2016 United States presidential election

The 2016 United States presidential election took place on November 8, 2016, pitting Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton against Republican Party candidate Donald Trump. After an extremely negative, mud-slinging campaign from both sides, Trump won an upset victory with 306 votes in the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote by almost three million. By appealing to dissatisfied voters in the Rust Belt who were being hammered by rising joblessness and poverty, Trump narrowly won the longtime Democratic stronghold states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan while handily winning the longtime swing states of Iowa and Ohio. Clinton, on the other hand, lost ground in rural areas compared to her predecessor Barack Obama in 2012 while turnout for Democrats significantly dropped in critical urban areas. Trump's victory was the fifth time a candidate lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College. This election was also the first in recorded history where both major candidates had negative popularity in the polls.
From start to finish, 2016 was a chaotic election. Trump's successful attempt to seize control of the Republican Party as a populist outsider candidate caused uproar from within the party and a prolonged battle in the primary season. Over on the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders, a progressive senator from Vermont, staged his own populist outsider attempt to win the party nomination before being stonewalled by the Democratic establishment. 
As accusations of a rigged primary mounted, Hillary also faced an American public that increasingly viewed her as being untrustworthy and corrupt. Her campaign dismissed a scandal concerning Clinton's mishandling of classified emails, while many voters viewed it as evidence that Clinton saw herself as a political elite to whom rules did not apply. Clinton's campaign was also dragged down by her own self-entitlement, her lack of charisma and authenticity, and her failure to break away from the popular perception that she was a status quo establishment candidate during a time where much of the country was struggling with decreasing living standards and a sluggish economy. The last nail in the coffin for Clinton's presidential aspirations came in the form of an FBI announcement 11 days before the election that it had discovered "pertinent" information in the ongoing investigation into Clinton's emails—just in time for early voting to start. The investigation wrapped up with no evidence of wrongdoing by Clinton, but only two days after the election took place. Hillary has been pissed about this ever since, by the way.
Trump, meanwhile, ran a racist and xenophobic campaign based on building a wall across the southern border and somehow getting Mexico to pay for it, banning Muslim refugees and immigrants from entering the United States, opposition to globalization and free trade, and vague condemnations of "political correctness." His campaign—along with the entire Republican Party—was thrown into bedlam in October after multiple audio examples surfaced of Trump crudely demeaning women and bragging about sexual assaults he had allegedly committed: "They let you do it. You can do anything. Grab 'em by the pussy." Unfortunately, this was not enough to halt Trump's momentum or prevent his victory in the election.
The atmosphere of chaos persisted during and after election night. While polls seemingly predicted that Hillary had a 90% chance to win, Trump unexpectedly overperformed the polls in many key states. During the official voting of the Electoral College in December, protests swept the nation while seven faithless electors broke away from both candidates. Clinton lost three votes to Colin Powell, one to Faith Spotted Eagle, and one to Bernie Sanders, while Trump lost one vote to John Kasich and another to Ron Paul.Which candidates did the seven "faithless" electors support? Boccagno, Julia. CBS News. DEC.21.16 For years afterwards, allegations swirled that Russia had launched a major effort to interfere in the election on behalf of Trump and that Trump's campaign directly coordinated with the Russians—these allegations were confirmed by a Senate report in 2020. 
All in all, a pretty wild election. It's really quite a shame, then, that the next two were even crazier. 
==Background==
===Voter suppression===
Lots of minorities were effectively banned from the polls. In 2013, the Roberts Court struck down a crucial part of the Voting Rights Act, which mandated the DOJ to review changes in states with a history of voter discrimination (i.e., the entire South), to make sure they don't disproportionately affect people of color (and poor whites). This freed up Republicans to prevent as many Democrats from voting as possible."New Voting Restrictions in Place for 2016 Presidential Election", Brennan Center for Justice (1/5/17 at 7:31 am). Several hundred polling places were closed in these states, disproportionately in areas with non-white residents, and many had to wait hours in line to cast a vote—if they bothered to show up at all.Berman, Ari, "There Are 868 Fewer Places to Vote in 2016 Because the Supreme Court Gutted the Voting Rights Act", The Nation (1/5/17 at 7:37 am) Voter ID laws, which disproportionately affect people who lack time to register for them (e.g., poor people), also played a role.Dayanite Ramesh, Coleman Lowndes, and John Kerr, "Strict Voter ID Laws Are The New Jim Crow Laws - Right-Wing Media Falsely Cry “Voter Fraud” To Keep Citizens From Voting", Media Matters (1/5/17 at 7:27 am) 
Not to be outdone, Governor Rick Scott (R-FL) announced they wouldn't reschedule the deadline for voter registration, even after a hurricane swept the state just days prior. A federal judge overruled him.A federal judge overruled him (1/5/17 at 7:16 am) 
==Party nominations==
===The Republicans===
The 2016 Republican presidential primaries had the greatest number of candidates running at the same time in the party's history, reflecting the discord and discontent into which the party had been thrown following Mitt Romney's decisive loss to incumbent president Barack Obama. Major contenders were extremist Texas senator Ted Cruz, disliked by his colleagues but beloved by Tea Party conservatives for being an uncooperative and unproductive obstructionist in Congress, the safe and moderate Ohio governor John Kasich, who had no chance at victory for those reasons, Florida senator Marco Rubio, also safe and well-liked and possessing no chance at victory because of those qualities, and un-charismatic former Florida governor Jeb Bush, whose only claim to fame was being the brother of the disgraced George W. Bush. A host of minor candidates dropped out before the voting started due to abysmal polls (Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, Scott Walker, etc) while others just totally faceplanted with humiliatingly small vote totals as the states started voting (Lindsey Graham, Rick Santorum, Rand Paul, etc).
