Support For Democratic Presidential Candidates In A Nutshell

The New York Times summarizes the amount of support each leading candidate for the 2020 Democratic Presidential race has and in the linked article maps that geographically.

Who Do I Like And Why?

I would note that Trump is the only President in U.S. history who was not previous a Vice President, U.S. Senator, Governor, cabinet member in the federal government, or highest ranking military officer in the United States, and I think it would be wise to revert to the tradition of imposing those informal qualification for a Presidential nominee. The twelve leading candidates who have that experience are: Sanders, Warren, Harris, Biden, Castro, Booker, Klobuchar, Inslee, Gillibrand, Bennet, Bullock and Hickenlooper.

Many of them are doubtful because their support is almost entirely concentrated in a single state. This is true, at least, of Klobuchar, Inslee, Gillibrand, and Hickenlooper.

This leaves Sanders, Warren, Harris, Biden, Castro, Booker, Bennet, and Bullock.

Sanders and Warren are the leading progressives. Biden, Bennet and Bullock are positioned a centrist moderates. I don't know enough about Harris, Castro or Booker to characterize them on the progressive to centrist spectrum, and that isn't irrelevant. None of those three individuals are really national figures, even though each of them has strong support on his or her home turf. The background Harris has as a prosecutor strikes many as conservative even though she is not positioned strongly in the moderate wing of the Democratic Party like Biden, Bennet, Bullock and Hickenlooper.

In my humble opinion, Biden is the worst candidate for the Democratic nomination with any significant support. If Democrats choose a centrist, either to lead a ticket, or to balance more liberal candidate's ticket as Vice President, Bennet and Bullock would be better candidates, although sacrificing the electoral incumbency advantages that Bennet has in the U.S. Senate and that Bullock has in Montana, may not be worth it compared to the slight bump that a ticket splitting Vice President can provide in the 2020 general election race for President.

I am leaning towards Warren as my preferred candidate for the Democratic nomination. Sanders is too old, and is a somewhat more polarizing figure within the Democratic party. Warren is competent, a good and inspiring public speaker, she speaks to Sanders supporters in terms of policy and could easily win a wholehearted endorsement from Sanders himself, she speaks to supporters of Hillary Clinton in terms of potentially being the first woman to serve as U.S. President, and she has lots of supporters over a wide geographic area (almost everywhere but Texas, which is a lost cause, and Wisconsin) and has raised lots of money. She would do a good job of mobilizing the base while not alienating to many people in the base. 

In terms of a Vice President, the most important qualification is an ability to deliver one or more swing states for the ticket that might otherwise have been difficult for the Presidential nominee to win. 

In 2016, the red states that were close enough that a Democrat might pick up in 2020 were Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, the least urban Congressional districts in Maine, North Carolina, Florida, and Arizona (a third-party candidate might just conceivably deny Trump a win in Utah as one nearly did in 2016, but no Democrat would). The states won by Clinton in 2016 that were least secure were Virginia, Maine, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada.

The most critical swing states were Florida and the Rust Belt states.

Many Democratic Presidential candidates in 2020 have little or no significant support at this point in any of those swing states. Working from the back of the pack, the following candidates aren't strong at this point in swing states: Blasio, Delany, Ryan, Moulton, Bullock, Gillibrand, and Inslee. If you assume that Colorado and Minnesota won't be a swing states in the Presidential race in 2020 (a fairly safe assumption), Hickenlooper and Klobuchar don't look attractive either.

Which candidates other than Sanders and Warren, have significant numbers of supporters in both the Rust Belt and Florida?

Buttigieg and Biden. And, Biden might do more harm in damping the support of the Democratic faithful, than he would add in swing states. Butteigieg, in contrast, has meaningful backing in key swing states, has great personal charisma, alienates mostly homophobes who were voting for Trump anyway, in significantly less progressive than Warren helping to secure support from more moderate Democrats, and knows how to communicate to Rust Belt voters. A Butterigieg candidacy also won't sacrifice any electoral incumbency advantages in key races. 

Ultimately, then, I like a Warren-Buttigieg ticket. This ticket would secure the extreme hate and ire of cultural conservatives in red states and one percenters. But, those aren't the constituencies that the Democrats need to beat Trump in 2020. Those constituencies are largely lost causes.

Sanders would have been a better choice in 2016 than Clinton. And he still is, beyond being a progressive, a populist than crosses party lines with working class support on bread and butter issues. But, I'm not sure that the hard feelings left from that race, and the fact that he isn't getting any younger, help in 2020. Warren can play the age card as well as the gender card against Trump, Sanders can't.

