Observations: Data from the Election

(This post is part of a sequence of blog posts, trying to make sense of the 2016 election, and what it means about us, and how we move forward. The first post in the sequence is “Let’s Be Less Wrong”.)

In my last post (“The Adversary and the Goal”), I asserted that we are in an adversarial situation relative to a status quo that is failing us, and that we should use the OODA Loop paradigm to gain strategic advantage over it.

This post is the first step in OODA: Observation. Here, I gather what I find to be the most interesting raw data and initial observations/comments about the election. Given that it’s now a week after the election, I imagine that most informed individuals have already seen much of this data. I’m gathering it here partially as a reference for myself.

I do think it’s important to separate out the raw data (and observations closely tied to the data) from the interpretation and the refinement of narratives, so we don’t end up conflating things and confusing our analysis. (The interpretation and deconstruction will be part of the Orientation step, which comes next.)

The polling wasn’t that far off. There were a number of battleground states that all ended up breaking marginally for Trump, and in aggregate, that shifted the electoral college significantly in his favor. But in most of those states, his lead was not some huge amount. As my friend Robert Kern states:

“One thing that we do know now is that this was a close election. The proximate reason that Trump won is because he won three electorally-key state contests by razor-thin margins. Any ultimate explanations will be quibbling over tens of thousands of votes in those states, not broad swathes of the country. This wasn’t Reagan-Mondale, or even Bush-Kerry. Trump won/Clinton lost on the margin, so the explanation will have to involve those marginal voters. Any explanation that talks about millions of people across the country, populist/racist/whatever uprisings isn’t really addressing the question.”

Hillary won the popular vote. In no uncertain terms: More people who voted wanted Hillary to be president. As of Nov 16, 2016, it looks like her popular vote total exceeds Trump’s by 1 million votes. What this means is that despite Donald Trump’s complaints that the media didn’t cover his “huge turnouts” and that he had activated the mythical “silent majority” that Republicans have been talking about for 30 years, they were still fewer in number than Democrats.

NPR presented 7 reasons why Trump won, including:

• Clinton did not fire up the Obama Coalition. (Clinton got nearly 5 million fewer votes overall than Obama; Trump got about the same number as Romney)
• Whites without college degrees have fled to the GOP, with a 35-point spread in favor of Trump, vs. a roughly 12–14 pt spread in from 2004–2012.
• And that leads to what might be the biggest story of the election — Democrats’ cratering with blue-collar white voters.
• Clinton forgot how she campaigned in 2000. Overall, the reason Trump won was because he flipped big margins with white, working class voters in the Midwest and Pennsylvania — something that was always a possibility.

TheHill.com provides some data comparing Clinton’s performance against Obama in 2012, which is very useful:

• In the 10 most competitive swing states, Clinton underperformed Obama’s 2012 tally by nearly 1.2 million votes. Besides Pennsylvania and Michigan, she became the first Democratic presidential candidate since 1984 to lose Wisconsin.
• Democrats turned out a record number of voters in the nation’s largest urban areas and did well in traditional swing counties such as Chester and Montgomery counties in Pennsylvania, home to some of the all-important Philadelphia suburbs.
• Clinton scored better than Obama in just one of the 36 Pennsylvania counties with populations of less than 100,000.
• Florida was one of the few states where Clinton’s total outpaced Obama statewide. Clinton outperformed Obama and beat Trump by 853,000 votes in the five counties with populations over 1 million residents — Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, Hillsborough and Orange. Obama had won those counties by a combined 695,000 votes.
  
  But Trump outperformed Romney by a wider margin: In the 31 counties with populations between 100,000 and 1 million, Trump won by 801,000 combined votes — 300,000 more than Romney’s margin four years ago. Trump beat Clinton by 171,000 votes in Florida counties with fewer than 100,000 residents, improving on Romney.
• Clinton also suffered from a predictable decline in the African-American vote, a critical loss in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. If the Democrat had won those three states, she would be the president-elect.
• Clinton’s focus on urban cores helped her win Nevada, a state dominated by two urban centers. Clinton took more votes than Obama in both Clark (Las Vegas) and Washoe (Reno) counties — and she underperformed Obama in the other 15 counties in the Silver State. Clinton’s margin in Clark County alone, where she beat Trump by 81,000 votes, was three times the size of her statewide margin. “We did not lose this in base Democratic counties,” Schale said.

