In the fall, as in the spring, Republican leaders and conservative intellectuals were deeply divided over Trump. Some continued seeing him as unfit. Some fifty former foreign policy officials in past Republican administrations signed an open letter denouncing him, while the party’s living ex-presidents—both named Bush—and recent losing nominees—McCain and Romney—remained aloof or in opposition. The elder Bush made it known he would vote for Clinton, while his son reportedly voted for neither major party nominee.45 Others, represented by Publius Decius Mus, saw the election as a “Flight 93 moment,” a last opportunity to save the republic from progressive destruction by “charging the cockpit”—backing an admittedly risky venture (Trump) as the only viable alternative to certain national doom.46 In the end, the overwhelming majority of Republicans heeded the call to charge the cockpit. Post-election polls showed that two of three Trump voters thought the 2016 election was the last chance to turn the country around.47 Party loyalty won out on both sides of the aisle. Overall, Trump won 88 percent of Republicans, and Clinton 89 percent of Democrats. The Democratic advantage in the electorate shrank from six points in 2012 to three points in 2016, and Trump won the independent or unaffiliated vote by 46–42 percent.
BEYOND HOW TO WHY
This may be how Trump won, but it leaves the important question of why Trump won. What caused voters to cast their ballots in sufficient numbers in the right places to send him to Washington?
There are a number of plausible causes, many of them mutually reinforcing. Here the debate of fundamentals versus contingencies returns with force. It also becomes clear that the debate assumes a dichotomy that is easier to assert than to delineate.
In the realm of fundamentals—or at least perception of fundamentals—by a 62–36 percent margin, voters said the economy was poor rather than good or excellent. By a nearly identical margin, they said the country was on the wrong track. And a 48–46 percent plurality judged Trump better able to handle the economy than Clinton.
It was, moreover, clear that a change election was prepared in deep wells of public opinion. In the view of a 50–45 percent plurality, the federal government should do less rather than more. Nearly half wanted the next president to be more conservative than Barack Obama, while only 17 percent wanted a president more liberal than Obama, as Clinton promised. Nearly seven in ten were dissatisfied or angry with the federal government, and they sided heavily with Trump; Clinton won the minority who were enthusiastic or satisfied with Washington. It was not a propitious time to be seeking a third consecutive term for the incumbent party.
Then there were the contingencies. After giving them a low-grade fever for most of the last seven years, Obamacare erupted again as a disaster for Democrats weeks before the election; exit polls showed 47 percent thought Obamacare had “gone too far”; only 18 percent that it “was about right.” Trump won the former heavily. A majority thought the fight against ISIS was “going badly”; Trump won two-thirds of those voters. Trump’s attention to the issue of the Supreme Court, made more salient by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February, paid dividends. Nearly one in five voters declared the Supreme Court the most important factor in their vote choice, and 56 percent of them favored Trump. An additional half of the electorate called the Court “an important factor.” Of the nearly 70 percent in these two groups, Trump won a plurality. Voters who identified the economy (52 percent) or foreign policy (13 percent) as the most important issue facing the country tilted toward Clinton; those prioritizing terrorism (18 percent) or immigration (13 percent) went even more heavily for Trump. However, only one-quarter of voters thought illegal immigrants should be deported, and only four in ten supported building a wall on the Mexican border. Immigration by itself did not carry Trump to the White House.
Not least, the candidates themselves evoked strong, and largely negative, reactions. Hillary Clinton was viewed unfavorably rather than favorably by a 55–43 percent margin, only to be out-unliked by Donald Trump, whose unfavorable ratings outpaced his favorable opinions by 60–38 percent. Some 61 percent called Clinton untrustworthy, while 64 percent said the same of Trump. Nearly two-thirds said Clinton’s use of private email bothered them; 70 percent said Trump’s comments about women bothered them. A solid majority of voters said they would be either concerned or scared if Clinton won, and an even larger majority said the same if Trump won. In this race to the bottom, Trump fared even worse than Clinton. A total of 47 percent called Clinton “unqualified” to be president, an unusually high number; 61 percent said the same about Trump. And Clinton held a clear edge on the question of which candidate had the right temperament to be president: 55 percent said Clinton did, while only 35 percent said that Trump did. Overall, there has been no presidential election in recent memory in which both major party candidates were held in such low esteem.