The big name, of course, was Donald Trump. On 14 June 2015, Trump came down the elevator to the lobby of Trump Tower in New York City to deliver a meandering 45-minute speech in which he declared the "American dream" to be "dead" before making his iconic promise to "Make America Great Again." With the benefit of hindsight and having just reviewed the other candidates in the race, it now seems pretty inevitable that Trump was going to prevail. Aided by support from far-right scumbag media figures like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, Trump presented himself as an alternative to the failed Republican establishment. His skills at demagoguery and his willingness to crassly insult his opponents helped him tap into the growing fury of the Republican voter base towards professional politicians, a stagnant economy, and the mere existence of President Obama. He turned undocumented immigration into the central issue of the Republican nomination by insulting Mexico and Mexican-Americans while promising to order a wall built along the southern border, differentiating himself from the other Republican politicians with an easy-to-grasp policy and his willingness to embrace the xenophobia of the Republican base. 
The Republican primaries saw their highest voter turnout since 1980. The disunited field of Republican candidates stood no chance against the popular enthusiasm behind Trump, and he won early contests in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. Ted Cruz and John Kasich belatedly teamed up to halt Trump's momentum, but it was far too little and far too late. Kasich, Cruz, and the other Republicans were swamped by the massive voter turnout from Republicans inspired by Trump's candidacy.
Trump's victory was reflected in his receiving an overwhelming 1,441 delegates at the Republican National Convention, whereas his closest competitor Ted Cruz only got 551. This was the first time, but far from the last, in which Trump's willingness to embrace the ugly side of America boosted him to an election victory. It was clear that Trump had successfully tapped into something, and that said something wasn't good.
File:GOP Primary debates October 2015.jpg|The crowded GOP primary field during the October 2015 debates.
File:Trump at plane door 2015Dec16.jpg|Trump emerges from his plane before a rally in Arizona, December 2015.
File:Trump taco bowl 2016 crop.jpg|Trump poses with a taco bowl in May 2016.
File:Trump at the 2016 RNC.jpg|A smug Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention.
===The Democrats===
Former senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was the first candidate to announce that she was running for the Democratic nomination. She had previously sought her party's nomination in 2008, but she lost due to her ties to the unpopular Iraq War and a groundswell of grassroots support for Barack Obama. That's foreshadowing, by the way. 
Although Clinton was considered the frontrunner from the get-go, Vermont senator (and self-described democratic socialist) Bernie Sanders jumped into the race with a platform advocating for universal healthcare and lambasting longstanding economic inequality. His anti-establishment campaign won him major support from voters under 30 years old, and powered his momentum against Clinton to the point where the press started talking about "the Summer of Bernie." Sanders attacked Clinton for taking money from Super-PACs while both candidates were pledging support for campaign finance reform, but his campaign wasn't completely the "underdog" bid he described it as. Riding a wave of small dollar donations, Sanders impressively outspent Clinton by 50% across many states in early 2016. 
After almost tying Clinton in the Iowa caucus, Sanders easily won the New Hampshire primary, lending credibility and momentum to his outsider campaign. New Hampshire was the state that kept Clinton in the running against Obama in 2008, and it was the state that started her husband's momentum in 1992. This loss was seen as a major warning sign of Democratic discontent with Clinton, and she indeed came within a razor's-edge of losing the state to Trump in the general election.
Sanders ultimately fell short with Black, Hispanic, and older voters as his coalition was primarily composed of white and young people. As a result, Sanders fell behind on pledged delegates on Super Tuesday as Southern states with high numbers of Black Democrats all fell in behind Clinton. Worse, the Democratic Party establishment locked ranks behind Clinton and funneled more money into her campaign as the primaries went on, while Democrat-supporting pundits wrote hit pieces against Sanders.Michael D. Shear and Matthew Rosenberg, "Released Emails Suggest the D.N.C. Derided the Sanders Campaign", NYT July 2016.Borchers, Callum, "Emails show Debbie Wasserman Schultz pressured ‘Morning Joe’ — to no avail", WaPo July 2015. Party staffers even decided to highlight the fact that Bernie wasn't a Christian right before key Bible Belt states went to vote.East, Kristen, "Top DNC staffer apologizes for email on Sanders’ religion", Politico (23 July 2016, 6:15 PM EDT. 
There were a few moments of accord as well. During a debate in October 2015, Sanders and Clinton laughed together after Sanders told her, "The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!"
The Sanders insurgency did have an impact on the race. In response to his popularity, Clinton adopted some of his language attacking income inequality and abruptly decided to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that she had spent previous years pushing. The Democratic primary season also contained the first great warning sign of events to come. While polls showed Clinton ahead by 21% in Michigan, Bernie actually went on to win it by 1.5%—"among the greatest polling errors in primary history," as Nate Silver put it. This was the first big warning that Clinton was in real trouble in the Rust Belt. Unfortunately, that warning was ignored.
With the help of the controversial superdelegates, Hillary locked up the Democratic nomination at the Democratic National Convention in July.{{cite web | title=Democratic National Convention, 2016 | website=Ballotpedia | date=2016-04-14 | url=https://ballotpedia.org/Democratic_National_Convention,_2016 | The Convention proceedings were clouded by the aftermath of a Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee and the publishing of emails showing that the DNC had mocked the Sanders campaign, and Sanders delegates frequently booed and jeered at mentions of Clinton's name. 
File:Hillary Clinton Iowa April 2015 20160802092059!.jpg|Hillary Clinton speaks to the press in Iowa, April 2015.
File:Bernie and Hillary at second debate November 2015.jpg|Sanders and Clinton on the debate stage, November 2015.
File:Bernie Sanders by DW Nance 25.jpg|Bernie Sanders addresses supporters in Alabama, January 2016.
File:Clinton DNC 2016.jpg|Clinton at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.
===The real winner of the primaries: Populism===
Sanders and Trump showed that if you convince the people you're out to take on the system, you can get a lot further than your actual political acumen would otherwise take you. Trump never had a coherent plan, but it's not like anybody who won this election could have gotten very much through a deadlocked Congress. In terms of policy, Trump and Sanders were on the opposite ends, but very similar in campaigning and tactics.Bier, Daniel, "Bernie Sanders on Open Borders: Silly, Tribal and Economically Illiterate" Newsweek (7/30/15 at 12:43 PM). 