The Raw Data

Bernie Sanders

Senator from Vermont

746,000 Estimated donors

$36 million Total raised

Elizabeth Warren

Senator from Massachusetts

421,000 Estimated donors

$25 million Total raised

 

Pete Buttigieg

Mayor of South Bend, Ind.

390,000 Estimated donors

$32 million Total raised

Kamala Harris

Senator from California

277,000 Estimated donors

$24 million Total raised

 

Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Former vice president

256,000 Estimated donors

$22 million Total raised

 

Beto O’Rourke

Former congressman from Texas

188,000 Estimated donors

$13 million Total raised

Andrew Yang

Businessman

133,000 Estimated donors

$5 million Total raised

 

Julián Castro

Former housing secretary

110,000 Estimated donors

$4 million Total raised

 

Cory Booker

Senator from New Jersey

100,000 Estimated donors

$10 million Total raised

Tulsi Gabbard

Congresswoman from Hawaii

88,000 Estimated donors

$4 million Total raised

 

Amy Klobuchar

Senator from Minnesota

79,000 Estimated donors

$9 million Total raised

Jay Inslee

Governor of Washington State

78,000 Estimated donors

$5 million Total raised

Kirsten Gillibrand

Senator from New York

77,000 Estimated donors

$5 million Total raised

 

Marianne Williamson

Self-help author

75,000 Estimated donors

$3 million Total raised

 

Michael Bennet

Senator from Colorado

28,000 Estimated donors

$3 million Total raised

Steve Bullock

Governor of Montana

17,000 Estimated donors

$2 million Total raised

 

Seth Moulton

Congressman from Massachusetts

14,000 Estimated donors

$1 million Total raised

 

John Hickenlooper

Former governor of Colorado

14,000 Estimated donors

$3 million Total raised

Tim Ryan

Congressman from Ohio

10,000 Estimated donors

$1 million Total raised

John Delaney

Former congressman from Maryland

8,000 Estimated donors

$2 million Total raised

Bill de Blasio

Mayor of New York City

7,000 Estimated donors

$1 million Total raised

Perceived Scarcity Drives Conservatism

A new study shows that "in the 2016 presidential election, with Republicans making gains in counties that had 2.5 times more deaths from suicide, alcohol, and overdose."

Counties with a net gain in the percentage of individuals who voted for the Republican candidate had a 15 percent higher 2015 age-adjusted death rate than counties with a net gain in Democratic voters. The increase in death rates due to alcohol, drugs, and suicide was also 2.5 times higher in counties where Republicans made gains compared with counties where Democrats made gains. 

"It's commonly argued that President Trump won by receiving more votes from people who have been left behind economically -- especially older, less-educated, and less-urban, white voters," said Dr. Goldman. "Based on our data, we can also say that changes in life expectancy were an independent factor in voting choices. Reduced health prospects are an important marker of dissatisfaction, discouragement, hopelessness, and fear -- sentiments that may have resonated with voters who sided with President Trump. Although correlation does not imply causality, our findings also suggest that plausible improvements in life expectancy in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin might have shifted their electoral votes to Secretary Clinton.

This isn't a great surprise and corroborates previous data.

General, but less widely disseminated political theory explains why this is so.

Basically, conservatism (and religiosity) is associated with economic hardship and uncertainty, while liberalism and secularism are associate with economic prosperity and security.

If personal survival is the key, you focus on looking out for yourself and perhaps your family, at the expense of empathy for others specifically, or in the abstract in the sense of the larger community and environment.

Suicide, alcohol related and overdose related deaths are symptoms of psychological stress and despair that tend to be associated with economic hardship and uncertainty. So, survival oriented thinking, which tends to be conservative, prevails.

The paper is:

Lee Goldman, et al., "Independent Relationship of Changes in Death Rates with Changes in US Presidential Voting." Journal of General Internal Medicine (2018). DOI: 10.1007/s11606-018-4568-6

Least Inspiring Independence Day Ever

I can't recall a single year in my entire life when the prospects of our Republic's future have seemed more bleak.

Since Trump took office, almost all of our federal government departments have been run by people who are either grossly incompetent, or actively want to undermine their agency's mission, or both. The judicial appointments we've seen have included dramatically unqualified candidates and candidates whose views are beyond reactionary. Faithfully executing the laws has gone out the window. We now have bona fide Nazis and white supremacists in high offices wielding great political influence in the Trump administration.

