Score one for the 2012 Republican autopsy. Notwithstanding last night’s “white working-class” wave,
often linked to those voters’ purported latent racism and xenophobia, the net effect of Trump’s campaign was to make substantial progress with nonwhites relative to Romney’s performance in 2012.
Early Wednesday morning, exit poll data began to circulate that showed Trump improving the GOP’s standing with both African-Americans and Latinos. Less clear was just how central a role this shift played. To see the dramatic effect, compare the
2012 and
2016 exit polls that split the result by race.
In 2012, the electorate was 72 percent white (which went 59 percent Romney / 39 percent Obama) and 28 percent nonwhite (which went 81 percent Obama / 18 percent Romney), yielding a total margin of plus 3.1 percent for Obama. In 2016, the electorate was 70 percent white (which went 58 percent Trump / 37 percent Clinton) and 30 percent nonwhite (which went 73 percent Clinton / 21 percent Trump), yielding a total margin of plus 0.9 percent for Clinton.
The overall result is a 2.3 percent shift toward the Republicans. (Totals won’t sum due to rounding, and they won’t match final vote counts, because these are the exit polls.) We can allocate that shift across three changes: the shift in the mix of white and nonwhite voters; the shift in preferences among white voters; and the shift in preferences among nonwhite voters.
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The Trump campaign didn’t produce a whiter electorate. In fact, if the only change in 2016 had been in white versus nonwhite turnout, Clinton would have increased Obama’s margin by 1.7 percent. Trump didn’t dominate the white electorate—his narrow gains there only sliced 0.7 percent off the Democrat advantage. The real gain came with minorities, cutting in by 3.2 percent, leaving the popular vote within one percentage point and helping tip the Electoral College. This is even simpler to see in isolation: whether nonwhite turnout was 28 percent or 30 percent, Trump’s 11 point net gain within that group was worth more than three points to the final margin.
A better case exists that Trump’s more dramatic improvement in Midwest swing states, which ultimately gave him the Electoral College and the presidency, relied on his performance with white voters. But even there, the story is complicated. Look at Pennsylvania (
2012,
2016). The electorate did shift from 78 percent white to 81 percent white. But Trump actually won a
lower share of that population (56 percent) than Romney did four years earlier (57 percent). A two-point drop in Clinton’s support relative to Obama left Trump with a net gain of 1 percent. He logged a net gain of 2 percent with African Americans. He logged a net gain of 10 percent with Latinos. Further, while white turnout appears to have increased about 10 percent in the state, a 20 percent
decrease in African-American turnout accounted for two-thirds of the share-shift toward a whiter electorate.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/examining-scorecard-14841.html
