The morning after the election, Van Jones offered his thoughts on the outcome:
"This was a whitelash against a changing country. It was whitelash against a black president in part. And that's the part where the pain comes."
Jones spoke honestly, from a place of sincere emotion, and I have a great deal of respect for that. His thesis certainly appealed to a lot of people. Given that Trump began his campaign with racist rhetoric and never really stopped, it also makes quite a bit of sense on the surface. There’s one problem: The numbers say it doesn’t hold water.
Yes, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a margin now approaching two million. That’s very important to remember going forward, but not especially helpful in terms of exploring why Trump did as well as he did. Let’s also leave aside the impact of James Comey’s completely inappropriate actions. Even if, as it appears true, Comey was enough to swing the election to Trump because of the tight margins in three key states, it doesn’t change what we can learn from the election in terms of race, income, and education.
From the national exit polls, here are the numbers that disprove the whitelash thesis: Trump did a slim 1 percent better among whites than Mitt Romney did four years ago. Were some whites drawn to Trump’s side by racism? Absolutely. But he appears to have lost pretty much an equal amount among those whites disgusted by it.
Furthermore, Trump improved over Romney by much more among every non-white ethno-racial group large enough to measure. He improved by 7% among blacks, 8% among Latinos, and 11% among Asian voters. Along similar lines, an exit poll conducted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) found that Trump received 13% of the Muslim vote. That doesn't sound like much, but it represents almost twice the percentage Romney won. No whitelash there.
Overall, turnout looks like it will come in at just about the same percentage of the eligible voter population as we saw in 2012. However, as Northern Ohio University political science professor Robert Alexander explained, “You saw turnout spike in more rural counties. If you take a look at a lot of the larger cities you did see depressed turnout there. It certainly was more consequential for Hillary Clinton than it was for Trump.”
Despite the more heavily rural voting population compared to 2012, Trump didn’t do significantly better than did Romney among whites overall. Of course, given that whites are about two-thirds of the voting population, gaining 1 percent among whites is important, but the gain of about 8 percent overall in the one-third of the voter population that is not white adds up to more votes.
Yes, these exit polls could be off by a couple of percent, but remember, the national polls weren’t off by that much. For example, Five-Thirty-Eight predicted a popular vote win for Hillary of 3.6 percent, and it looks like she’ll win the popular vote by close to 2 percent. That’s actually a better performance than the average polling miss of 2.0 percent in the twelve presidential elections before this one. In 2012, for example, the national polls were off by 2.7 percent, but no one noticed because all that happened was that Obama won by more than expected. So, if you reject exit polls this time, you have to always reject them, which would mean we’d know very little about demographics and voting. Either way, they’d have to have been off by a ton for this election to represent a whitelash.
On education, Trump gained significantly over Romney among all voters without a college degree, and Clinton gained significantly over Obama among voters with a degree. Looking at race and education combined tells the fuller story. Trump improved over Romney by 14 points among whites without a college degree, while Hillary improved over Obama in 2012 by 10 points among whites with a degree. Overall, Trump did 16-17 points better among whites without a degree than those with one. Among voters of color, however, non-degree holders were actually a bit stronger for Hillary than degree holders. So education mattered, but much more so among whites.
How about income? Trump improved over Romney by the biggest amount among the people helped most by Democratic policies, i.e., the poorest Americans: by 16 percent among those earning less than $30,000, and by 6 percent among those making $30,000-$50,000. Clinton, on the other hand, improved over Obama by 2 percent among those making $50-100K, and by 9 percent among those making $100-200K. This is clear and striking evidence that the election results were determined much more by class than by race for white voters taken as a whole.
Finally, although my focus is whether the whitelash theory was accurate, let’s talk about gender as well. Trump ran five points stronger among men than Romney did, whereas Clinton improved over Obama’s performance among women four years ago by only one point. Such a result, despite women having the opportunity to vote for the first woman president—not to mention against an opponent who bragged that he could get away with committing sexual assault because he’s a “star”—has to count as a colossal disappointment.