Trump has blindly sought to repeal every positive regulatory development of Obama's tenure, stripping environmental protections, shrinking national monuments, eliminating protects for workers and consumers, and so on. Obamacare has been undermined in every possible way by Republicans, despite the fact that it has worked as advertised. Irrevocable damage will be done before these good policies can be restored.

Trump has failed to meaningfully address a clean water crisis in Flint, Michigan, the aftermath of a record setting disaster in the form of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, an epidemic of mass shootings, and a wave of blatant instances of law enforcement misconduct. Trump's approach to the opioid overdose crisis has been counterproductive, making it worse. Trump's response to marijuana legalization, at least where states have taken that step, has been all talk and no action, and his campaign promises on that issue have been directly disavows by his Reefer Madness obsessed attorney general who has also flagrantly lied to Congress and fostered other malicious mischief.

Trump has used the bully pulpit and executive orders to fan the flames of delusional xenophobia, racism, sexism, and religious based hate. He has vilified the press in an effort to alienate his followers from all connections to reality, and relentlessly showed utter and total disregard for the truth, lying pathologically in ways that are easily to falsify multiple times every day. Somehow, in the great national divorce between white Evangelical Christian racists and everyone else, Democrats even ended up with the NFL on its side of the divide. Trump has encouraged corruption and nepotism at the highest levels. He has converted the Republican party from a party of bad ideas to a white nationalist party of hate and ignorance. This is a genie that can't be put back in its bottle now that it has been unleashed.

Trump has provoked trade wars with our allies that are deeply damaging the economy, has cozied up to Russia and North Korea (our historical enemies), has disavowed long standing and widely supported treaties, and done everything possible to undermine the orderly working and human functioning of our immigration system. The standing of the United States in the world has plummeted and will take decades to restore if it can ever be restored. Trump has materially increased the risk of nuclear war with North Korea, Iran and Russia. Trump has intentionally degraded our ability to respond to natural disasters and catastrophic disease outbreaks.

Republicans have dramatically given away the store with tax cuts for large corporations and very affluent individuals and now want to pay for these cuts by dramatically gutting the social safety net in the form of deep cuts to programs like Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and housing aid. In the meantime, the deficit is soaring to unprecedented levels (again, totally contrary to campaign promises and purported Republican policy), the government has shut down already at least once, and the credit rating of the United States has been downgraded due to the shenanigans of Republicans in Congress. The storefront retail sector is collapsing and the promised trickle down benefits of the tax cuts have proved to be as illusory as Lucy's football.

We are on the verge of a permanent conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court for all practical intents and purposes, after moderates like Kennedy and O'Connor have positioned SCOTUS at the far left fringe of the Republican party establishment for most of my life. This will have huge practical consequences, undermining almost all of the America's core values. Courts have intervened to significantly thwart and stop some of the worst parts of his agenda, but this is just a finger in the dike.

In a year and a half, we have taken giant steps backward, setting us back by decades.

The United States is now rated a "flawed democracy" by international observers. The Pope has repeatedly condemned some of the worse of our recent developments. Fundamental flaws in our political process are limiting the ability of democracy to intervene to prevent these problems or remedy them, and almost all of these flaws favor Republicans. The Electoral College gave us President Trump, despite the fact that Clinton won three million more votes than he did. Laws designed by Republicans to suppress voting, like felon disenfranchisement in the South (especially Florida), voter registration purges and voter ID laws have kept legitimate voters who would like to vote from voting. Partisan gerrymandering has mostly given Republicans an improper advantage in the House of Representatives and in state legislatures in many states. Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia (both of which strongly lean towards Democrats) continue to have no Congressional representation. The U.S. Senate unfairly favors small states to an absurd degree with Wyoming and California, for example, having the same political clout. The Voting Rights Act has been hamstrung bad bad court decisions. Conservative court majorities have made it dramatically more difficult to prosecute corrupt politicians criminally. Voter turnout remains abysmal in the U.S. for a variety of reasons. Third-party voters routinely spoil the major political party contests to the detriment of the people they agree with most in those contests. Russian proxies tampered with our 2016 election in favor of Trump, a fact he denies despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and the FBI's selective disclosure of information undermined Clinton at the expense of Trump based upon trivial and bogus charges. Campaign finance laws have also weakened, although I believe that most progressively leaning political reformers vastly overestimate the importance of this relative to the other factors degrading our democracy - still forces like the NRA and the Koch Brothers efforts to push anti-democratic agendas with cash have harmed our Republic. The Trump administration wants to manipulate the census so that even that neutral broker will start to favor them. The dramatic failures of political polling in the 2016 election also cast doubt on that entire methodology's reliability going forward and those poor polls led Democrats to misallocate their resources in the late days of the 2016 election.