They both made economically populist appeals to the working class and railed against the political establishment.Proposed legislation on TBTF. Four whole pages of legislation on how to deal with the largest financial system in the world!Kruger, Allan B., "The Minimum Wage: How Much Is Too Much?", 10.9.15.Sanders, Bernie, "To Rein In Wall Street, Fix the Fed", NYT op-ed 12.23.15.Carey, Kevin, "The Trouble With Hillary Clinton’s Free Tuition Plan", NYT 7.19.16.Wolfers Justin, "Uncovering the Bad Math (or Logic) of an Economic Analysis Embraced by Bernie Sanders" NYT 2.26.16. They both sold themselves as anti-"insider".Wagner, John, "An expensive reminder that Sanders still hasn’t dropped out: His Secret Service detail", WaPo 6/19/16. It's costing taxpayers $38,000 every day he remains in the "race".Debenedetti, Gabriel, "Bernie's Roman holiday", Politico (Updated 04/17/16 11:42 AM EDT). Hit the music! Both claimed to be a victim of the media.Patterson, Thomas E., "Pre-Primary News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Race: Trump’s Rise, Sanders’ Emergence, Clinton’s Struggle", Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy (6/13/16 at 6:00 am). They both presented themselves as the only man who can clean up D.C. and serve the American people. They both presented their opponents as stooges/sell-outs.Ye Hee Lee, Michelle, "Sanders’s claim that he ‘does not have a super PAC’", WaPo 2.11.16.Berman, Richard, "The Democrats' dark money hypocrisy", The Hill (05/09/16 09:00 AM EDT).Mac, Tim, "Bernie Sanders Loves This $1 Trillion War Machine", Daily Beast (02.08.16 9:01 PM ET). They both had vociferous and loyal supporters.
==Campaign issues==
===Immigration and the border wall===
From the earliest moments of the race, Trump successfully made undocumented immigration a central topic of discussion during this election cycle. He presented himself as an immigration hawk who would build a wall to stop Mexican "rapists" and "criminals" from illegally entering the United States, and he appeared at a 2015 rally in Arizona with Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was known for his authoritarian measures against both crime and undocumented immigrants. Trump also attacked other Republican primary candidates as being too soft on immigrationEasley, Jonathan, "Trump: Bush’s wife influences his immigration positions", WaPo (07/08/15 11:23 PM EDT).Sean Sullivan and Katie Zezima, "It’s on: Rubio and Cruz clash over immigration and the GOP’s future", WaPo 11.9.15. and raged when they tried to co-opt his wall idea.Strauss, Daniel "Trump fumes as Cruz steals wall mojo", Politico (Updated 01/06/16 02:43 PM EST). During the primaries, Trump was criticized for politicizing and sensationalizing the death of a woman who was murdered by an illegal immigrant—by her brother, no less.
His claim that he would make Mexico "pay for it" was very light on details until Trump came up with a half-baked plan to use the PATRIOT Act to cut off remittance payments to Mexico from Mexican-Americans. This, of course, ended up being completely infeasible, and Trump started insisting after he won the election that he never said Mexico would pay for the wall "with a check."
Nonetheless, Trump's hardline anti-immigration platform was an effective way to motivate the Republican base; for much of the Twenty-First Century, partisan opinions on undocumented immigration had been sharply diverging. Views on why the nativist backlash started among the Republican base range from the voters being more worried about competition for jobs post-Great Recession to the idea that Republican voters just always had harsher views against immigration than the party's politicians had realized.
It should also be noted that Republicans have traditionally avoided addressing those who employ illegal immigrants and gone after the employees.Tuttle, Ian, "Donald Trump Thinks American Workers Aren’t Good Enough for the Trump Organization", National Review (2/25/16 at 4:58 PM). Going after employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers actually ended up being a Clinton idea,McAlone, Nathan, "Uber may become an issue in the US presidential race as Hillary Clinton vows to crack down on worker 'misclassification'", Business Insider (7/13/15 at 1:09 PM ). while Bush and Rubio's idea for mandatory E-Verify was laughed out of the debates.Transcript of Republican Candidates Debate in Cleveland, Ohio 6 August 2015.
===Globalization and free trade===
Somehow sensing an opportunity to expand the Republican Party's electoral appeal in the Rust Belt, Trump co-opted leftist arguments against globalization and free trade to present himself as a defender of blue-collar workers.Jobson, Barney, "FT survey shows US business balks at backing Trump", Financial Times (5/18/16 at 9:15 am). He did so by promising to rip up the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was extraordinarily unpopular with Rust Belt auto-industry workers, for example. Trump called NAFTA "the worst trade deal in history," and blamed Mexico's role in the trade agreement for the loss of 800,000 jobs from the Rust Belt. He even went as far as to publicly pledge to stop eating Oreo cookies to protest the Nabisco company's transfer of Oreo production from Chicago to Mexico.
The underlying causes behind the Rust Belt's decline were quite a bit more complex than that, and American manufacturing had and has little chance of returning to the heights of decades past, but Trump's attacks on free trade resonated strongly with Rust Belt voters. The vitriol Trump launched at the concept of globalization proved extremely successful at winning over disaffected Democrats in the region who felt left behind by the Obama administration's commitment to free trade agreements.Cohn, Nate (2017-08-15). "The Obama-Trump Voters Are Real. Here's What They Think". NYT 2017-08-15. Retrieved 2018-12-19. For example, free trade was extremely unpopular in Ohio, where it was blamed for years of manufacturing job losses.Torry, Jack, "Free Trade is Key Issue in Race for U.S. Senate in Ohio", Columbus Dispatch (3/20/16 at 7:16 PM).
