2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: How were we supposed to reach 'Rural Whites' and still maintain our base? [View all]Humanist_Activist
(7,670 posts)If there were so many voters who switched from Obama to Trump, and the cognitive dissonance they displayed would have been staggering, there weren't a lot of them, and most likely not as many as the margin of loss we are talking about. And again, in many of those rural counties, how many young people, mostly Dems, left to go elsewhere such as California or other blue states and/or cities for better jobs in the past 4-8 years? That can also make a difference. If the demographics in those counties shift to become older due to this, that would also help explain a Trump win, he got a lot of the angry white boomer vote, their kids, not so much.
Look at this data:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Wisconsin,_2012#Results
http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/wisconsin
She got about 200k less votes than Obama in 2012, and Trump didn't gain any new voters either. It was people staying home or population loss.