From The Huffington Post:

• A significant chunk of Obama voters flipped to Trump. Trump won 10 percent of voters who approve of Obama’s presidency and 23 percent of voters who think the next president should “be more liberal,” according to CNN data. Trump significantly outperformed Romney among union households. He did 14 points better than Romney among whites without a college degree, according to The New York Times, and 16 points better among households with less than $30,000 in income. The Trump Democrat turns out not to be a myth, but a meaningful constituency that just cost Clinton the presidency.

I also found a number of comments on Hacker News immediately after the results from Florida and Pennsylvania started to point fairly conclusively to a Trump victory. I am including these not because I necessarily agree with their viewpoints (although I ultimately do agree with some of them), but I think that it’s worth noting both the text and the subtext of each of these. In a sense, the snap responses from these commenters also serve as a kind of data.

“Poor whites in America seem to identify with rich whites more than others from different races who are working (or unemployed) right next to them.
To them, Trump is like the star NFL quarterback that everyone wishes to be, and wears that star’s jersey on their back. Even if the fan is overweight and can barely waddle across the parking lot.
Except that in reality Trump does not have the skills necessary to do the job. (He is a great candidate, but will likely be a terrible president). Someone observed that Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person. He is unfortunately likely a disenfranchised person’s idea of an effective president.”

“I think this attitude drove more people to trump. The real reasons most people voted for him were things like party loyalty, they dislike Hillary, perceived him as anti establishment etc etc.
People like you took the narrative from the big news networks of the mass numbers of bigots and racists and just ran with it. Problem was that story smelled like bull, which pushed more people to his camp.”

“In 2012 Mitt Romney lost Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which Trump now won, some solidly, some barely.

With no major demographic shift there, seems also fair to assume a good portion of the voting-age population in those states saw no noticeable improvement in the past 4 years.”

“Here’s the thing: Trump would have won by a wider margin if he had a clean tax history and wasn’t on tape bragging about groping women. But, if you take away his early, inflammatory statements about (illegal?) Mexican immigrants, I think the net results might be fewer votes, but only because those comments seems to propel his media coverage. Trump was great for ratings, and frankly will continue to be. It’s been a rich ride if you’re CNN and FOX. But also, I think left-leaning media wanted him to be the candidate, because they though he embodied the “racist Republican” characterization Democrats always had in their playbook. I’m not sure if overt racism was a net vote-getter though.

Speaking of free media coverage… Citizens United, a.k.a unfettered super-pac spending seemed to play no part in this election. I think Clinton and her supporters outspent Trump in every measurable way.”

“To me this shows how hard it is to come up with good solutions for problems.
I think both Trump and Clinton know what the problems in the US are. The difference is: Trump is naming all problems but doesn’t provide real solutions, Clinton is only naming problems she has a solution for.
That’s why the working class votes for Trump because he is the only one who is talking about their problems.
The same is happening here in The Netherlands. Politics doesn’t likes to talk about problems with immigration. Wilders does. That’s why he is very popular. But just like Trump his solutions are unrealistic.
This is also why I don’t think a lot is going to change in the US. The unrealistic solutions are what they are: unrealistic. So the Mexican wall is never going to be build.
The only sad outcome is that this populistic talk is dividing the nation.”

“I think it boils down to Clinton not being a good candidate — she’s “the establishment”, a woman, and has no charisma. You can’t have all three and still win.
Obama had the “handicap” of being black and “a funny name” but has plenty charisma and was seen as an outsider. Trump has charisma (for some) and is an outsider. Clinton has no redeeming quality in the eye of the electorate, even many who voted for her did so to stop Trump, not because they believed in her.”

“They saw change and didn’t like how it affected the national identity of their country, which is why his strongest support came from places which were less likely to be impacted by immigration, much less illegal immigration. So let’s not pretend they had “economic anxiety.” It was about race, which is not to say those folks are racist. We need better language than just “racism” to talk about demographic anxiety, but we can’t ignore that the voting split down racial lines. We can’t ignore that Trump made racist and bigoted remarks, or that he enthused racist wings of the far right.”

Armed with this data and initial analysis, the next step (and the hardest step) is to Orient ourselves relative to this new information. If there are critical data points or if there is something flawed about the data presented above, please leave a comment and let me know.