On Tuesday night, I sat on my couch in complete shock. What happened? Almost everyone I know declared support for Hillary Clinton yet here I was contemplating the people’s choice and president-elect Donald Trump. I know I probably live in a liberal university bubble, but even the New York Times predicted an ~85% chance of Hillary Clinton as our female president. But in a room of eleven people where only three had even voted, it started to become clear that many things went wrong this election cycle.
So, what happened? Well, a lot of things:
1. Nearly all of the swing states, Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Florida switched their allegiance from the Democratic party in 2012 to the Republican candidate in 2016. Wisconsin, Michigan and Philadelphia all have many members of the white working class, a population that Trump won in this election cycle probably through his anti-immigration policies.
2. Hillary Clinton lost Pennsylvania by over 68,000 votes.
3. There was a decline in African-American voter turnout with Obama no longer in office and Hillary’s failure to really garner their support.
4. Trump won the white vote by a record margin (58% to Hillary’s 37%). He also overwhelmingly won the vote of whites without college degrees by nearly 35%.
5. Despite Trump’s calling them “fat pigs”, “piece[s] of ass”, and threatening to “grab her by the pussy”, there was no surge in the female vote. Hillary Clinton only had 12% more female voters than Trump, which isn’t very much considering she is a woman herself and Obama had an 11% lead in female voters over Romney in the 2012 election.
6. Trump’s threats to build a wall between the United States and Mexico failed to increase Latino-American voter turnout. In fact, Trump performed even better among Hispanics than Romney did in 2012.
7. This was a change election. Regardless of him being a good or bad change, he was the change candidate. Hillary’s potential as the first female president just wasn’t enough compared to Trump’s seemingly unscripted behavior and radically conservative platform. Many voters thought Hillary was going to be a mere continuation of Obama’s administration.
8. People are sick of being political correct. Trump, of course, shows the alternative to being mindful of stereotyping and prejudice by making condescending remarks about women, referring to Mexicans as criminals, drug lords and rapists and generalizing terrorism to all Muslims. Instead of being enraged by these generalizations, many Americans viewed Trump as a vote against a perceived oversensitivity to gender and racial boundaries. For some, not all Trump supporters, a vote for Trump was also a vote for a whiter, more racist and sexist America–a return to old anglo values.
9. Hillary Clinton’s image was irreversibly tarnished by her e-mail scandal and the Benghazi incident. Just days before the election when FBI director James Comey reopened the e-mail investigation, the inability for American citizens to trust Clinton was brought to light again and probably decreased her favorability as a candidate. Nearly two thirds of Americans insisted that Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server bothered them. Many people who voted Republican felt they weren’t voting for Trump, but against Hillary.
10. People were dissatisfied with their options and viewed this election as “the lesser of two evils”. As a result, many people either a) didn’t vote at all, b) voted for a third party candidate or c) voted for Harambe (yes some people actually did this).
11. Neither candidate succeeded in gaining the overwhelming support of young voters. Whereas only 3% of voters 18-29 voted for a third party candidate in 2012, 8% did in 2016. Young voters in favor of Hillary Clinton tended to think that this election would be a landslide so their votes wouldn’t change the outcome and therefore didn’t register nor request an absentee ballot.
12. Some people just aren’t ready for a woman president. As sexist as it is, for many it is still the unfortunate truth.