The 2016 Presidential Election by the Numbers and in Historical Perspective

Abstract

Using election results as our point of departure, this article places the 2016 presidential election in historical perspective. Trump's victory was an "expected" outcome, as races following two-terms of one party rule usually go to the opposition party. Trump also ran close to fellow Republicans competing for Congress despite his unusual relationship with many of those in the party he captured. Trump's victory in the presidential contest proved remarkably economical. He lost most of his votes relative to Romney in 2012 in places where it did not matter, while his opponent ran up the score in the states she already had locked down. We further measure the increasing geographic concentration of each major party's electoral support and consider how this relates to the controversy over the Electoral College.

Place-Based Imagery and Voter Evaluations: Experimental Evidence on the Politics of Place

“…Indeed, as pundits in the Washington Post and other major outlets have noted, "the deepening fissure between red and blue America" is due in large part to the emotional identity clash between rural and urban places (Guo 2016). Geography interacts with other political attributes and social identities in mutually constitutive processes: political parties compete in electoral districts structured by geography; the persistence of de facto housing segregation means that neighborhood boundaries mirror those of race and class; and in the 2016 Presidential Election over one-third of the entire American electorate lived in counties where there was virtually no competition between the two major party candidates (Jacobs and Ceaser 2016). The experimental design presented above provides an unparalleled ability to control for these myriad interactions and isolate the independent effects of place-based identities and geographic imagery.…”

Working Class Hero? Interrogating the Social Bases of the Rise of Donald Trump

“…If the general election outcome seems less surprising on closer inspection than many have suggested (Jacobs and Ceaser 2016), consider the primary campaign. Trump seized the Republican nomination against the wisdom predictions of the dominant social science theories of the nominating process.…”

After the White House: The Politics of the Postpresidency

“… Source : Gallup Polls, Presidential Job Approval Center, http://www.gallup.com/interactives/185273/presidential-job-approval-center.aspx?g_source=PRESIDENTIAL_JOB_APPROVAL&g_medium=topic&g_campaign=tiles (accessed March 8, 2017). Presidential Vote Share of the Two‐Party Vote and the percent of seat losses is calculated from data provided by Jacobs and Ceaser (). …”

“…But President Obama entered into office in large part because of his independence from the formal Democratic Party, using his personal campaign organization (Obama for America, now titled Organizing for Action) to mobilize voters, solicit campaign funds, and pronounce party doctrine. As Sidney Milkis and John York () write, “It remains to be seen, however, whether the presidential partisanship practiced by Obama's information‐age, grassroots organization offers a novel and enduring form of party building or marks, instead, a new stage of executive aggrandizement that subordinates collective party responsibility to a cult of personality.” By most accounts, President Obama used his organization to prioritize his own personal loyalties over his party's collective position—a fact evidenced by the fact that in the modern era only Dwight Eisenhower suffered greater party‐seat losses in Congress over the course of his presidency than President Obama did during his tenure (Jacobs and Ceaser ). Yet, while Eisenhower redoubled his efforts to reshape the Republican Party after his term by actively working through its preexisting institutions, Obama has the option of sidestepping the Democratic Party by using his own impressive institutional capacity to carry forward his postpresidential ambitions.…”