Trump’s strategy pinpointed areas of Clinton’s weakness—biographical weakness, in her long insider resume and scandal sheet; political weakness, as an avatar of unpopular liberal policies; and geographic weakness, as an unappealing candidate outside of the coasts. Clinton had a flawed strategy, which took for granted the Rust Belt, counted on reassembling the Obama coalition in full, and positioned her as a status-quo candidate in a change year. She and her party swung too far to the left, doubling down on Obamaism rather than creating space to run in the middle. Trump, by contrast, ran what his advisers called a “post-ideological” campaign that promised change,48 and his everyday rhetoric dominated the discussion and the air-waves. His advisers also held that his bold rhetoric was not meant to be taken literally but established general principles that people could understand and rally around.49 Not least, his wealth made it plausible for him to claim that he was a genuine outsider—that is, someone who could not be bought. Representative Tim Ryan (D-OH), who would unsuccessfully challenge Nancy Pelosi for leadership of House Democrats, argued that “while they [voters] look at us [Democrats] as trying to appeal to the donor class and the elites and the coasts and all that stuff, (Trump) said, ‘ I don’t need anybody’s money. ’ If you want to resonate with people here who want to change the system, that one line did it.”50 Together, it proved just enough to overcome voters’ deep doubts about him and his capacity to be president.
For his part, Trump and his team attributed his improbable election to a mandate from the American people. Yet, at the end of the day, Trump polled 3 million fewer votes than Clinton. His supporters were correct to note that a Clinton popular vote plurality in an Electoral College–based system would not necessarily translate into a Clinton win in a popular vote system. The rules of the game—270 electoral votes to win—controlled each candidate’s strategic choices about where to buy ads, where to send the candidate, where to open field offices, and so on. If you change the rules, you change the game. No one knows how the popular vote would have turned out in a system in which Trump or Clinton would leave New Hampshire to its devices and troll for votes in Texas or California instead. Having said that, it is still difficult to argue for a sweeping mandate after having not only lost the popular vote but also posted the lowest two-party popular vote percentage of any winner in modern times. Contrary to his boasts, even Trump’s electoral vote percentage ranked only seventh of the ten presidential election winners since 1980, twenty-sixth of the thirty-one winners since 1896, and forty-sixth of all the fifty-eight winners since 1788. Trump’s numbers were not even impressive in the much smaller group of seven opposition party candidates since 1920 who deprived the incumbent party’s non-incumbent nominee of a third term, placing fifth of seven in the electoral vote, sixth in the total popular vote, and seventh in the two-party vote.
The Clinton camp and its supporters offered a variety of similarly flawed theories for their candidate’s loss. One was that third-party candidates took votes away from Clinton, making the difference in critical states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. In particular, Clinton enthusiasts noted that Jill Stein received more votes than Clinton’
s margin of defeat in those states. However, as Aaron Blake explained in the Washington Post, “Exit polls showed 60 percent of Stein backers said they would have stayed home if she weren’t on the ballot. Among the rest, Clinton led by about a two-to-one margin—27–13, to be specific—but Trump took a fair amount of voters. Applying those numbers to the totals above means Clinton would have gained about 4,300 votes in Wisconsin and about 6,400 in Pennsylvania—not nearly enough to change the results.”51 National exit polls also showed that in a two-person race, Trump and Clinton would have tied at 47 percent each, with the remaining voters choosing not to vote at all.52 To put it another way, had the third-party candidates been removed from the race, Clinton would have gone from leading by two points to being tied with Trump. This implies that their net effect was not damaging to Clinton and may have even helped her a bit. In any event, the appeal of the third-party candidates was itself due largely to Clinton’s (and Trump’s) weaknesses as a candidate.
