The real story of 2016

What exactly, then, is the “right” story for how Trump won the election? I obviously have a detailed perspective on this — but in a macroscopic view, the following elements seem essential:

First, the background conditions were pretty good for Trump. Clinton was trying to win a third consecutive term for her party, replacing a fairly popular predecessor in President Obama, but she was doing that amid a mediocre economy and at a time of high partisanship. Various “fundamentals” models put together by political scientists and economists considered a matchup between a “generic” Republican and a “generic” Democrat (say, between Marco Rubio and Joe Biden) to be roughly a toss-up under these circumstances, or perhaps to slightly favor the GOP. While these models have significant limitations, they argue against the widespread presumption that the election was Clinton’s to lose.

Second, demographics gave Trump a big advantage in the Electoral College. Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1 percentage points, similar to George W. Bush’s margin of victory over John Kerry in 2004, after which Bush claimed to have earned a mandate. But she lost in the biggest popular vote-versus-Electoral College discrepancy since 1876. Although Trump has protested otherwise, this discrepancy does not appear to have been mainly the result of tactical choices made by the campaigns. Instead it reflected demographics: White voters without college degrees, by far Trump’s strongest demographic group, were disproportionately concentrated in swing states, while Clinton’s coalition of minorities and college-educated whites (but with declining turnout among black voters) produced huge gains for her in states such as California and Texas without winning her any additional electoral votes.

Third, voter preferences varied substantially based on news events, and the news cycle ended on a downturn for Clinton. As compared with recent presidential elections, there were a much higher number of undecided and third-party voters in 2016, probably because of the record-setting unpopularity of both Clinton and Trump. As a result, public opinion was sensitive to news coverage and events such as debates, with Clinton holding a national polling lead of as much as 6 to 8 percentage points over Trump in most of June, August and October, but Trump within striking distance in most of July, September and (crucially) November. Late-deciding voters broke strongly toward Trump in the final two weeks of the campaign, amid a news cycle dominated by discussion of the Comey letter and the Wikileaks hack of Democratic emails.