Notes On Votes

The Presidential election is decided, even though the Electoral College does not meet until next week.  I thought it would be interesting to look a little more closely at the popular vote and trends in recent elections.  To that end, there are four charts below; Nationwide Vote; California; Michigan and Pennsylvania (with all figures in millions).  I waited several weeks to do this, because the near-final totals we have are, in some instances, much different than they did the day after the election.

What most surprised me about the 2016 election is turnout hitting an all-time high of almost 137 million - the candidates were so dismal I thought voting would decline.  It also had, by far, the most third-party votes in the past four elections, more than 8 million, an indication of the distaste for Clinton and Trump.  2008 remains the year with the highest combined vote total for the Republican and Democratic candidates.

Other items of note:

• Hillary ended up getting only 97,000 fewer votes than Obama in 2012.

• Trump exceeded Romney's count by 2 million, the highest vote total ever for a Republican candidate, surpassing GW Bush in 2004 by almost a million votes.

• The chart illustrates how overwhelming Barack Obama's 2008 victory was.  Democrats added more than 10 million to their 2004 tally, while Republicans lost 2 million.   Since then, Republicans have added 3 million, Democrats lost 3.7 million, and the third party vote increased by more than 6 million.

• While Republicans seem to have hit a 60-63 million ceiling, Democrats have a 65-66 million floor. 

	R	D	Other	Total
2004	62.041	59.028	1.126	122.295
2008	59.948	69.499	1.867	131.314
2012	60.933	65.915	2.237	129.085
2016	62.958	65.818	8.131	136.907

I included California to show its outsized impact on the popular vote.  As one wag recently noted, given its increasingly one-party state politics, if we changed Presidential elections to a popular vote, the other 49 states would effectively become colonies of California.

While Clinton leads the nationwide popular vote by 2.86 million, her margin in California alone is 4.27 million!  The state delivered 900,000 more votes to Clinton than it did to Obama in 2012, meaning that Hillary fell about a million short of Obama in the rest of the country. The chart below also shows the collapse of the Republican vote after 2004.  I was curious about whether this was a broader west coast trend but the 2016 margins in the solidly Democrat states of Oregon and Washington were about the same as in 2012.  It's a California phenomenon.

CALIFORNIA	R	D	Difference
2004	5.510	6.745	1.235
2008	5.012	8.274	3.262
2012	4.840	7.854	3.014
2016	4.484	8.753	4.269

Michigan and Pennsylvania were selected because of their critical roles in switching to the Republican column in 2016.

While Trump carried Michigan, receiving 8% more votes than Romney, it was still fewer than Bush received in 2004 when he lost the state by 165,000 votes.  What really changed is the collapse of the Democrat turnout.  Hillary received 600,000 fewer votes than Obama in 2008 and 300,000 fewer than he had in 2012.  Over eight years, the Democratic vote declined by 21%.

MICHIGAN	R	D
2004	2.314	2.479
2008	2.049	2.873
2012	2.115	2.565
2016	2.280	2.269

The picture in Pennsylvania differs from Michigan.  Trump improved by 11% on Romney's vote, easily surpassing Bush in 2004.  Clinton's decline was only 2% from 2012, 10% compared to 2008, and almost the same as Kerry polled in 2004 when he carried the state.

PENNSYLVANIA	R	D
2004	2.794	2.938
2008	2.656	3.276
2012	2.680	2.990
2016	2.971	2.926