The remedy of impeachment would require Democratic gains in Congress that the flaws in our democratic process have made unattainable. Democrats have perhaps even odds in the face of nearly unprecedented outrage to retake the House of Representatives, but have no hope of getting close enough to a two-thirds majority in the U.S. Senate to convict Trump in an impeachment hearing with the help of the handful of Republican Senators who are less than completely loyal to Trump. Likewise, the palace coup contemplated by the 25th Amendment seems equally unlikely.

Midterm elections could dramatically shift the political balance, and they will undermine Trump's administration somewhat. But, Democrats are struggling to wage this electoral campaign well, and are painfully divided by infighting in the Sanders-Clinton Presidential nomination fight of 2016. This nation needs an unprecedented landslide in the midterms to right the ship, and it isn't at all clear that the results will be that extreme and unprecedented, although the two score safe Republican seats that have been flipped in vacancy elections over the last year or so, and the large wave of resignations by Republican incumbents can give us some hope that this isn't an absolutely impossible outcome.

Until a couple of years ago, it was possible to give Republicans the benefit of the doubt and assume that they had a good faith vision for our country even if it was different. Now, we know better. Republicans simply hate everything that America stands for, have no moral compass whatsoever, and blindly support policies that have been empirically proven to fail, while opposing policies with massive evidentiary support. Policy divisions have been replaced by tribal divisions.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and this era in our history is no exception. By staying the course in the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria that was established by Obama, ISIS has been defeated as a de facto nation-state and effective organization in both of those countries. An improved process for approving drugs to treat terminal conditions has been adopted. Lots of bad tax breaks were eliminated in a tax bill whose big dollar provisions that overshadowed these reforms were overwhelmingly bad. Low unemployment is a good thing, although job creation has slowed since Trump took office and wages remain stagnant. But, these consolation prizes are overwhelmed by all that has taken a turn for the worse and both low unemployment and the defeat of ISIS are carryovers from trends started during the Obama administration.

U.S. Liberals Share The Same Ideas More Than Conservatives

Do liberals or conservatives have more agreement in their political attitudes? 

Recent research indicates that conservatives may have more like-minded social groups than do liberals, but whether conservatives have more consensus on a broad, national level remains an open question. 

Using two nationally representative data sets (the General Social Survey and the American National Election Studies), we examined the attitudes of over 80,000 people on more than 400 political issues (e.g., attitudes toward welfare, gun control, same-sex marriage) across approximately 40 years. 

In both data sets, we found that liberals possessed a larger degree of agreement in their political attitudes than did conservatives. Additionally, both liberals and conservatives possessed more consensus than did political moderates.

Peter Ondish, Chadly Stern, "Liberals Possess More National Consensus on Political Attitudes in the United States: An Examination Across 40 Years" Social, Psychological and Personality Science (September 14, 2017 ).

This is contrary to what has been conventional wisdom had been until quite recently (perhaps since 2015 when apparent fractures in the conservative coalition started to become more apparent in the election campaign).

Trump And Mainline Christians

The evidence is reasonably clear that places with more mainline Christians supported Trump more than they supported Romney, while places with more Roman Catholics supported Romney more than they supported Trump.

The trends were not monolithic, however.

Denominations whose members favored Trump more than Romney:

1. ELCA Lutherans (1.85)

2. Missouri Synod Lutherans (1.26)

3. Disciples of Christ (1.14)

4. Nazarene (0.81)

5. American Baptists (i.e. Northern Baptists) (0.76)

6. United Methodist Church (0.64)

7. Southern Baptists (0.28)

Denominations whose members favored Romney more than Trump:

1. Mormons (-10.61)

2. Presbyterian Church in American (Southern Presbyterians) (-2.01)

3. Non-Denominational Christians (-1.49)

4. Roman Catholics (-0.98)

5. Assemblies of God (-0.56)

6. Presbyterian Church USA (Northern Presbyterians) (-0.50).

The Mormon case is fairly clear. Romney was a Mormon and Mormon leaders mobilized around Trump's immorality, in part, by offering a third-party candidate who was a Mormon establishment Republican.

Roman Catholics had the comfort of knowing that Romney had been a Governor of a state with a large Roman Catholic population who was a moderate who created the model for Obamacare, while the Pope himself offered cues that Trump was a man to avoid.

