And now, the aftermath.
In the coming weeks and months, there will be endless reading of exit polls and analysis of how exactly Donald Trump managed to win an election he wasn’t supposed to have a chance at being the least bit competitive in. But one demographic group appears to have been the key to Trump unlocking the Electoral College and securing the White House: Older Americans.
While younger voters showed up and supported Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump by 55 percent to 37 percent, that number is slightly less than Obama, who won the millennial vote by 67 percent in 2012. Mitt Romney received only 30 percent of young voters.
Fast forward from 2012 to last night and we see older voters overwhelmingly voting for Trump. Perhaps it was his message of returning to earlier days in American history, or perhaps it was something as basic as fear. Whatever it was, it worked brilliantly and Trump is now President-elect.
Another drag on Clinton winning the number of voters is the third-party factor. The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) says that one in 10 million millennials, or 8 percent of those voters, chose a third-party candidate. That, combined with the huge turnout among older voters and those in rural America were a major part of why Clinton didn’t manage to get the numbers she needed in key battleground states such as Florida, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin.
If you look at a racial breakdown of the 2016 vote, you find exactly what you would expect: People of color went for Clinton about as much as they did for Obama. White voters, however, voted for Trump at a rate of 7 percent more than what Romney managed in 2012.
So where does all of this leave us? Has Trump created a new GOP majority that will endure? That seems unlikely as the country continues to change demographically each day. In 2020, there will be even more Hispanics, more young voters, and fewer older voters as time takes its toll, as it does on all of us.
These three charts help explain what happened last night:
h/t Raw Story
Featured Image Via Wikimedia
