population down into 32 demographic groups made up of four racial categories-white, black, Latino, and Asian and other race four age groups-18–29, 30–44, 45–64, and 65+ and two education groups- people with a four-year college degree and people without a four-year college degree. election surveys in existence, and we feel confident that our results are as close to reality as can be gathered from survey and modeling research.įor our analysis, we broke the U.S. The sources we’ve employed in this project are considered to be the top U.S. But as with any study combining data sources, our results are dependent upon the quality of the publicly available surveys themselves. We believe our methodology gives us a fuller and more complete understanding of voter trends. (see the Appendix for full description of our methodology)Īs will be seen, our results on vote composition, turnout, and support rates are frequently quite different than the most commonly cited data on elections: the national exit poll conducted by the major media outlets on Election Day. To overcome this, we created a new method for combining these data in ways that fit with known outcomes. This is not due to any one source of information being particularly biased rather, each particular source has points of weakness. Furthermore, if we combine those data with the best data we have on vote choice, we get election results that do not line up with reality. We used this approach to help address what we believe are systematic problems with some of the most widely available and most frequently cited pieces of data about elections-mainly, that some of the most reliable sources of data we have on demographics do not fit well together with the best data we have on turnout rates, leading to results that vary from the actual levels of turnout seen on Election Day. For this project, we developed original turnout and support estimates by combining a multitude of publicly available data sources including the American Communities Survey (ACS), the November supplement of the Current Population Survey (CPS), the American National Election Study (ANES), the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey (CCES), our own post-election polling, and voter files from several states. The most vexing issue for electoral analysts exploring these voting trends is determining which, if any, of the existing data sources provide the best and most reliable information on vote composition, turnout, and support rates. For a thorough analysis of what determined the vote, the recently established Democracy Fund Voter Study Group produced an excellent series of papers, including one by two of the authors of this report, examining the Trump and Clinton coalitions and the issues and social beliefs that shaped people’s voting decisions in 2016. The second category focuses primarily on public opinion data and other qualitative research methodologies to see how views of the candidates, campaign dynamics, and specific attitudes and policy beliefs among voters shaped the overall vote choice.įor the purposes of this paper we are examining the former category, with a particular focus on vote composition, turnout, and party support rates by demographic group, to get a more precise read on what actually happened in the vote itself in 2016. In the first category are items including vote composition, or the percentage of various demographic groups as a share of all voters turnout rates, or the percentage of eligible voters in various demographic groups that actually voted support rates, or support for the Democratic or Republican presidential candidate by demographic group and shifts, or increases or decreases in vote composition, turnout, and support rates compared to past elections for various demographic groups. In the immediate aftermath of the election, and over the ensuing months, electoral analysts have tried to assess two main components of how the 2016 election unfolded: the breakdown of the vote itself and the motivations for these vote choices. Although Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton won a plurality of the national popular vote-48.2 percent-with a nearly 3-million vote margin, Donald Trump carried 30 states and won the Electoral College vote by a 304-to-227 margin. The unprecedented and largely unanticipated election of Republican candidate Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2016 set off intense debates about how his victory was achieved and which factors mattered most in determining the outcome.
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