What is going on with Lutherans? More plausibly, Lutherans are heavily concentrated in the Rust Belt and in rural areas, as are Disciples of Christ, Nazarenes, Baptists (of all types) and Methodists (although less intensely).

The Romney v. Trump leanings of Non-Denominational Christians and Assemblies of God and to a lesser extent Presbyterians may reflect church groupings that are less likely to be in the Rust Belt and more likely to be urban or at least suburban.

Non-Denominational Churches are something of a cypher, tending to organize in suburban megachurches, tending to de-emphasize any denominational-like creed, favoring contemporary music, and not very prominent in politics. Perhaps equally important, non-denominational churches may be less distant from day to day life and have members less prone to see themselves as culturally marginalized by elites. They didn't share the tribal cultural resentment that motivated other Trump voters (such as the rural Ohio voters near where my father grew up which was thick with Trump signs at every little family farmhouse). Non-denominational churches may lean Evangelical in their theology (and disproportionately made up of former Evangelical denomination members), but they tend to emphasize the prosperity Gospel more than derision of gays and anti-abortion causes, for example.

Still, I would have been hard pressed to predict the actually observed patterns which aren't a good match to the traditional division of white Christians into mainline, Roman Catholic and Evangelical factions. Likewise, there is no coherent "high church, low church" pattern. Many denominations historically split into mainline and Evangelical denominations (Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists, and arguably Nazarene/Disciples of Christ) spoke with one voice in the 2016 election, rather than following the liberal or conservative lead of their denomination.

Overall, in the 2016 election, religious affiliation looks like an ancestrally informative marker illuminating other factors that were really driving electoral choices, rather than a cause for how people voted, with the clear exception of Mormons. And, indeed, sliced and diced this way, it is even hard to see the trend so obvious in other examinations of voting statistics that show racist attitudes as a critical factor in Trump support.

At a minimum, however, the linked article's conclusion that the left might benefit from more mainline church attendance seems to spit in the face of the data collected, which would seem to show that the many mainline Christians far preferred Trump to Romney. At best, one could argue that the widespread abandonment of mainline denominations in favor of a non-religious worldview, has left those who remain in mainline denominations more conservative on average (something offset by the consistently very liberal political leanings of the non-religious people who leave mainline Christianity).

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

We Are In A Crisis Caused By Bad Political Leadership

It can be painful to absorb the daily news.

The sheer senseless stupidity of it all can leave you wanting to crawl back into bed and wanting to erase all memory of what you've learned.

Not all of the bad news is due to bad political leadership, but bad political leadership is responsible for a lot of it and the social climate created by these leaders is responsible for a lot more of it. Without bad political leadership, our world would only suck to the usual degree and not at the crisis levels we are experiencing right now.

We Have Bad Political Leadership Because So Many Voters Are Ignorant and Immoral

We Have Bad Political Leaders Because So Many Bad People Are Voters

Yes, Donald Trump is ignorant, immoral, and incompetent. But, we wouldn't have him if it weren't for the plurality of voters in dozens of states who voted for him in the general election and the plurality of Republicans who supported him in the primaries. 

Trump won the GOP primary because the Republican rank and file is more on his wavelength than they are on the wavelength of establishment Republicans. Trump won the election because most Republicans are suicidally loyal to their party and lots of independents in key states wanted to send a fuck you to the nation's political and cultural establishment.

Yes, votes were suppressed. Yes, bad tactical choices were made. Yes, Hillary Clinton was not an inspiring orator, didn't respond effectively to efforts to create scandals, and focused on listening and twenty point plans on every topic under the Sun instead of articulating a larger and simpler vision for the country.

But, Donald Trump wouldn't have been able to come remotely close enough to winning for any of those factors to matter if there wasn't something deeply wrong at the grass roots voter level in this country.

For example, the best predictor of a voter's likelihood of supporting Donald Trump was the extent to which that voter is racist, xenophobic and sexist. The connection was cultural much more than it was economic, for example. But, this was only electorally relevant and actually gave Donald Trump an edge, because so many Americans are racist, xenophobic and have incredibly backward views about women.

American Conservatives Are Predominantly Immoral And Ignorant

Establishment conservatives have long tried to project a myth that the American conservative movement is about people with an exceptionally strong moral compass whose superficially harsh economic policies are necessary to achieve prosperity. But, this is rubbish.