Another explanation offered by Clinton herself no sooner than the ink was dry on the Chicago Tribune headline “Clinton Defeats Trump” was that FBI Director James Comey’s two late letters played a decisive role in her defeat. Certainly, Trump’s last-minute polling gain partly coincided with the letter announcing reopening of the email investigation. Nate Silver has endorsed this hypothesis.53 However, there are many reasons not to put too much emphasis on this factor. For one thing, Clinton’s polling lead had actually peaked on October 17, eleven days before the first letter, and had been receding since then. Trump was already closing fast, and he may have continued doing so even without the reopening of the investigation. It may be significant that Trump’s most positive free media coverage and biggest paid media buys were in the final two weeks of the campaign. Most of his late gain was among 2012 Romney voters who were “coming home.”54 When voters were asked in exit polls when they had decided for whom to vote, Trump was the winner among those who had decided in September (48–46 percent), those who had decided in October (51–37 percent), and those who had decided in the last week (49–41 percent). Clinton won among the 60 percent who had decided before September and tied Trump among the 8 percent who said they had decided in the last few days. If this is true, the second Comey letter may have helped her more than the first one hurt. In any case, most voters had heard about the email scandal and, to a large extent, had probably already factored it into their vote decision. Perhaps Comey and Access Hollywood cancelled each other out. In any case, the scandals and gaffes of the fall tended to reinforce the negative views that voters had of the candidates more than to change views.
Some argued that Trump won because of Russian interference on his behalf. Starting with the Debbie Wasserman Schultz revelations in July, WikiLeaks dribbled a steady stream of damaging information about Hillary Clinton, the Clinton campaign, and the Democratic National Committee. To cite three examples, one WikiLeaks release provided the transcripts of Clinton’s highly paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, transcripts that Bernie Sanders had unsuccessfully demanded in the spring. They showed Clinton reassuring the finance executives that, although she had to be tough with them in public, there was a difference between her public and private politics.55 On several other occasions, emails were leaked suggesting that the Clinton Foundation had been an elaborate pay-to-play scheme that foreigners funded to get favors from Clinton’s State Department. And in October, WikiLeaks revealed emails among Clinton campaign staffers disparaging evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics and showing John Podesta to be involved in a partisan attempt to influence the doctrine of the Catholic Church.56 The U.S. intelligence community concluded that Russia was behind the hacking of the documents that were exposed, though analysts debated the purpose of the exposures, both before and after the election. Some thought that Vladimir Putin wanted to help Trump win, judging him to be friendlier to Russia’s interests; some thought he assumed Clinton would win, but aimed to sow chaos in the American political system; Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, contended that Putin simply aimed to exact revenge on Clinton for what he saw as her interference in Russia’s 2011 parliamentary elections while she was secretary of state.57 A partially declassified intelligence report released in January 2017 claimed that Putin originally aimed to help Trump with a broad influence campaign including propaganda and hacking and distribution of damaging information about Clinton; he later concluded that Trump was going to lose and shifted the objective to simply undermining the incoming president Clinton.58 In any event, it was difficult to untangle how much effect any given revelation had, much less all of them together. Even Clinton campaign operatives dismayed by the Russian hacking were unable to identify any single particular effect. Of course, in a close election, everything can matter, but these complaints amounted to saying that Clinton might have won if only her misdeeds and character flaws and those of her top campaign staff had been more effectively covered up by DNC cybersecurity.
Finally, there were a number of versions of the theory that Trump owed his victory to racism in the electorate, as Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri argued in December 2016.59 In this view, the central feature of Trump’s campaign was his attack on Mexicans and Muslims and the support he received from the alt-right. There is no question that Trump was supported by white supremacists such as David Duke and Richard Spencer, though he ultimately disavowed them. On balance, this explanation for Trump’s win is also difficult to sustain. Most important, exit polls showed that Trump had won slightly higher percentages among racial minorities and slightly lower percentages among white voters than Mitt Romney in 2012. The proximate cause of his win in the Electoral College was his ability to flip states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Iowa; he flipped those states because he was able to convince a large number of white working-class voters who had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 to vote for him in 2016. In other words, the decisive bloc of voters in the decisive states consisted of whites whose most recent votes were cast for the nation’s first black president.
