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Sunday, November 13, 2016

A quick look at the US election

I have read a lot of garbage about what the 2016 US election means and signifies. In this post I want to look at what the raw numbers suggest.

While the counting has not finished, it looks like five and possibly six states will flip from Democratic in the 2012 presidential election to Republican in 2016: Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa. The states where the count is still in doubt are New Hampshire and Michigan.

In this first chart, I have plotted the likely state winners according to American sensibilities: the states which Trump/Republicans won are red and the states Clinton/Democrats won are blue. The states that have flipped from one side of politics to the other are in a darker hue.


The biggest swings to the Republicans (on a two-party basis) were in the industrial upper mid-west. This suggests the economy (and the challenges of managing economic change in those states previously heavily dependent on the industrial/manufacturing sector) may have driven the Trump win. There is an irony here: Bill Clinton won the 1992 with the catch-phrase: it's the economy stupid.


The bigger swings by state follow. In this table, a positive swing is to the Republicans, a negative swing is to the Democrats. In Utah, the measurement of a two-party swing was compounded by Evan McMullin an independent and former Republican, who took votes from Trump.

Hawaii                10.402887  
Indiana                8.836585  
Iowa                  15.197928  
Maine                 12.587298  
Michigan               9.742464  
Missouri               9.761118  
North Dakota          16.080305  
Ohio                  11.492718  
Rhode Island          12.140835  
South Dakota          11.772774  
Utah                 -29.320763  
Vermont                9.187492  
West Virginia         15.004805  
Wisconsin              7.751092   

If the economy was the distal cause, the immediate factor I find most compelling in explaining the election outcome was the decline in raw Democratic votes in 2016. Put simply, Clinton was not as attractive to voters in 2016 as Obama was in 2008 or 2012. This outcome is driven less by a decline in turn-out and more by an increase in votes for the Other parties. In the US first-past-the-post voting system, these third party votes are effectively wasted. Of note: Maine voted on a referendum to introduce ranked-choice voting for the next Presidential election. (Ranked-choice voting is what we have in Australia).

Before looking at voting patterns by party, let's look at the change in overall turnout between 2012 and 2016. At this point in the count some 128.5 million votes have been counted. In 2012, there were 129.2 million votes counted in total. I expect the final 2016 vote count will exceed the 2012 count.


In the next three charts, we will look at percentage changes in the raw vote numbers by state for Republicans, Democrats and Others. The most significant thing to notice here is the dramatic increase in votes for other parties. But also of note, the decline of the Democratic vote in many states, compared with the neutral or slight growth in Republican votes.




The table of percentage changes in vote count, by state, as set out in the above charts follows.

                      Delta_turnout  Delta_Rep  Delta_Dem  Delta_Other
State                                                                    
Alabama                    1.910248   4.658399  -8.796324   224.990096   
Alaska                   -15.597930 -20.805096 -24.162590   129.167615   
Arizona                   -5.535995 -12.783973  -3.453852   137.245401   
Arkansas                   5.213714   5.252229  -4.000162   137.342120   
California               -27.072075 -34.879166 -25.381954    40.718861   
Colorado                   3.527116  -1.778285  -3.800161   255.222752   
Connecticut                1.609885   2.175307  -4.469738   272.546747   
Delaware                   6.671321  11.855527  -2.886835   256.244661   
District of Columbia      -2.549325 -45.966045  -2.563747   172.896669   
Florida                   10.707080  10.657011   5.897012   237.066350   
Georgia                    4.378169   0.306924   5.403909   123.319726   
Hawaii                    -6.232617   1.119696 -17.158528   344.105923   
Idaho                      5.401512  -2.528325 -10.528839   297.344211   
Illinois                   3.193796  -0.797905  -1.391417   234.500124   
Indiana                    3.674430   9.364862 -10.209785   145.281806   
Iowa                      -1.581868   8.996916 -20.956447   281.246769   
Kansas                    -0.897513  -4.899907  -5.710285   174.477800   
Kentucky                   6.968557  10.646897  -7.438656   190.809197   
Louisiana                  1.711629   2.261031  -3.641763   114.950095   
Maine                      3.292296  13.793469 -12.165530   163.210532   
Maryland                  -5.847539  -8.262225  -9.363087   137.265248   
Massachusetts              2.012901  -8.867863   2.237895   219.212456   
Michigan                   0.840977   7.689755 -11.688592   270.282940   
Minnesota                  0.349763   0.288436 -11.490609   262.405051   
Mississippi               -9.565847  -4.637944 -17.887766    89.881403   
Missouri                   0.464235   6.969118 -13.801892   136.501140   
Montana                    0.116206   2.310695 -13.564276   147.788272   
Nebraska                   1.259726   2.155078  -9.568626   166.380411   
Nevada                    10.648348  10.300992   1.200663   269.996997   
New Hampshire              2.934855   4.816955  -5.699736   226.555295   
New Jersey                 3.286754   5.435946  -3.089847   230.071427   
New Mexico                 1.093579  -5.565118  -7.912408   184.228106   
New York                   0.445977   6.002740  -7.498578   207.735610   
North Carolina             4.071784   3.058278  -0.714748   229.003640   
North Dakota               6.415458  14.864772 -25.075504   249.341081   
Ohio                      -4.471185   4.153658 -18.060840   147.541950   
Oklahoma                   8.848788   6.485962  -5.224249          inf   
Oregon                     7.923902   0.593894  -0.472443   219.613974   
Pennsylvania               4.822087   9.001266  -4.489789   200.825561   
Rhode Island               3.164675  14.132592 -10.646210   236.409250   
South Carolina             6.294428   6.970219  -1.867564   245.386703   
South Dakota               1.712959   8.114999 -19.027296   204.971834   
Tennessee                  0.689381   3.938646  -9.561272   135.283243   
Texas                     11.603998   2.445314  16.918713   211.061714   
Utah                     -11.301832 -43.420065  -0.330404   727.731299   
Vermont                    5.270808   2.873848 -10.372969   459.377125   
Virginia                   2.607012  -3.299823  -0.501009   283.482135   
Washington               -13.282854 -21.421277 -16.438627   147.327113   
West Virginia              5.995962  15.750081 -21.770352   162.957703   
Wisconsin                 -2.970212  -0.066621 -14.684775   374.432034   
Wyoming                    2.702149   2.001029 -19.227550   188.709860   

This table tells a fairly consistent story of votes leaking from Democrats to the Other parties.This raises the interesting conjecture on whether Bernie Sanders would have done a better job at holding the flow of votes. My suspicion (without supporting evidence) is that he would have held more votes lost to others on the left, but may have lost more votes to Trump on the right.

Some have contested that Trump doesn't have a real mandate because he did not get more than 50 per cent of the vote. Arguments can be made about the fairness of the US voting system: particularly as it looks like Clinton won more of the popular vote but not the electoral college vote. However, these arguments are not resolvable. Fairness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. The American founders decided to weight their voting system to those who are engaged (through voluntary voting) and to those who live in the less populous states (by giving all states two electoral college votes, and then one or more votes weighted to the population of the state). They also decided on a first-past-the-post system for counting votes. While compelling arguments can be made for and against each of these design elements, ultimately the Presidential election was conducted under the rules accepted by the American people.

Finally, a quick acknowledgement: I sourced the data for this analysis from http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/.

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