Actual American conservatives are about as hate filled, prejudiced and immoral as all but a handful of other political factions on the planet and have managed to refrain from utterly ruining our nation mostly only because they have lacked the power to do so. They are deeply disconnected from reality in almost all matters scientific and economic. The demagogues who lead them have convinced them to support policies in areas from health care to economics to gun control to the war on drugs that are starkly contrary to their own self-interests.

We have been placed in a situation where our nation is ruled by psychological toddlers, crackpot religious fanatics and radical white supremacists, none of whom have any grasp of the kinds of policies that are empirically supported, because so many conservative voters are just as ignorant and hateful, or more so, than they people they have elected - not just to the Presidency and Vice Presidency, but to the U.S. House, to the U.S. Senate, to Governorships and to state legislatures.

Misguided And Mean American Conservatism Predates The Civil War

This is not a new problem. For the most part, this cancer predates the U.S. Civil War. Serious post-civil war efforts to treat this cancer, like Reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement damped and contained its progress somewhat, but certainly hasn't successfully removed this malignancy from our body politic.

The North had an opportunity to surgically remove the lion's share of this cancer from our body politic by accepting Southern succession in support of slavery in 1861, and then to try to reform the Confederate stance on slavery and other bad policies from the outside. But, instead of choosing a less bloody course of action, that left the former Confederacy a half-way unrepentant nation of hate facing tighter economic discipline from the outsider world, Lincoln went to war. As a result, even places where there are more enlightened majorities, must always struggle to counteract the ignorance and hate from the right that flood out room for compromise and good sense.

To be clear, I don't mean to say that fighting the Civil War didn't produce worthwhile results. The Civil War was fought to end slavery, and it did, although it took another century to end Jim Crow and the struggle for reforms that really make things right is ongoing.

The North stayed in the relationship and fought for it to protect members of its community who were being mistreated in the South, and the North continued to do so protect its politically powerless and mistreated community members in the South through the federal government through the Civil Rights movement and into the present. But, this unselfish conduct was costly. The price the North paid for protecting the rights of the oppressed in the South as much as it could out of its moral imperative to do so, has been that their own progress has been limited by the resistance of the regressive movement in the places that were retained.

Conservatives Favor Means Spirited, Tribal, Emotional Policies That Ignore Reality

The Core Positions Of American Conservatives Are Divorced From Reality And Harmful

Rather than grapple with reality, American conservatives deny that pollution of the air, soil and water causes any serious harm. They ignore the overwhelming evidence that tax cuts don't pay for themselves, and that low tax rates are associated with economic malaise. Natural experiments, like the aftermath of huge tax cuts in the state of Kansas, strongly suggest that tax cuts are a first order cause of this economic malaise, rather than being merely correlated in a scenario where the pressure to lower taxes comes from economic malaise, and rather than being only a higher order effect dwarfed by other factors in economic success that have more of an impact on the health of the economy.

The Case Of Gun Control

Gun control is another area where American conservatives have a worldview that is fundamentally absurd, as suicide rates and accidental firearm death rates closely track the availability of guns.

In contrast, the use of guns for legitimate purposes by citizens who are not in law enforcement is vanishingly rare. Indeed, far more than a majority of incidents in which non-law enforcement citizens claim to be using a firearm to defend themselves or others, turn out to be cases where the use of force or a threat of force by the citizen did not qualify under the law as legally justified. There are roughly a hundred-fold fewer instances in which there is a legitimate uses of firearms for self-defense or to defend others, than there are instances in which firearms are used in a manner that violations criminal laws (excluding suicide and accidental harm by people not engaged in criminal activity). From a cost-benefit perspective there is no plausible way to justify America's lax gun control laws as good policy.

Yet, American conservatives repeatedly fail to learn from experience and absurdly argue that the way to make concerts, college campuses, elementary schools, churches, and other scenes of mass killing or terrorist attacks, it to arm more of the people who attend activities in those locations. And, in each case American conservatives routinely and selfishly disavow all empathy with and concerns for the plight of people other than themselves rejecting the existence of a common community, no matter how cruel the consequences of their proposals may be.

Bad Conservative Policies Flow From Objectively Wrong Factual Premises

A key point in each of these policy battles is that what is at stake is more than a mere difference of opinion regarding what constitutes desirable outcomes, or mere differences in preferences. These are cases where the conservative position requires one to assume facts that can be demonstrated empirically to be objectively false. Conservatives are not just immoral, they are also self-deluded.

Admittedly, there are selected issues upon which liberals often cling to positions that are not factually supported. But, the issues for which this is true aren't the central pillars of their policy agenda, are fewer in number, and are issues upon which liberal leaders aren't opposed to sincerely considering evidence which could persuade them otherwise in the vast majority of cases.

