With all of our discussion about which candidate voters choose or why they do not cast a ballot at all, it seems fitting that we discuss the 2016 election of Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump. It seemed to me, and to many Americans, that this election was an extremely divisive one. With voter preferences on their extremes on each side, I would categorize the voter preference distribution for this election as bimodally distributed. The Democratic and Republican party showed no sign of wanting to associate with each other, and voter preferences were very opposed and stubborn on either side. Many of the moderates in the election decided to abstain from this election also. The extremists on either side were unwilling to vote for either and there seemed to be a slew of uncertainty of information. In fact, as Downs suggested, this refusal to converge seems to be a spark for the “revolution” on January 6th (but that would take a whole new post to get into).
Another important part of this election as it relates to class is the rational abstention that took place in the 2016 election. In this election, 25% of people that did not vote cited “dislike of candidates”; this percent grew by about 200% from the 2012 presidential election. Downs insinuated that where elections can start to break down is when people start voting for candidates based on personality instead of issues, but I wonder what he would say about abstaining based on the personality of candidates. I would normally say that when voters abstain, it is detrimental to the democratic process because the preferences of these voters are not known. However, in a case where each candidate seems to be at an extreme, I question whether abstention is actually a more powerful way to demonstrate their preferences. It would show that there is space for a new, moderate party to be created that would either garner a large number of the moderate voters or influence one of the parties to start to converge.
1 comment:
Hi Kate, great post, but I’d like to offer a different perspective on voter distribution and candidate placement along that distribution. I think it is easy here to take the politics and climate of the Trump administration while he was in office and impose them on the 2016 election itself. I believe the election was far less extreme in policy, according to the average voter, than we might recall.
The 2016 election was divisive no doubt, but was it so politically or in rhetoric? I would argue for the latter. Trump was a bombastic candidate with rather aggressive debating and campaigning tactics, but his policy priorities during the election, I think, were most likely derived from a unimodal distribution of voter preferences. At the time, Trump was a more moderate candidate.
How was the infamously divisive Trump a moderate candidate? A UVA political research study observed that 20% of Trump’s voters reported having voted for Obama in 2012. The logical explanation for “party hoppers” is generally that they are middle of the road voters. Further, during the election, it was the hardcore republican establishment supporters that vehemently opposed Trump. You might recall the establishment’s support of Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, two far more traditional Republicans. Finally, Trump lost in 2020, once many of his more politically extreme viewpoints had come to light while in office. The same study also supports this claim showing that after 100 days in office the moderate party hoppers had a lower approval rating of Trump than their committed Republican voting counterparts. The bimodal distribution argued for would have probably thus kept him in power, but a unimodal distribution is what I assert elected Biden—another election and a new battle to win the median voter.
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