China was another particular target of Trump's ire. He (truthfully) said that China was manipulating its currency and engaging in unfair labor practices to gain an edge over American manufacturing, and he went on to say, "We can't continue to allow China to rape our country, and that's what we're doing." Trump also attacked Clinton for supporting the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, which was a very flawed trade agreement that would have reduced various regulations and expanded free trade between the United States, Mexico, and various countries in Asia. 
Although Clinton backed away from supporting TPP, Trump cynically said "She will betray you again." His attacks on Clinton on the issue echoed Bernie Sanders' criticisms towards her during the Democratic primaries.
===Terrorism and the Muslim ban===
The 2016 election took place during the peak of DAESH, a terrorist organization that had seized control of large tracts of territory in Iraq and Syria. By July 2016, Pew Research found in a poll that terrorism was the second-highest prioritized issue for voters likely to participate in the election. In the 12 months leading up to the election, Trump tweeted about "radical Islamic terrorism" almost twice as often as he did about immigration and the border.
Clinton struggled to outline a strategy against DAESH due to the 57% public disapproval of how Obama handled the situation, and she had the added challenge of balancing the Democratic base's distaste for foreign wars with the popular expectation for a strong response. Noting the difficulty in forming a coherent Democratic campaign message on DAESH, Clinton instead focused on attacking Trump's views. To be fair, Trump's proposals were quite abhorrent.
Trump responded to the DAESH crisis with a call for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on," and he then endorsed the creation of a database to register Muslims living in the United States. He also said his administration would "strongly consider" forcibly closing down mosques. In terms of dealing with the terrorist group itself, Trump said the US should "take out their families," and pledged to "quickly and decisively bomb the hell out of ISIS." Trump even was as far as to praise Saddam Hussein for his apparent skill at killing Islamic terrorists: "He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn’t read them the rights. They didn’t talk. They were terrorists."
===Healthcare===
Hillary was already bleeding badly on the issue of healthcare upon entering the general election campaign against Trump. During the primaries, Clinton lambasted Sanders' plan for universal healthcare as being costly and unrealistic, thereby frustrating and alienating a large portion of the Democratic base. For context, a Kaiser Health poll from December 2015 found that an astonishing 81% of Democrats at least somewhat supported the concept of universal healthcare (52% were strong supporters) while only 7% of Democrats reported strong opposition to the idea. Clinton instead proposed marginal and uninspiring improvements to the Affordable Care Act and Medicare.
In contrast, Trump said the Affordable Care Act was a "disaster" and issued a vague promise to repeal the law and replace it with "the finest health care plan there is." What scant details he offered were just standard Republican talking-points. Importantly, while Clinton staked out a position against universal healthcare that only 7% of Democrats supported, Trump's repeal-and-replace proposal appealed to the over 52% of Republicans who wanted the law repealed and hedged bets with the 24% of Republicans who wanted the healthcare plan scaled back rather than eliminated. Trump's dumbass talking points ended up being a stronger appeal to his own base than Hillary's half-hearted reform proposals. 
Also, a huge number of Americans got a big letter one week before the general election showing their health care costs increasing due to the self-inflicted October surprise of an Obamacare rate hike.Demko, Paul, "Obamacare's November surprise", Politico (05/02/16 05:22 AM EDT). Nice one!
===Political correctness===
The 2016 election also took place during a broad cultural backlash against the right-wing's much-derided concept of "political correctness"; a study by the London School of Economics during the election found that moderate (and even left-wing) voters were less likely to say they supported Clinton if they had been reminded about the political correctness debate just prior to the question.L. C. Conway, M. Repke, and S. C. Houck. Donald Trump as a Cultural Revolt Against Perceived Communication Restriction: Priming Political Correctness Norms Causes More Trump Support. Journal of Social and Political Psychology (May 2017): 5(1):244-259. An October 2015 poll cited by PBS News found that two-thirds of Americans (and 81% of Republicans) somehow saw political correctness as a "big problem" for the country. 
Trump invested a great deal of time and effort into making political correctness an issue in the campaign, exemplified by his attacks on Obama for not using the term "radical Islamic terrorism" to describe current events. He proceeded to harp on the topic throughout the campaign with statements like, "[T]his political correctness is just absolutely killing us as a country. You can’t say anything. Anything you say today, they’ll find a reason why it’s not good."
As dumb as the anti-PC language might seem, it actually served a critical role in rendering Trump effectively immune to criticism from Clinton or the press. The argument re-contextualized Trump's bullying and vile behavior as being expressions of defiance against the political establishment and as part of a crusade to defend free speech. A lot of voters ended up buying it. The Washington Post noted that Trump supporters in polls and focus groups consistently said they liked him because "he says the things they feel they can't say." A study by the RAND Corporation also found that voters who affirmed the statement, "people like me don't have any say about what the government does," were 86.5 percent more likely to back Trump. In other words, a general feeling of being unheard and not prioritized by politicians was a better predictor of Trump support than many other commonly-cited factors such as age, race, college attainment, income, or attitudes towards Muslims or undocumented immigrants. 
===Other issues===
*The Supreme Court: Trump won a lot of support from angry conservatives by promising to appoint conservative (and especially anti-abortion) judges to the Supreme Court.Michael Boorstein and Julie Zauzmer, "Thrilling Christian conservative audience, Trump vows to lift ban on politicking, appoint antiabortion judges", WaPo 22 July 2016.Montgomery, Peter, "Trump Turns To Far-Right Heritage Foundation For Future Supreme Court Nominees", Right Wing Watch (3/22/2016 1:53 pm). 
*Climate change and green energy: Saying "Because we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right, Tim?" in the middle of coal country is actually all the media's fault!Strauss, Daniel, "Clinton haunted by coal country comment", Politico (05/10/2016 05:14 AM EDT).Kennedy, Brian, "Clinton, Trump supporters deeply divided over use of fossil fuel energy sources", Pew Research 31 October 2016. (The context behind that quote is not that great, really.)Goode, Darren, 'Clinton's coal aid plan leaves critics cold", Politico (Updated 12 November 20151, 6:42 PM EST).Schor, Elana, "Climate lessons from the Clinton campaign's hacked emails", Politico 22 October 2016.