Solutions

Not Viable: Let Conservative Form Their Own Screwed Up Country And Leave The Rest Of Us Alone

One approach would be to eject the former Confederacy (and perhaps some of its political allies outside the former Confederacy proper, like Oklahoma) from the union so that these states cannot impose externalities arising from the stupidity of their people on the rest of us through the national political process and through the day to day needs of many of the sane people from sane states who do business with people in these misguided states. But, the consensus is that this approach it out of political bounds, even for the far right and far left political factions in the United States. 

Viable But Wickedly Hard: Change The Views Of Grassroots Voters With Movement Politics

So, the only practical means to address this cancer is to relentlessly and effectively take steps to transform this culture's world views, ideally in a manner that is perceived as coming from inside the group, rather than being imposed. This approach is sometimes called "Movement politics", because it takes a prolonged social movement to accomplish this kind of mass ideological change.

This is a daunting, and perhaps even "impossible" task, in much that same way that resorting to forensic physical anthropology and archaeology to infer the language these people spoke and the broad outliners of unwritten aspects of their culture, is a wickedly difficult problem.

An Inauspicious Beginning

President Trump has been denounced by multiple members of Congress, by the CEOs of leading American businesses like Apple, Google, and GE, by the Pope, by superstars, and by masses of people across the United States. Multiple judges have ruled that his Muslim travel ban is illegal. The rest have denounced it as a threat to American security, as inhumane, as unfair, and as counter to Christian values.

Home grown terrorists have burned down a mosque in Texas with his encouragement, and the malaise poured over the border to the mass shooting at a mosque in Quebec. This happened, in no small part, because Trump encouraged the perpetrators.

Republicans lost seats in both the House and the Senate in 2016, despite Trump's electoral college win. Trump's approval ratings at the start of his first term are lower than any President in history and falling fast. Republican officer holders are starting to smell blood in the water and to realize that if they tow Trump's line that they will go down with him in two years. Trump lacks majority support for his travel ban in either the House or the Senate due to public GOP defections.

The Republican establishment has never liked Trump, but, because they failed to agree on an alternative early enough on, they were stuck with him and backed him in the election. But, they have no loyalty to this outsider who clearly doesn't trust them either and doesn't play by the political rules.

It isn't at all unprecedented for serious failures while in office to bring a party from a thin majority to virtually being wiped off the political map in a single election. It has happened in Canada. It has happened in the U.K. It has happened in Greece. And, it can happen just as dramatically in the United States is the Republicans don't get this dumpster fire under control and fast.

Many people who voted for Trump in 2016 already regret their decision. Almost nobody who voted for Clinton thinks that they made the wrong choice.

If Trump continues to try to implement abhorrent policies that hurt ordinary people, he will fan the flames of the resistance against him and take his entire political party and movement down with him. And, right now, that looks like exactly where we are headed.

Why Has The Electoral College-Popular Vote Gap Grown?

The gap between the electoral college vote (which produced a majority for Donald Trump), and the popular vote (which favored Hillary Clinton by more than 2 million votes) was larger than at any time in U.S. history in 2016, although it has favored Republicans for some time now. This is the second time in five elections that Republicans have won the electoral college while losing the popular vote.

Why did this happen?

Largely because Democrats are increasingly concentrated in higher density urban areas, while Republicans are increasingly concentrated in lower density rural areas.

As recently as 1988 (the first Presidential election in which I voted and a single generation ago), there was only a slight divide between relative levels of Democratic and Republican support in urban and rural areas. But, in every Presidential election since then, the urban-rural divide has intensified, and since at least the 2000 election, population density has been an excellent predictor of partisan leaning. 

Strong support in dense urban areas that affect only a minority of electoral votes is inefficient relative to support distributed across rural areas that have more electoral votes. As Sean Trende explains at Real Clear Politics:

Hispanics exceed their national share of the population in just nine states, only three of which are swing states (Colorado, Florida and Nevada). Likewise, African-Americans exceed their national share of the population (14 percent) in just 16 states, only a handful of which (Florida, Michigan, North Carolina and Virginia) are swing states. 

In other words, the Democrats’ coalition of the ascendant is very inefficiently distributed. We therefore opted to utilize a demographic (urbanicity) that is easily filtered through a geographic component (CBSAs) and that people intuitively think of in geographic terms. What we discovered is a different dimension to the Democrats’ demographic inefficiency problem: They are becoming far too clustered in urban centers to be effective, even when they win the popular vote. 

