What has happened to the Democratic Party’s coalition in the 20-year interval between the appearance of a Clinton as the head of its presidential ticket? One answer is that the Democratic percentage nationally has remained just about the same. Bill Clinton received 49 percent of the popular vote in 1996; Hillary Clinton received 48 percent of the popular vote in 2016. Of course, the outcomes of those elections were radically different. In 1996 Bill Clinton was re-elected with 379 electoral votes; in 2016 Hillary Clinton was defeated, earning only 232 electoral votes.
One reason for the difference in results was that Ross Perot received 8 percent of the popular vote in 1996, while Gary Johnson received only 3 percent 20 years later. So Bill Clinton carried 31 states and the District of Columbia, while Hillary Clinton carried only 20 states and D.C.
Another way to look at it is that Hillary Clinton won a higher percentage than her husband had two decades before in only 15 states and D.C. The Democratic percentage declined in the other 35 states. Hillary Clinton’s biggest percentage gain over her husband was 10 percent, in California. Her next biggest gains were in the Washington metropolitan area: 6 percent in Maryland and D.C., 5 percent in Virginia. Democratic percentages also increased 3 to 5 percent in other states touching the Pacific Ocean: Hawaii, Alaska, Washington, Oregon. Note, however, that these gains transformed only one state, Virginia, from safe Republican to Democratic. Otherwise the only Democratic electoral vote gains in these states were the 2 extra electoral votes gained by California and Washington in reapportionments following the 2000 and 2010 Censuses.
Small Democratic percentage gains, from 1 to 3 percent, produced no additional electoral votes for the party in Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware and Alaska—all safe Democratic except for the last, which has remained safe Republican. Neither did the 2 percent Democratic gain in North Carolina, which was carried by Barack Obama in 2008 and was a target state in 2012 and 2016. Hillary Clinton’s 4 percent Democratic gains over 1996 in Colorado and Nevada made more difference, helping her to a narrow win in Nevada, which her husband also carried twice, and in Colorado, which he won narrowly in 1992 but lost narrowly in 1996 and which now has 1 more electoral vote than it did in the 1990s.
Perhaps surprisingly, Hillary Clinton ran behind her husband’s percentages by 1 or 2 percent in Florida, Texas, Arizona, Georgia and Illinois. The conventional wisdom the last few years has been that increasing numbers of non-whites, Hispanics in four of those states and blacks in Georgia, would make these states more Democratic, and there has been some perceptible movement in that direction over the last 20 years. But not enough to produce Democratic electoral votes in 2016. Bill Clinton carried Florida and Arizona and lost Georgia by 1 percent in 1996; Hillary Clinton lost all three in 2016. Illinois was safe Democratic in both elections.
In what states did the Democratic percentage fall most? In coal-producing West Virginia (25 percent) and Wyoming (17 percent), in Bill Clinton’s native Arkansas (20 percent), in oil-producing Louisiana (14 percent), North Dakota (13 percent) and Oklahoma (12 percent), in Jacksonian Tennessee and Appalachian Kentucky (13 percent), in Harry Truman’s Missouri (10 percent) and George McGovern’s South Dakota (11 percent). None was competitive any more in 2016, and Hillary Clinton lost 38 electoral votes in the states in this group which Bill Clinton had carried.
Most critically, Hillary Clinton failed to carry five Midwestern states and Pennsylvania which Bill Clinton had carried by comfortable margins, and where in counties outside million-plus metro areas the Democratic percentage declined sharply between 1996 and 2016: Pennsylvania (down 2 percent), Ohio (4 percent), Michigan (5 percent), Wisconsin (2 percent) and Iowa (9 percent). These states cast 80 electoral votes for Bill Clinton in 1996; they cast 70 electoral votes for Donald Trump in 2016.
The bottom line is that over the last 20 years the Democratic percentage rose robustly in California and in the three states that are part of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. In the other 47 states it rose no more than 4 percent and fell by as much as 25 percent. That proved not to be a good tradeoff for the party in 2016.
