Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Election marked the first time a candidate with no history of government or military service has ever won the presidency. Despite this departure from the norm, a panel of four political science professors portrayed the election outcome as fairly standard and predictable.
This Post-Mortem Panel on the election acted as the epilogue to the Issues for the Next President Series and featured Calvin College political science professors Kevin Den Dulk, the department head currently on sabbatical, international relations professor Becca McBride, Mikael Pelz and Doug Koopman, professors of American politics, and political theory professor Micah Watson.
While Trump’s campaign tactic of making promises with varying degrees of feasibility, and seemingly playing on racial, gender and religious prejudices, were a deviation from traditional presidential discourse, Americans voted along predictable fault lines. Professor Den Dulk highlighted that Trump did well with people with some college education or less, and that people with a bachelor’s degree or higher were more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton.
In fact, Trump seemed to improve on Governor Romney’s 2012 numbers with less educated voters: “The direction of that move is that in those counties with lower percentages of folks with bachelor’s degrees were seeing this movement from 2012 to 2016 toward the Republican candidate. Again, a piece of evidence of class playing a role here.”
Christian voters overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump, with 81% of self-identified evangelicals siding with the Republican nominee, the highest, but not by a large deficit, of the past four candidates support levels going back to President George W. Bush. Professor Den Dulk believes the Clinton campaign’s lack of outreach is to blame: “One of the problems, I think, with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, was that the campaign itself didn’t have a similar kind of outreach, they didn’t even have an office.” This contrasts with dedicated evangelical outreach departments in current President Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns.
If standard demographics followed standard voting patterns, why did the mainstream media so badly underestimate Trump’s chances of winning? Even Fivethirtyeight.com, that gave Trump a 30% chance to win the electoral college, by far the best odds offered by any organization, including Trump’s own campaign, was heavily criticized.
Professor Pelz believes that the Bradley Effect, “where people may not be terribly honest when we ask them who they might support … that it was more socially desirable to say you supported Clinton than Trump,” was ignored by pollsters. Additionally, Pelz suggested that some polls may have accidentally or intentionally oversampled democrats, which would leave the public, fed for months by semi-flawed polls predicting a strong Clinton win, shocked and disappointed on Tuesday night.
This explainable, albeit improbable outcome led to protests around the country, spurred on by Clinton’s not-insignificant popular vote win that has been growing since Tuesday night as more votes, specifically those from California, are tallied. The protests revolved around the notion that President-Elect Trump presents a threat to democracy, evidenced by his divisive rhetoric, unlike anything American politics has seen.
Professor Micah Watson suggested this might not be the case by bringing the audience back to American’s genesis. Watson evoked images of physical altercations between Representatives Griswold and Lyon, of Connecticut and Vermont respectively, on the floor of the House of Representatives in 1798 that involved fire pokers. He also catalogued the numerous personal attacks President John Adams and Vice President Thomas Jefferson levied at each other while both were in office such as, “the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father” and “hideous hermaphroditical character.”
Finally, Watson stated that this election, at its core, revolved around the same fight the founders had in America’s earliest days, and coincidentally, are at the heart of the modern protesters’ actions: “The debate about who we are has been with us since the beginning of the American experiment. To whom did the magnificent promises of the Declaration apply and for whom did the guarantees of the Constitution apply?”
