The 2016 Presidential Election of the U.S. left people all around the world shocked. An unusual chain of events led Donald Trump to be elected as the 45th president of the United States of America. It all began when Trump formally announced his candidacy in June 2015. Most Americans thought it was impossible for Trump to win the elections. But as the candidates began their presidential campaigns, it became obvious that a chunk of the American population supported Trump and his views on immigration, terrorism, etc. While the polls predicted that Hillary Clinton had 90% of chances to win the elections. When the day finally came, Donald Trump won the race and took office soon after.
Trump’s campaign was not a smooth one. Allegedly, Trump received assistance from the Russian government in order to influence voters around the nation. The Russian Interference was investigated by Special Counsel and was led by former FBI director, Robert Mueller. The Mueller Report, which contained the findings of the investigation, was released to the public in April 2019. Author Jean Robert Revolus’s latest work, US Election 2016 NO COLLUSION?978-1-95-163003-4 is a compilation of everything you need to know regarding the 2016 Elections. The book discusses the investigation and the Mueller Report in intricate detail. Now, let’s look into the reasons how Donald Trump was able to win the race for the presidency of the U.S. American statistician and writer, Nate Silver, provides three reasons why Trump’s win was possible:
· 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 was 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.
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