If third parties, FBI directors, Russians, and racists are not really satisfactory explanations for Trump’s win, can anything else be offered to help understand this surprising election? An alternative story might be built around world trends, rioters, a weak president, and rampaging progressives. Though it, too, would be speculative, this story weaves together elements that help explain how Trump, who was never a regular Republican, nevertheless managed to hold together most of the traditional Republican coalition.
International Trends
Throughout the industrial world, voters in 2016 were rejecting supra-national elites and defending national sovereignty. Nowhere was this more dramatic than in Britain, which voted on June 23 to exit the European Union and where some of the same issues were in play, including uncontrolled immigration, centralized over-regulation, and loss of a sense of self-government. Trump consciously embraced Brexit, congratulating the British on their decision, and was in turn embraced by some of Brexit’s most outspoken leaders. In June, pundits briefly considered the possibility that Trump’s rise was part of a broader international trend and that the Brexit vote might foretell Trump’s electoral success in November. The pundits soon moved on, but perhaps the voters did not. After the election, some commentators returned to this proposition, allowing that it was possible that “Trump’s win is part of a global phenomenon of populist and nationalistic policies and leaders that have caught fire with voters worried about the ongoing threats of international terrorism, increased immigration and economic inequality.”60
Law and Order
Background noise throughout the 2016 campaign included a sharp rise in the homicide rate nationally, accompanied by violence connected with the radical Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Examples of this breakdown of order and respect for police were seen in the assassination of five Dallas police officers in July and in the swing state of North Carolina in early September, when Charlotte poli
ce shot black motorist Keith Scott and BLM responded with protests and riots despite the fact that Scott was proven to be armed and resisting arrest.61 Throughout the campaign, Trump made a point of praising police and was endorsed by a number of important law enforcement organizations, including the Fraternal Order of Police and the National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council, the union for ICE employees.62 Like Obama, Clinton praised BLM, incorporating the group into the Democratic national convention. A “silent majority” backing the police may have been swayed into Trump’s corner; Gallup reported at the end of October that Americans’ respect for the police had surged 12 percentage points since 2015 and was near record highs.63
Obama Weakness
Starting with the 2009 worldwide “apology tour,” as critics dubbed it, Barack Obama made a deliberate policy of reducing the U.S. footprint abroad. For the remainder of his presidency, many Americans bemoaned what they saw as weakness exuded by the president, as in 2013 when he promised military action against Syria if its dictatorship used chemical weapons in the ongoing Syrian civil war and then backed off of enforcing the “red line” when it was crossed. The 2016 campaign months saw continued examples, such as U.S. ransom payments made to Iran and an episode in China in which President Obama was forced to exit from the rear of Air Force One in violation of diplomatic protocol, a breach the Chinese themselves would never have accepted. In separate incidents in the fall of 2016, the governments of Turkey, Russia, and the Philippines showed blatant disrespect to Obama with no visible consequences.64 A seemingly unending series of Islamist terror attacks also coincided with the presidential campaign, including Paris (November 2015); San Bernardino (December 2015); Brussels (March 2016); Orlando (June 2016); Istanbul (June 2016); Nice (July 2016); Wurzburg, Germany (July 2016); Gaziantep, Turkey (August 2016); New York City (September 2016); and St. Cloud, Minnesota (September 2016). The nuclear deal with Iran, consummated under Secretary of State John Kerry but endorsed by Hillary Clinton, was another symbol of weakness, with opponents in the public outnumbering supporters by a 2–1 margin.65 In this context, Trump’s appearance of strength appealed to many, and it may have been his single most attractive quality to voters (though others feared that he promised too much strength).66
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