Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:31 pm
A graph of the popular vote totals in each party from the last three presidential elections illustrates that the biggest reason why Hillary Clinton lost is that Democrats did not come out and vote for her.
Here’s the graph:
Turns out it's not a Trump insurgency, but a Clinton collapse. A graph that cuts straight through today's punditry … pic.twitter.com/x41cyyy2XI
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— Jonathan Webber (@jonathanwebber) November 9, 2016
The third party candidates tipped the election to Donald Trump in key states because Democratic voters did not show up to vote.
In the Politicus Presidential Projection Maps, I noted that the only way for Donald Trump to win the White House was if Democrats didn’t vote, and that is exactly what happened. It wasn’t the polling being wrong, or some great late Trump surge if you look at the graph above Trump got roughly 5 million fewer votes than Mitt Romney. Hillary Clinton lost because she got roughly 10 million fewer votes than Obama in 2012 and 15 million fewer votes than Obama’s 2008.
Donald Trump is the weakest and least popular president-elect in history. Unless Trump experiences a burst of popularity as president, Democrats should have a great chance of taking back the White House in 2020. Republicans didn’t run a great campaign. Trump should be very beatable. Democrats voted in the 2016 presidential election like it was a midterm congressional election, and got their heads handed to them.
If Democrats want to successfully rebuild their party, the first thing that they need to figure out is how to get their voters out to vote, because what they did in 2016 didn’t work.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
