How Unhappiness Helped Elect Trump

Like more than half of American voters, I woke up severely depressed the morning after Election Day 2016. As my wife and I wiped the tears from our eyes, she turned to me and said: “As terrible as we feel, can you imagine what the backlash would have been if the election had gone the other way?” Her comments reflect a basic reality: For large numbers of Americans, happiness and well-being increasingly turn on who is elected.

That intuition is confirmed in newly released polling data from Gallup that focuses on the link between partisan voting and well-being. Gallup’s analysis is part of a study done in partnership with researchers at the Yale School of Medicine and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, and originally published in the journal PLOS ONE. The study finds that the places that swung most for Trump were those whose residents had the lowest levels of improvement in their happiness or life satisfaction under the Obama administration, whereas the places that swung most for Hilary Clinton saw among the highest levels of improvement in well-being during that same time.