*Net Neutrality: Ike attacked the military. Nixon opened China. Reagan fucked the elderly. Bush turned Texas brown. Trump, the first meme President: NET NEUTRALITY MUST GO! "The 2016 Presidential Candidates' Views on Net Neutrality and Broadband", Gizmodo (3/01/16 at 6:00am).
*Campaign finance and Citizens United: In exchange for Bernie's endorsement, Hillary pledged to introduce an amendment to overturn Citizens United in her first 30 days as President.McGough, Michael, "Democrats united in (over)promising to reverse Citizens United ", LA Times (7/26/16, 2:05 PM). First of all, the lion's share of her big-money donations came from corporations; approximately 27% of it was dark money coming through SuperPACs. This was not the profile of a person who was ever going to turn off the spigot.
==The campaign trail==
===The Clinton campaign: status quo centrism wasn't a winning message===
Clinton had a war chest of $1.2 billion (compared to Trump's $600 million), had virtually the entire political establishment behind her, and she still lost the walking dumpster fire that is Donald Trump. The ubiquitous question being asked for months afterward: how the fuck?
The inevitable answer: Clinton ran an arrogant and complacent campaign that had no focus on any substantial message. Take Michigan, for example. During the primaries, her supporters in the state such as Representative were sounding the alarm bells that labor unions were turning against Clinton due her stance on free trade, and then Bernie Sanders won the state in a massive upset. Instead of learning the proper lesson from this, her campaign staffers came to the strange conclusion that Clinton's campaigning in the state amounted to "poking the sleeping bear of the white working class" and that she should campaign less in Michigan. When she did belatedly campaign in the state, she avoided the topic of trade and earned criticism from local press because of it. Her campaign's over-reliance on "data analytics" rather than polling or on-the-ground intelligence led her to mistakenly believe that the Democratic base was enthusiastic about her and that the Rust Belt states were solidly in her camp and therefore did not need much effort. Her campaign's complacency left local Rust Belt Democrats in the lurch. These local organizations, many of which relied on volunteers, understood the way the wind was blowing and tried to hastily cobble together their own fundraisers and campaign efforts with no help from Clinton's own organization.
It's not like Trump had some grand and compelling vision for the future of economy that would help the working class; Clinton just failed to establish a competing message about economics and political power that would appeal to disaffected Americans.Stranage, Niall, "Hillary struggles with going big in campaign message", The Hill (3 July 2016, 6:25 PM EDT). A microcosm example: her campaign's struggle to find a slogan. Her campaign tried and rejected various slogans such as "I'm With Her," or "Breaking Down Barriers," before finally settling on "Stronger Together." The common thread, of course, was that no slogan even hinted at an actual vision for the country. Voters saw Clinton as the status quo candidate and a defender of the global capitalist system, and her campaign's vague and muddled messaging on the economy gave voters no reason to see her as anything else. Her campaign, particularly her advertisements, focused more on attacking Trump than explaining any real policy objectives. The Clinton campaign left a vacuum. What policies Clinton did run on were uninspired "market-driven incentive" type stuff that played well with donors and fell flat with voters.Linskey, Annie, "Clinton criticized for being too vague on policy", Boston Globe 12 August 2015.Grunwald, Michael, "Donald Trump’s One Unbreakable Policy: Skip the Details", Politico 17 July 2016.Lee Fang and Andrew Perez, "Hacked Emails Prove Coordination Between Clinton Campaign and Super PACs", Intercept (18 October 2016, 6:28 a.m.).
She made little or no attempt to connect with people outside her base of middle-class professionals and wealthy donors. When one reads the post-mortem from the campaign, it's like they're trying to assemble this simulacrum half-blind, whereby whatever they decide will be what the candidate (most qualified of all time) not only has always been, but is also ipso facto evidence of her being the most qualified of all time.Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, "Clinton campaign plagued by bickering", The Hill (04/12/17 at 6:00 AM EDT). Clinton accidentally insulted the people who she wanted to vote for her ("...put coal out of business..." "...basement dwellers....", "...basket of deplorables...")Lee Fang and Alex Emmons, "Hacked Audio Reveals Hillary Clinton Sees Herself Occupying “Center-Left to Center-Right”", The Intercept (30 September 2016, 2:31 p.m).Nakamura, David, "Trump makes ‘deplorable’ joke in meeting with South Korean president", WaPo 21 September 2017. because she thought it was going to be a massive blowout win.In Shattered, they said that her crew hastily wrote a concession speech that they hadn't prepared yet, so her supporters had to wait until the next morning. The arrogance of not preparing a concession speech and also not be willing to improvise in front of her adoring cult is classic HRC.
More Democrats voted for Trump than Republicans voted for Clinton,Jon Juang, Samuel Jacoby, Michael Strickland, and K.K. Rebecca Lai, "Election 2016: Exit Polls", NYT 8 November 2016. despite the "Never Trump" noise.Waldman, Paul, "Beware of this new #NeverTrump scam", WaPo 5.5.16.Salaky, Kristin, "#NeverTrump to Rebrand as #EventuallyTrump", TPM (3/4/16, 1:19 AM EST). Mitt Romney appears to be the only actual member of the #NeverTrump 'movement'. Small movement. Clinton mistook damage control for party disloyalty, and it cost the Democrats big throughout this entire election cycle.