One question we need to ask coming out of this election is this: Why did Hillary Clinton do so much better than Obama did in 2012 as we move up the income ladder, and so much worse as we move down the income and, among whites, the education ladder? If it was just that Hillary was a weaker candidate than Obama, or this just wasn’t a Democratic year, she’d likely have done weaker than he did across the board. Another question is why she did worse among non-whites than did Obama, especially among Latinos, given Trump’s bigoted language about Mexican immigrants?
There are no definitive answers, no way to prove any hypothesis. But here’s where I’ll start. Hillary Clinton talked much more about hate and much less about economic issues than did Barack Obama four years ago. Yes, that was in large part a response to Donald Trump, and it was also a necessary response to the fundamentally important issues raised by movements like Black Lives Matter. Nevertheless, her campaign chose to do so rather than, say, clearly condemn Trump’s racism and then pivot more strongly to the economy and argue that that was where voters should focus. As Ezra Klein wrote:
Obama’s campaigns were studiously nonracial. In 2012, he and Mitt Romney both primed the electorate to think about businessmen versus workers, capital versus labor, makers versus takers. Obama won that election in part by making it about economic identity.
Obama did better than Hillary among non-whites as well as whites, and did it by focusing to a much greater degree than she did on economic issues. Furthermore, he did so at a time when workers were worse off than they are now, thanks to the drop in the unemployment rate and the stronger growth in wages over the past two years.
When it comes to black voters, no white candidate was likely to match Obama’s turnout, either in terms of percentage or total numbers. That she dropped off by more among Latino and Asian voters suggests a deeper failure of her message to resonate across all racial groups—not just the white working class. The data cited above—aided by an Electoral College structure that overweighs rural votes that are disproportionately white—also indicate that America’s demographic changes are not enough, on their own, to guarantee that we elect a Democratic president.
Especially in the final days of the campaign—including a two-minute ad that aired in primetime the night before the election—Clinton’s message centered on love trumping hate. That ad included a brief mention of economic inequality toward the end, but framed the election first and foremost as a choice between an America that is “dark and divisive, or hopeful and inclusive.” That message inspired me, but I’m privileged enough to not have to worry about my next paycheck or paying this month’s rent.
Hillary undoubtedly thought that building her campaign around a message that celebrated diversity and rejected her opponent’s bigotry was both the morally and strategically right thing to do, that it would deliver her the presidency by turning out enough of the people most likely to be scared and/or repelled by Trump’s racism—people who are and who must remain central to our progressive coalition. It did not.
Lynn Vavreck at the New York Times examined the television ads run by both candidates (note that Clinton ran three times as many TV spots as did Trump):
More than three-quarters of the appeals in Mrs. Clinton’s advertisements (and nearly half of Mr. Trump’s) were about traits, characteristics or dispositions. Only 9 percent of Mrs. Clinton’s appeals in her ads were about jobs or the economy. By contrast, 34 percent of Mr. Trump’s appeals focused on the economy, jobs, taxes and trade.
Maybe a measure or two less ‘love trumps hate’ and a corresponding amount more ‘elect me and I’ll protect Medicare and Medicaid—which Trump and Republicans in Washington, DC want to destroy— and I’ll expand Social Security, plus make sure Donald Trump can’t take away health care from the 20 million Americans who got it thanks to President Obama—the guy whose policies, by the way, brought unemployment down from 10% to under 5% after Republican policies caused the worst economic crash since the Depression’ might just have been enough to put her over the top.
Let’s remember that not just whites but millions of Americans of color benefit from those Democratic programs and policies. Such a message could’ve helped bring more of them out to vote, in addition to the white working class voters everyone’s talking about.
Since she was there when it was coined, this Democratic nominee in particular should have remembered the guiding principle every recent successful Democratic campaign for president has followed: it’s the economy, stupid. Focusing more on economic issues would likely have gotten her elected president. That would’ve been the best way to protect the rights of the people most threatened by the hate Trump has spewed.
Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity (Potomac Books).
