The All-Time Election Shock

In what can only be described as the greatest electoral surprise in modern history, the populist outsider Donald Trump overcame a clear deficit in nearly all pre-election polls to defeat the overwhelming favorite, Hillary Clinton, in this week’s presidential election in the United States.  While the final results are still to be determined, it is clear that Trump won a surprisingly large majority in the Electoral College, potentially winning more than 300 of the 538 votes in that body.  Moreover, Trump currently leads in the popular vote over Clinton, although a large share of the vote in Democrat-dominated California has yet to be counted.  This outcome was predicted by only a small handful of polling organizations, as the vast majority of pollsters and election experts predicted a solid Clinton victory.  As a result, the United States and the rest of the world are scrambling to contemplate what the next four years of a Trump Administration will mean for the US and the world.  

Heading into this week’s election, the general consensus was that Donald Trump would need to win not only the swing states of Florida, Ohio and North Carolina, but also nearly all traditionally-Republican states, while at the same time, winning at least one larger state that normally voted Democratic.  With regards to the larger swing states, Trump won Florida by a margin of 1.4%, North Carolina by the surprisingly large margin of 3.8%, and Ohio by a whopping 8.6%.  As far as traditionally Republican states are concerned, Trump won clear victories in states such as Arizona and Georgia, both of which were targets of the Clinton campaign.  Finally, and most importantly, Trump backed up his claim that he could be very competitive in Rust Belt states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, despite the fact that polls showed him trailed Clinton by a noticeable margin in these states throughout the election campaign.  In the end, not only did Clinton fail to win the election (let alone score a landslide victory), but it appears that she won less votes in the Electoral College than any Democratic presidential candidate since Michael Dukakis in 1988.

While the final exit poll numbers have yet to be released, some clear trends have emerged that indicate why Donald Trump was able to achieve this monumental victory.  First, it appears that voter turnout in rural areas far exceeded the levels recorded in previous elections, as Trump was able to generate significant enthusiasm for his campaign in rural areas of the Midwestern and southern United States, the two regions where he outperformed the polls by a wide margin.  Second, Trump did not lose as much of the female vote as had been expected in the wake of the numerous sex scandals that he faced in the final months of the campaign, as he appears to have won at least 40% of the female vote.  Third, Clinton did not dominate the minority vote to the extent that her campaign had hoped for, particularly among Hispanic voters, as nearly 30% of Hispanics who voted in the election opted for Trump.  Finally, Clinton appears to have struggled to raise levels of enthusiasm among younger voters, the same problem that dogged her campaign for the Democratic Party’s nomination when Bernie Sanders was able to generate high levels of enthusiasm among younger voters.

The election of Donald Trump to the most powerful position in the world is a shocking conclusion to what has been the most anticipated election in modern history.  Even Trump and his supporters were talking down their chances of winning in the final days of the campaign, as it appeared that they were about to fall short of victory.  Now, Trump and his team must prepare for the task of governing a divided country of 325 million people.  On one hand, he will have a largely friendly Republican Congress to work with in the wake of the Republicans’ better-than-expected performance in the Senate and House of Representative elections this week.  On the other hand, history shows us that candidates that run on a populist platform that includes promises of drastically overhauling their country’s political system often struggle to fulfill such promises, costing them much of their support.  Nevertheless, Donald Trump and the Republican Party must be in a state of euphoria as it had been expected that the party would emerge from these elections defeated and divided.  Instead, it is the Democratic Party that must pick up the pieces from this devastating defeat as it has lost not only the presidency and hopes for controlling the Congress, but also the political initiative in the United States.