Clinton's conceited handling of the classified e-mail scandal also told voters some damning things about her. If it was a subordinate of hers, they would have been 100% charged. Still, because she was an "Original Classifying Authority" (as per an Obama signed), she tried to justify moving the goalposts whenever it was convenient and made rhetorical exercises like there being no proof of intent (which is impossible unless she was dumb enough to put it on paper), even though she was an OCA for the wrong department.Allen, Jonathan, "Clinton says she relied on State staff for classification decisions", Reuters (8 July 2016, 1:48 PM). Her lawyer husband decided to have an "impromptu" meeting with the attorney general,Wilber, Del Quentin, "Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch defends meeting with Bill Clinton amid email probe", L.A. Times. prompting Lorretta Lynch to recuse herself. FBI Director James Comey confirmed the sketchiness in a July press conference. Nate Silver did the analysis and came back saying that the Comey Letter (which Giuliani boasted about knowing was coming for weeks until people pointed out that it was illegal for him and the FBI to be sitting on) was enough to push Trump over the top at precisely the right time.Savransky, Rebecca, "Nate Silver: Clinton 'almost certainly' would've won before FBI letter", The Hill (12/11/16 01:52 PM EST). Clinton collapsed from a 4% lead to 2% in the week following his little stunt.Wang, Sam, "The Comey effect", Princeton Election Consortium (12/10/16 at 10:06pm).
Finally, it's worth noting that Trump entered the race after a meeting with Bill Clinton, where he was encouraged to "have a bigger role in shaping the future." Hillary and her husband quite possibly handpicked her opponent, and they still lost to him.Robert Costa and Anne Gearan, "Donald Trump talked politics with Bill Clinton weeks before launching 2016 bid", WaPo 5 August 2015 She even signal-boosted him because she thought he would be easy to beat.Debenedetti, Gabriel, "They Always Wanted Trump", Politico 7 November 2017. And she fucking lost to him.
===The Trump campaign: appealing to America's worst impulses===
Trump's campaign rejected many of the Republican Party's orthodox positions, and he won a lot of support by doing so. Gone was the party's support for free trade, interventionism, and small government. His emphasis on protecting Social Security and his various personal foibles did nothing to alienate the Republican base. Also unusually for a Republican, 47% of Trump's party saw him as being either very secular or outright irreligious, but evangelical voters were still firmly behind him. Trump's celebrity status, his high popularity with previously disengaged voters, and his propensity for making outlandish statements won him huge amounts of media attention—and therefore free advertising—that was valued at about $5.9 billion. That phenomenon helped offset the fact that Clinton massively outspent Trump on the campaign trail.
Of course, the defining feature of the Trump campaign was its ugliness. His message appealed strongly to racism, and Trump was even denounced for this by other Republicans (who naturally still supported him anyways). Trump's accusations that Clinton was playing "the woman card" spiraled into overt sexism, which his supporters both embraced and promoted with the slogan, "Trump that bitch." Trump even earned the endorsement of the Neo-Nazi Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, who went on to say that his own supporters were the same as Trump's supporters. To Trump's credit, he rejected and denounced the endorsement, but to his discredit, that was only after he tried to weasel out of doing so.
After audio tapes were released of Trump bragging about sexually harassing women and three women came forward to claim that he assaulted them, many Republican politicians tepidly distanced themselves from his campaign. While the so-called "Never Trump" movement from anti-Trump conservatives attempted to win support for their cause from elected Republicans, the movement fizzled out, and most "Never Trumpers" ended up supporting him in the end. 
The crowded and raucous rallies for which Trump became known frequently featured assaults by his supporters against protestors. Trump personally encouraged violence at his events with statements like, "Knock the crap out of him, would you?" or "We have some protesters who are bad dudes, they have done bad things." He even at one point promised to pay legal fees for any of his supporters who might end up arrested for physically attacking a protester. Trump's campaign manager, , personally assaulted a reporter from Breitbart. 
Due to the disgusting nature of his campaign, Trump successfully tapped into a growing phenomenon in the United States: white racial resentment. Post-election analysis consistently found that a sense of "white vulnerability" was a better predictor that someone would back Trump than was genuine economic insecurity. Trump's promise to "Make America Great Again" appealed strongly to voters who felt alienated by social progressivism and changing values and drove enthusiasm for Trump among a large group of white voters. Republican political strategist Steve Schmidt described the phenomenon as "a cultural backlash," and said that, "Millions and millions of people in this country, blue-collar people, feel that their values are under assault, that they’re looked down upon, condescended to by the elites." Patricia Aufderheide, a professor of communication at American University, put it differently: "Trump has given people permission to say things out loud that are usually tucked in until after the third drink at Thanksgiving dinner. But I think they’ve always been there." 
Therefore, Trump's ability to tap into the underlying instinct for ugliness in American society, both in 2016 and future elections, is indicative of a serious structural problem within American culture. People liked that Trump's rhetoric racist and sexist. People liked that he repeatedly said idiotic things. People liked that Trump slung playground insults at his opponents. This says a lot about the state of the United States, and none of it is good.
==Results==
Clinton's failures delivered this election result as much as did Trump's luck. The major headline was that Trump flipped the longtime Democratic states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Key to those developments was low Democratic turnout from urban areas: she got almost 36,000 fewer votes in Philadelphia than did Obama, and her vote count total dropped by almost 15,000 in and over 93,000 (!) in . By themselves, the vote dropoff from Philadelphia and Milwaukee account for about half of Clinton's statewide deficit in their states, while the Wayne County dropoff is many times larger. Clinton did significantly improve on Obama's margins in a few places, but those were counties home to the very wealthy.Frank, Robert, "The Rich Vote Republican? Maybe Not This Election", NYT October 2016. This is the opposite of the kind of support a Democrat should be getting.
Trump slightly improved from Romney's margins with minority voters: he gained about 2 points with both Black and Hispanic voters compared to 2012. It is a myth, however, that Trump's victory was completely powered by the white working class—turnout from these voters was actually lower than usual even though Trump won them by a significant margin. Clinton did do worse than Obama had with lower-income voters of all races; she won 52% from voters who made less than $50,000 annually, while Obama had won 60%. However, this cohort of voters made up 41% of the electorate in 2012 and only 34% of the electorate in 2016. These are more pieces of evidence indicating that Clinton failed to turn out the Democratic base. 
