It's Still About Class and Geography

The post-mortem on the 2016 presidential election is still in process, but there are already some clear narratives: Clinton lost because of lower Democratic voter turnout, especially among minorities; Trump mobilized the white working class and was able to breach the ‘blue wall’ in the Midwest; 2016 realigned the electorate along regional lines. Plus, nearly all the polls and data analytics failed to predict the outcome. All of those conclusions are true to a certain extent. But the bigger reality according to my own analysis is that the 2016 election follows the same basic contours of class and location—the same divides of knowledge and density—of the last several election cycles.

Writing here in October, I used polling data to show that “despite Trump” who I called one of “the strangest” candidates in American presidential history, the 2016 election “conforms to America’s underlying basic economic, demographic, and political divides.”