One of the big arguments made by Donald Trump and his supporters was that the Republican nominee was capable of redrawing the electoral map. Specifically, they said, Trump would turn out the vote in rustbelt states that hadn’t voted reliably GOP in decades. A lot of people found the suggestion that Trump could do this preposterous, myself included.
In 2012, Mitt Romney won 206 electoral votes, 64 shy of what’s needed to win an election. Not coincidentally, if you add up the electoral votes from Pennsylvania (20 votes), Ohio (18 votes), Michigan (16 votes), and Wisconsin (10 votes)—that adds up to 64. Trump carried all four of those states, albeit narrowly.
So how did he do it? Well, one big possible leaps out: the missing white voters thesis.
After the 2012 election, Real Clear Politics’s Sean Trende, a respected election data analyist, wrote a piece called “The Case of the Missing White Voters.” Democrats, fresh of Obama’s triumphal reelection were buying the “demography is destiny” explanation for their win hook, line, and sinker. While it’s true the electorate is become less white and this should in theory benefit Democrats, Trende offered up an alternate explanation: The changes in demographics seen in that election were brought on less by the changing ethnic composition of the electorate, and more by a drop off in participation by white voters. In fact, Dave Wasserman notes that while Obama won by a 5 million vote margin in 2012, “about 47 million eligible white voters without a college degree — including 24 million men — didn’t bother to vote” that year. As Patrick Ruffini said last night, “The political class was blinded by the demographic change theory and the immutability of partisanship/demography.” It would certainly appear the he electorate hasn’t changed as much or as fast as was believed. Based on the limited information we have so far, Trump won these rustbelt states because he reactivated rural and white voters that were out there but maybe hadn’t voted in the Obama years.
And while Trump’s strength may have potentially come from “missing” working class white voters, Trump’s overall strength with white voters was notable. “Clinton suffered her biggest losses in the places where Obama was strongest among white voters,” observed New York Times polling guru Nate Cohn. Polls also underestimated Trump’s support among some key portions of the white vote. Trump apparently won non college educated whites by 40 percent, but also won college educated whites by 4 percent—and many pollsters had assumed he would lose the latter group. Further, “exit polls show Trump only losing white women with college degrees by 6 points,” noted pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson. “There’s your shy Trump vote.”
Of course, there will be a lot more data to dive through in the coming days, weeks, and months. And the story of Trump’s victory isn’t just about mobilizing white voters. One astonishing fact from the preliminary data is that Trump apparently did better with black voters, and incredibly, Latino voters than Mitt Romney.
