1.5 "What Happened (with the voters)

1. How popular were Clinton and Trump compared to past candidates for president?

             Trump and Clinton were the No. 1 and No. 2 least-popular nominees on record, and it wasn’t particularly close. Trump and Clinton were in a slug-fest where the pivotal voters disliked both of them and — in many cases — ended up voting for neither.

2. How much did minor party voting increase from 2012 to 2016?

            The Libertarian party candidate's support tripled to 3.27% of the the vote and the Green Party candidate tripled her support too to 1.06% of the vote.

3. How did Clinton's negative attacks on Trump, combined with minor party candidates, end up hurting her?

            Exit polls indicate that a majority of voters were persuaded by Clinton’s arguments that Trump was unqualified and temperamentally unsuited for the presidency, but a decent swathe of voters who agreed with her about that voted third party rather than for Trump’s opponent — ultimately denying Clinton the victory.

4. How did Trump compare to Romney in 2012 among white voters?

Romney got 59 percent of the white vote in 2012 and still lost the election, leading many analysts to reach the conclusion that America had become too diverse for Republicans to win without making major inroads among voters of color. Trump, however, won the election with just 58 percent of the white vote thanks to Clinton slipping to 37 percent down from Obama’s 39 percent with the excess going third party.

5. How did Clinton compare to Obama in 2012 among the different groups of nonwhite voters?

            While Clinton did worse with voters overall than Barack Obama, she did gain 1 percentage point more of the white women’s vote — rising from 42 percent to 43 percent. Most white women, however, preferred Trump. And though Trump did no better with white men than Romney had, Clinton did considerably worse than Obama. Though Clinton carried all nonwhite groups she seems to have done decidedly worse here than Obama had.

6. How did college educated voters vote in 2016?

            Clinton carried college graduates 52 to 42 while losing non-graduates 44 to 51. Clinton — a white professional woman — did very well with white women who had college degrees. Among the 20 percent of voters who fit that description, she won a solid 51-44 victory even while losing both white male college graduates (39-53) and white working-class women (34-61).

7. What was unusual about the choices of both major parties in the 2016 election?

            Both parties simultaneously took the unusual step of nominating someone who was already well-known and unpopular by the end of the primary process.

8. What's wrong with attributing Trump's victory to racism?

            Trump did not discover that the white population was deep down yearning for crude racism. But Trump got a slightly smaller share of the white vote than the more normal Mitt Romney. Conversely, whatever black and Latino voters hadn’t already abandoned the GOP during the Obama era weren’t driven away by Trump, who did no worse with these groups than Romney had.

9. What's wrong with assumptions that Clinton was wildly popular among women?

            While Clinton managed to rally educated white women to her side in a way that previous Democrats had not, she was not broadly more appealing to women than previous Democrats. And, in fact, she did worse with non-college white women than a black man did four years earlier