The working class white voters also have a soft spot for underdogs and Hillary was never an underdog. She has been inevitable for too long (I know ironic, right?)
Trump for all his faults was an improbable candidate.
Bernie was an improbable candidate.
An Aww schucks Biden would have been able to pull it off
Hillary would never have made a better appellate attorney than trial attorney, she would make great reasoned arguments and juries would still hate her because she just isn’t very smooth.
I know a shitload of swing voters, but I know a lot of Asians so maybe its just the people I know.
While whites without a college degree keep moving to the right, whites with a college degree are not.
Also whites are not a monolith. I know people like to say minorities are not a monolith, but whites really aren’t. White liberals (highly educated, liberal on economic and social issues) make up maybe 15% of the electorate (probably 50% of this board) and vote pretty reliably leftward. Right off the bat, about 1/4 to 1/5 of white people are liberals and will not vote GOP. If you watch any of the neo-confederacy marches, not only are all the neo-nazis and neo-confederates white, but the vast majority of the antifa fighters are white too.
Latinos may not be a monolith, but they are pretty reliable democrat voters for the time being. Whites on the other hand can be 90% democrat or 90% republican in large numbers based on geography or ideology. I don’t think this kind of spread exists in minority groups.
In fact of the 5 racial groups that exit polls followed, whites had the smallest spread for one party over another (57-37 for Trump). that 20 point spread is much smaller than the 38 point spread for latinos or the 81 point spread for blacks.
Trump lost college educated white women 51-44, he won high school educated white men 71-23. That is a pretty big spread just based on education and gender going from -7 to +48 based on these 2 factors within white people.
White men w/o a college education now vote as partisan as LGBTs, who generally prefer the democrats 3-1.
Also Hillary won the popular vote, she just won it in the wrong states.
If there’s one lesson I would have thought was seared into the minds of Democrats everywhere after Gore lost, it would have been that winning the popular vote doesn’t mean shit. That doesn’t seem to be the case though.
For purposes of the discussion in this thread, winning the popular vote is significant.
In terms of becoming President or not, it doesn’t mean shit. In terms of political mandate, influence, and such things, it can be quite influential, purely because of the optics. If Trump had won 55% of the popular vote, Congress and both parties would likely be much less resistant to many of his policies.
About 5-10% of the population are true swing voters, compared with 15-20% who are sometimes voters.
Fair enough. One has more political capital the larger one’s margin of victory. I agree.
BTW, Wesley Clark, I hope my earlier post didn’t come across as hostile. I’ve really enjoyed reading your posts in this thread. They’re packed full of information and thoughtful analysis. That last line on your latest struck me as weirdly out of place, but that’s probably mostly due to my annoyance with HRC’s latest round of What Happened blame-shifting than anything else.
What was that national margin of loss again? Negative three million votes?
It actually should mean something, but to the “winning” party. It should mean that if this is the way you have to win (getting the electoral vote, but not the popular) that maybe your party is the one with the problem.
Obviously I’d prefer it if the Republican candidate won both the popular vote and the electoral college vote, but if I had to choose between him winning one and not the other, I know which one I’d pick.
ETA: and any “problem” that represents is dwarfed by the “problem” of losing the election in my eyes.
Why do you assume we needed to learn this lesson? Elections are about what the public wants, and by 3 million votes the public wanted Hillary Clinton as president. She just won those votes in the wrong states. Things like that are important about determining the wants of the electorate. The post mortems about the election keep acting like Hillary was some deeply unpopular candidate who barely showed up. She won 66 million votes, she just didn’t win them in the right places.
People are prepared to accept it when the popular and electoral votes part company, as long as it doesn’t happen too often. 2000, yeah, a fluke. 2016, the second time, starts to look like a pattern. If it happens again, you’re gonna start bumping up against that whole “consent of the governed” thing. Not a threat, just a prediction.
But that’s my point. She didn’t learn the lesson of Gore’s defeat. Take a look at this handy 538 gif and you’ll see that she made more stops to California than Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Maine’s second congressional district. Yes, she won more votes in the wrong places, but that’s because she campaigned in the wrong places.
That further complicates the Democrats’ coalition conflicts though. College educated whites are kept in the fold primarily by Democrats’ recent line in the sand about taxes for anyone making under $400K or so. I don’t think they’ll stick to that forever, or they may miscalculate and think they can get away with raising middle class taxes.
Well, one thing that hasn’t changed about American politics is that the discussion is primarily between white people of a left ideological bent vs. white people with a right ideological bent. As long as that continues, minorities will just kinda be tagging along, and whites will remain not a monolith. That changes in a big way if the discussion morphs into white right-wingers vs. Latino left-wingers. We live in an ideological time, but historically American politics has revolved more around race and region. We’re starting to see a shift back in that direction and the more whites leave the Democratic Party the most likely we’ll see a leadership vacuum in the party that will be filled by the 2nd largest racial minority, which will soon be Latinos.
Not really, because all of the anger will be concentrated in just a few places. If those few places want to secede or demand more self-governance, I think many would be prepared to listen.
There’s no level of taxation that could induce me, or most of the white Democrats I know, to join an all-white or nearly all-white party like the Republicans. If some large American organization in America is all-white or nearly all-white today, then there’s a reason for it, and whatever those reasons are would make it anathema to the vast majority of American cultural liberals.
That depends on what counts as all white to you. Even now, the GOP gets 10% of African-Americans, 30% of Latinos, and 30-40% of Asians. Also, would you be a member of a party where your views weren’t represented?
Looking at the overall demographics of Republicans, yes, this counts as “nearly all-white” to me.
If you divide it up along racial lines, Asians swing their vote more than almost any other racial group. That’s all I meant.
