next four to eight years would make anything post 2000 look like a picnic.