While Clinton supporters have blamed Hillary Clinton’s loss on Bernie Bros, Jill Stein voters, James Comey, Russia, and everything other than Hillary Clinton, there is yet more data debunking their arguments. Nate Cohn reviewed an analysis of voter files. The key issue was that Hillary Clinton lost the support of white working class voters who previously backed Obama. He wrote:
…it’s clear that large numbers of white, working-class voters shifted from the Democrats to Mr. Trump. Over all, almost one in four of President Obama’s 2012 white working-class supporters defected from the Democrats in 2016, either supporting Mr. Trump or voting for a third-party candidate.
In other words, he found that that Trump “flipped millions of white working-class Obama supporters to his side.” The millions of Obama voters who flipped from Obama to Trump was far greater than the votes lost to third party candidates.” He also wrote, “Mrs. Clinton won Mr. Obama’s white-working class supporters by a margin of only 78 percent to 18 percent against Mr. Trump, according to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.”
Sanders supporters were also not the likely to be the source of votes which Clinton lost:
Were they mostly supporters of Bernie Sanders? Unlikely: He was popular among the young, but 67 percent of the 2016 drop-off voters were over age 45, and 35 percent were over age 65. Just 5 percent voted in the Democratic primary in 2016, and 7 percent voted in the Republican primary.
This data is consistent with previous reports on the election, including those I discussed here and here. This includes how Clinton ignored states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin until virtually the end of the campaign. When she did campaign, she generally ignored the issues and failed to give reasons to vote for her other than her gender and it supposedly being her turn. Working class voters probably didn’t care about the letter from James Comey. They were more likely to be convinced by Donald Trump promising a stronger economy, even if they were promises he will never keep, as opposed to the negative campaigning from Clinton.
Hopefully, after loses in 2010, 2014, and now 2016, the Democratic Party is starting to realize it needs to stand for something.In one bit of potentially favorable news, NBC News reports, “Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez has launched a major overhaul of the party’s organization, which has been stung by recent crises — and the DNC has requested resignation letters from all current staffers.”
Hopefully this will lead to a real house cleaning. The efforts by the DNC to rig the nomination for Hillary Clinton was inexcusable. Even beyond the undemocratic nature of such actions, a candidate as unfit a Hillary Clinton should have never been considered for a major party nomination. If the party is to recover, those who thought that the nomination of Clinton was a an acceptable idea need to be replaced.