Trump's real win came through driving up margins from rural, conservative parts of the country. In counties that Obama lost in 2012, Clinton got crushed, showing that many Obama supporters from rural regions actually flipped to Trump.Where Hillary Clinton Fell Short, Andrew McGill, the Atlantic, December 2, 2016 Still, that there was some crossover from Democrats to Republicans was hardly surprising given that the Democrats had controlled the White House for eight years already and that the economy wasn't exactly spectacular.Sure, There Were Some Obama-Trump Voters. Who Cares?, Kevin Drum, Mother Jones, August 15, 2017
The media was stuck on a very contrarian idea that Trump's win had nothing to do with the economy and that the Electoral College stole the election. They also pretended that Trump's economic message played no part. Still, a state-by-state survey showed that the people who actually matter in Presidential elections care more about economics than people in safe states.Pacewitz, Josh, "Here’s the real reason Rust Belt cities and towns voted for Trump", WaPo December 2016. In her book about this election, Hillary instead blamed Russia, blamed the FBI, blamed other people generally, and sexism.Engel, Pamela, "New book suggests Hillary Clinton blamed everyone but herself for her humiliating defeat to Trump", Business Insider (1618 April 2017, 6:30 PM).Sanders, Linley, "What Happened? In Interview, Hillary Clinton Gives Sexist Argument for Why She Lost the 2016 Election", Newsweek (13 September 2017, 1:08 PM).Soloski, Alexis, "He Said, She Said: Gender-Bending the Presidential Debates", NYT 30 January 2017.
===Table===
All candidates who received over 1% of the popular vote.
Candidate 	Electoral vote 	Popular vote	States carried	Percentage
Donald Trump 	306 (304 actual)	62,984,828 	30 + Maine-2 	46.1%
Hillary Clinton	232 (227 actual)	65,853,514 	20 + DC 	48.2%
Gary Johnson 	0 	4,489,341 	0 	3.28%
Jill Stein 	0 	1,457,218 	0 	1.07%
===Maps===
File:ElectoralCollege2016.svg|Electoral College votes from each state and the District of Columbia. There were seven faithless electors.
File:2016 United States presidential election results map by county.svg|Results by county, shaded by the winner's vote share. 
File:2016 U.S. presidential election margins.svg|Results by margin of victory in each state.
File:U.S. 2012 to 2016 presidential election swing.svg|Swing in county margins from 2012 to 2016. You can see that the Midwest really didn't like Clinton.
=== Close states ===
States where the margin of victory was under 1%:
#Michigan, 0.23% (10,704 votes) – 16 electoral votes
#New Hampshire, 0.37% (2,736 votes) – 4 electoral votes
#Pennsylvania, 0.72% (44,292 votes) – 20 electoral votes
#Wisconsin, 0.77% (22,748 votes) – 10 electoral votes (tipping point-state) 
States/districts where the margin of victory was between 1% and 5%:
#Florida, 1.20% (112,911 votes) – 29 electoral votes
#Minnesota, 1.52% (44,765 votes) – 10 electoral votes
#Nebraska's 2nd Congressional District, 2.24% (6,534 votes) – 1 electoral vote
#Nevada, 2.42% (27,202 votes) – 6 electoral votes
#Maine, 2.96% (22,142 votes) – 2 electoral votes
#Arizona, 3.50% (91,234 votes) – 11 electoral votes
#North Carolina, 3.66% (173,315 votes) – 15 electoral votes
#Colorado, 4.91% (136,386 votes) – 9 electoral votes
States where the margin of victory was between 5% and 10%:
#Georgia, 5.16% (211,141 votes) – 16 electoral votes
#Virginia, 5.32% (212,030 votes) – 13 electoral votes
#Ohio, 8.13% (446,841 votes) – 18 electoral votes
#New Mexico, 8.21% (65,567 votes) – 5 electoral votes
#Texas, 8.99% (807,179 votes) – 38 electoral votes
#Iowa, 9.41% (147,314 votes) – 6 electoral votes
===Electoral College vote===
After Trump was confirmed as the winner of the 2016 presidential election, Democratic electors pledged to Clinton (including Bernie Sanders, funnily enough) attempted to lobby Republican electors to abandon their pledges to Trump—a long-shot effort intended more to erode the legitimacy of the Electoral College than it was a genuine attempt to overturn the election. Several referred to themselves as the "Hamilton Electors" in reference to and its assertion that the Electoral College exists to ensure that "the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications." As the atmosphere around the upcoming Electoral College became uglier, a Republican elector from Michigan complained that he was receiving death threats even though he was bound by state law to honor his pledge to Trump. Not great. A Change.org petition begging electors to make Clinton president gained over 4.8 million signatures.Electoral College: Make Hillary Clinton President. Change.org
68 electors from 17 states did request an intelligence briefing from the Obama administration regarding the intelligence community's concerns that Russia had manipulated the election results. , the Director of National Intelligence, denied the request.
For the first time since the (and that time was because the electors' pledged candidate literally died after the election), multiple electors voted against the candidate for whom their state voted. The campaign to sway Trump's pledged electors backfired somewhat, as most of the faithless electors were from Clinton's states. Just to give you an idea of how much chaos there was during this process, here are the details:
State 	State won by 	Political party of elector(s)	Description 	State's final vote
Colorado 	Hillary Clinton 	Democratic 	Voted for John Kasich in a frankly bizarre attempt to convince Republican electors to defect from Trump for an alternative Republican; Colorado immediately threw out his vote and replaced him. 	9 votes for Clinton
Hawaii 	Hillary Clinton 	Democratic 	Voted for Bernie Sanders due to personal preference; despite the violation of state law, the vote stood. 	3 votes for Clinton, 1 vote for Sanders
Maine 	Vote split by Congressional district	Democratic 	Voted for Bernie Sanders to encourage Sanders supporters to stay active with the Democrats; ruled out-of-order and subsequently voted for Clinton. 	3 votes for Clinton, 1 vote for Trump
Minnesota 	Clinton 	Democratic 	Voted for Bernie Sanders (and Tulsi Gabbard for Vice President) to disrupt the process or some such thing; immediately replaced with a backup elector. 	10 votes for Clinton
Texas 	Trump 	Republican 	One pledged ahead of time to vote against Trump due to personal opposition, voted for Kasich and was counted. Another voted for Ron Paul because something something Founding Fathers. 	36 votes for Trump, 1 for Kasich, 1 for Paul
Washington	Clinton 	Democratic 	The big one: four electors went rogue. The founder of the "Hamilton Electors" movement and two supporters voted for Colin Powell in another bizarre attempt to get other electors to line up behind an alternate Republican. Another voted for Native American activist because Clinton was a "criminal." Spotted Eagle is the first Native American to receive an electoral vote for president.	8 votes for Clinton, 3 for Powell, 1 for Spotted Eagle
Faithless electors reduced Trump's total vote to 304 and Clinton's to 227.
