This is the most reasonable explanation ive read as to why Clinton lost to trump
This isnt a flame thread, if you read it you will see it lays out the why clearly.
Reporting largely ignored the importance of economic conditions and other “fundamentals” that implied a potentially close race.
If the “emerging Democratic majority” was one pillar of the flawed argument that Hillary Clinton had an Electoral College advantage over Donald Trump, the other was the “blue wall,” the claim that Democrats began with a base of 242 electoral votes because they’d won them in each election since 1992. Here’s a version of the argument as it appeared in The New York Times on July 30, for example:For now, though, Mr. Trump is grappling with a magnified version of the dilemma that threatens to stymie Republicans every four years. Democrats have won a consistent set of 18 states in every presidential election since 1992, giving them a base of 242 Electoral College votes even before counting some of the biggest swing states. As a result, the last two Republican nominees, Mitt Romney and John McCain, would have needed to capture nearly all the contested states on the map in order to win.
It turned out that Clinton lost three “blue wall” states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin — along with the 2nd Congressional District of Maine. Throughout the campaign, the Times and most other news outlets had downplayed Trump’s prospects in these states, which were enough to win him the election.
What was wrong with the “blue wall” idea? You can read our longer critique here, but the gist of it is that looking at a state’s long-term voting history told you almost nothing about how it was likely to behave the next time around. California and Vermont had once been reliably red states (they had voted Republican in each election from 1968 to 1988) until they suddenly weren’t. In 1992, the first year of the “blue wall,” Arkansas and West Virginia were more Democratic than Connecticut. A state’s short-term voting history (how it voted in 2012 and 2008) might tell you something more, by contrast. But that information needed to be interpreted carefully because states rise and fall with the national tide.
An alternative to the “blue wall” and the “emerging Democratic majority” was to look at the underlying, macro-level conditions of the race, or what we sometimes refer to as the “fundamentals.” Political scientists and other empiricists disagree on exactly how to do this, and the precision of these methods can be overestimated. But there’s broad agreement on a couple of propositions:
- First, there are few if any permanent majorities. A newly elected party (for instance, Barack Obama’s Democrats before the 2012 election) often wins a second presidential term. Beyond that, it’s not much of an advantage to be the incumbent party, and it may be at a slight disadvantage when a party tries to win more than two terms in a row.
- Second, the economy matters a lot to voters, and a better economy helps the incumbent party, other factors held equal.
By this rubric, the 2008 and 2012 elections were likely to be strong years for Democrats. In 2008, Obama was facing John McCain after Republicans had held the White House for two terms and overseen a financial collapse. In 2012, Obama was a first-term incumbent running for re-election and the economy was just good enough to get him over the finish line.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/...ction-to-lose/
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Originally Posted by valley ranch
