Something very interesting to ponder, there were around 6 million fewer democratic votes in 2016 vs 2012, and around 1 million fewer republican votes for Trump compared to Romney.
The reason that Trump got a slightly higher percentage of the minority vote seems clearer now, it is likely that since a decent chunk of democrats did not show up (where there is a higher mix of minority voters) that boosted of the percentage of remaining minority voters that were more die hard republicans.
Now that is the national total, I have not seen state to state comparisons of the popular vote, perhaps there was a bigger drop off in safe states but swing states were higher?
Perhaps there were more democratic voters that actually switched to republican for Trump to account for perceived smaller republican drop, I’m not sure and more detailed studies will be needed to tease that out, but the notion that Trump brought the hillbillies out of the woodwork seems to have been false, he did worse than Romney on an absolute support scale, but democrats without Obama were less energized. This is a lesson to consider going forward, we need better candidates. We can’t allow the presidential elections to behave like the midterms.
This is the great problem of the democratic party to solve, and liberals in general. We won’t have Obama anymore, so how can we get closer to his kind of pull without him?
How about some real choice in candidates? I don’t even have to pay for cable TV these days to choose what to watch, but it feels as though my candidates are chosen for me ahead of time. Doesn’t exactly inspire some folks to be a part of it.
A question I haven’t seen asked: By every single report, Clinton had the vastly superior GOTV organization. So was her organization less awesome than reported, is the importance of GOTV organization overhyped or was Hillary such an uninspiring candidate that it overwhelmed even the mightiest of organization?
One of the political podcasts I was listening to said that while Trump had a terrible GOTV operation, the RNC as a whole did not and the campaigns for congresspeople like Portman and Johnson may have boosted Trump’s numbers as a side effect of getting out the vote for themselves.
I don’t see any basis for the assumption that the Republican-inclined minority voters would disproportionately turn out to vote. If anything, the opposite would seem more likely: the few Republican minority voters out there would have a relatively tenuous attachment to their party and would be less enthusiastic to vote when the Republican nominee is a clown show. Conversely, one would except Democratic minority voters to be comparatively more energized, and so one would expect decreased turnout among minority voters to produce higher percentages for the Democratic candidate.
That apparently didn’t happen (assuming the reliability of the exit polls holds up), so I think it’s fair to say that we don’t know yet exactly what was going on with the composition and motivation of minority voters this time around.