The Democratic Party is still trying to figure out how Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump. Almost every pre-election poll showed Clinton winning by at three to four points and far ahead in the key battleground states, yet as the returns rolled in on the night of November 8, one state after another went to the GOP nominee. What went wrong?
Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight has examined the numbers from the 2016 election and has some conclusions Democrats would be wise to pay close attention to. As Silver notes:
“If Clinton had done just 2 points better, pollsters would have called the popular-vote margin almost on the nose and correctly identified the winner in all states but North Carolina.”
Silver also provides us with two different Electoral College maps. Here’s the one we’re now looking at in light of Trump’s victory:
Then we get a hypothetical which may well haunt the Democrats for years:
If just 1 out of every 100 voters shifted from Trump to Clinton, that would have produced a net shift of 2 percentage points in Clinton’s direction. And instead of the map you see above, this would have been the Electoral College’s final tally:
Yep, if Clinton had gotten 1 more vote out of every 100 cast, she would be President-elect. Notice in this map that Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida flip back to Clinton, giving her a total of 307 electoral votes. And she’d have won the popular vote by 3 to 4 percentage points, which would have been in keeping with President Obama’s margin of victory in 2012. The Obama Coalition would have remained and carried her to victory.
What does this mean for future elections? Silver suggests a couple of things:
- “Republicans simply can’t appeal to enough voters to have a credible chance at the Electoral College. While states like Ohio and Iowa might be slipping away from Democrats, they’ll be more than made up for by the shift of Arizona, North Carolina and Florida into the blue column as demographic changes take hold. Democrats are the coalition of the ascendant.”
- “The United States was more than ready for the first woman president. And they elected her immediately after the first African-American president. With further victories for liberals over the past several years on issues ranging from gay rights to the minimum wage, the arc of progress is unmistakable.”
There will not be a permanent Trump/GOP majority in this country. There can, however, be a permanent Democratic majority if the party will follow the path which led it to the White House in 2008 and 2012. Those of us who want to see Donald Trump be a one-term President can learn from these numbers and make sure they shift to our favor in the future. There’s work to be done, so let’s get busy and do it.
Featured Image Via NBC News Screengrab