During Congress' official certification of the Electoral College results on January 6th, 11 House Democrats attempted to object to electoral votes from various states due to the growing evidence of Russian interference in the election. Due to the lack of support from any Democratic Senators, Vice President and presiding officer Joe Biden gaveled them down.
==Russian interference==
During the closing days of the campaign, Clinton's team raised their suspicions with the press that Russia had contacts within the Trump campaign and was using illicit means to influence the election in Trump's favor. This culminated days before Trump's inauguration with the release of the so-called "Steele dossier," compiled by retired British spy Cristopher Steele and alleging that Trump personally colluded with the Russians to swing the election in his favor. Trump rejected these findings, of course, and the dossier was later discredited while the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee were fined large sums of money by federal elections regulators for failing to disclose their financing of the report.
However, that wasn't the end of the story, or even the beginning. During the campaign, Trump "joked" that Russia should hack Clinton's e-mails and release them to the public. At least 12 of Trump's associates had contacts with Russian officials (including a secret meeting to get "dirt" on Clinton), and there were a total of 19 personal interactions and 51 communications. Trump's campaign chair Paul Manafort even handed the campaign's polling and strategy information to Russian intelligence.
Through federal intelligence efforts that included the Mueller investigation, it came to light that a Russian operation codenamed "Project Lakhta" had been operating since 2014 through dozens of Russian entities to manipulate discourse on social media for the purpose of spreading mistrust in institutions and spread disinformation. Project Lakhta reached "millions" of people during the 2016 election season. YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter were all targeted. Russian-made posts sought to rile up conservatives with fake news about immigration and Islamic terrorism and tried to suppress African-American turnout by undermining their faith that their votes would be counted. 
It's probably unknowable, and still debated, how much impact the Russian "troll farms" had on the election result. Nate Silver declared himself "agnostic" on the issue and noted that Russian disinformation efforts were consistent with what Trump-leaning voters already believed—that Hillary was dishonest and corrupt. 
Probably more impactful were the series of Russian hacks into the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, followed by the release of numerous memos that cast Clinton and her party in a negative light. E-mails released in July 2016, for example, showed that Democratic Party insiders were mocking and belittling Bernie Sanders and his supporters during the primary season, vindicating Sanders' claim that the party had been against him and further dividing Democrats before the election. Committee Charwoman Debbie Wasserman Schulz resigned on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, and 2018 findings by Robert Mueller showed that the hacks were indeed deliberately timed to cause maximum chaos ahead of the Convention. This led to a tense and uncomfortable Convention in which Sanders supporters frequently booed at Clinton's name. Trump, for his part, went on to mention this and other revelations from the Russian hacks over a hundred times on the campaign trail. The Trump campaign also utilized Roger Stone's contacts with WikiLeaks to gain advance knowledge of when various stolen emails and memos would be released.
A bipartisan Senate report released in August 2020 confirmed that Russia sought to help Trump win the election, and it confirmed that many of Trump's campaign officials had knowing or unknowing contact with Russian intelligence.
==Concurrent elections==
===House of Representatives===
House elections were a disappointment for Democrats; they gained only 6 seats. This left the total at 241 Republican seats and 194 Democratic seats, a comfortable Republican majority. Republicans won 55.2% of the seats with only a plurality of the popular vote at 49.9%, meaning that gerrymandering played a role in this result, albeit a smaller one than past years. Of course, it was always going to be a tough ask to win a House majority in 2016 considering the absolute shellacking Democrats received during the 2010 and 2014 midterms thanks to the Obama-era party's negligence in supporting its candidates whenever Obama wasn't on the ballot.
Disappointment in the House results inspired a major leadership challenge against Nancy Pelosi. of Ohio won the support of a third of the party's caucus by arguing that coastal Democrats like Pelosi had caused the party to lose touch with working-class voters. 
===Senate===
The Senate was an even more bitter pill for Democrats to swallow because they had actually expected to flip the chamber during Clinton's triumphant rise to the presidency. Instead, Democrats flipped two seats, and those were both on home turf for Democrats: Republican was obviously not going to win again in Illinois, and Democrat scraped by in New Hampshire to unseat . This left the headcount in the Senate at 52 Republicans and 46 Democrats. 
Not a great result, especially since there were vulnerable Republicans in other theoretically winnable states on the menu, like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Florida. All of these seats were held by the Republicans with varying degrees of narrowness. Democratic underperformance is attributed to Trump dragging several Republican Senate candidates across the finish line, and weak campaigns from Democrats in states like Indiana and Wisconsin. 
Kirk's loss in Illinois, inevitable as it was, was at least satisfying to watch after he made a flippant and incorrect comment making fun of his opponent 's parents for being immigrants from Thailand. Duckworth's mother was Thai, but her father was an American Marine.
==See also==
*2016 Republican Party presidential nomination 
*2016 Democratic Party presidential nomination
*2016 Republican National Convention 
*2020 United States presidential election
*2024 United States presidential election - they fucking lost to him again
==External links==
* New York Times - An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2016 Election
* Ice Cube - Arrest The President
*Captain America: Uncivil War
==Notes==
==References==
 
Category:The Clintons
Category:Government incompetence
Category:U.S. Presidential campaigns
Category:Trumpism
Category:United States politics