Winning mega-cities by 30 points is great, but her margin there was mostly (though not entirely) neutralized by her poor performance in large rural areas and small towns alone. Again, her vote in these mega-cities was also inefficiently distributed in already-blue states; the swing states with mega-cities tend to have large amounts of rural land, which is why she lost Florida, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Finally, we note that while rural and small-town America are disappearing, that disappearance is happening much more gradually than people appreciate… 

But we get back to our initial point: In our system of government, popular vote metrics are only sensible when put through a geographic filter. This causes problems in the Electoral College, which we’ve recounted before. There are only nine “mega-cities” in America: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Miami, Atlanta, Houston, and Dallas. These, in turn, affect 11 states: New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, California, Illinois, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Florida, Georgia and Texas.

But if it causes problems in the Electoral College, it wreaks havoc in the Senate, House, and state legislatures. While only 11 states have mega-cities, 18 states have neither mega-cities nor large cities. To put this in perspective, a party that sweeps the rural and town-dominated states starts out with 36 Senate seats. This won’t happen, of course – Vermont isn’t going Republican any time soon – but Republicans also have a solid foundation in states with large cities, like Oklahoma and Kansas. Because of the Democrats’ concentration in cities, and because of the concentration of the urban vote in relatively few states, the Senate is now a natural Republican gerrymander. In the House, it is largely the same story.

Responses

Changing The Rules

Ideally, the United States would change its electoral system so that the Presidency would be elected based upon the popular vote, rather than the electoral college vote, and so that legislative seats would be elected in some sort of proportional representative system within each state.

The lion's share of modern, Western-style democracies either have that kind of system, or have a proportional representation parliament with a merely symbolic Presidency comparable to a constitutional monarch.

There is widespread public support among members of the general public for electing the President based upon a popular vote basis (although Republican support for this dropped dramatically after the most recent election), rather than through the electoral college, and there is nothing unconstitutional about allowing states to elect members of Congress and their state legislatures on a proportional representation basis. 

The single member plurality election system in place at the federal level in all but a couple of U.S. states, is a product of a federal statute requiring members of Congress to be elected from single member districts, and state statutes implementing that requirement in most cases through a partisan primary or caucus in each party in each district followed by a plurality general election vote in each district.

But, for the short to medium term, the reality is that Democrats don't have the political power necessary to secure these kinds of changes in the election laws.

Shuffling The Coalition

The only alternative available to Democrats is to find a way to expand their coalition in a way that would deliver more swing states to it.

This isn't necessarily a big stretch. Political party coalitions are always in flux and if the Democrats can can make net additions to their coalition in swing states that pick up a few percentage points (even if it comes at the expense of the magnitude of their support in large urban areas), then Democrats can win majorities.

But, the trick is to identify which potential additions to the Democratic party that are electorally meaningful in swing states are viable for Democrats to try to increase their appeal to, without costing Democrats support from other coalition members in swing states, either by alienating existing coalition members to the point that they don't vote or vote for third party candidates, or by pushing existing coalition members into the Republican party.

During the period of realignment that has been gradually progressing every since Goldwater, socially conservative, often rural voters, especially in the South, have shifted their allegiance to the Republican party, while socially liberal, often urban affluent voters, especially in the Northeast, have shifted their allegiance to the Democratic party.

In terms of the raw proportion of U.S. voters leaning in favor of each major party, realignment has more or less been a wash, a fact reflected in the ability of Hillary Clinton to win the popular vote in 2016 by more than two percentage points. But, realignment has made the Republican coalition more efficient in the electoral college and legislative races, while making the Democratic coalition less efficient in translating popular vote support into electoral college and legislative majorities. The departing coalition members disproportionately live in states with lots of rural and small town voters. The new coalition members live states with high population density centers.

In addition to realignment, Democrats have suffered from the decline of the private sector union movement, some of which has been driven by the long term trend of declining manufacturing employment due to a combination of automation and offshoring in search of cheaper wages and less regulation abroad.

New Coalitions

Mr. Trende points to the possibility of expanding the Democratic coalition by essentially rolling back the clock:

Democrats were once able to win rural areas, and send large numbers of members of Congress from these places. That was in part because they focused their message on these areas, and tolerated culturally conservative Democrats like Harold Volkmer in Missouri and Sonny Montgomery in Mississippi.

But for much of the Obama administration, these members were forced to take a series of tough votes that rendered the Blue Dog Democrat a near-extinct species. Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016 was almost entirely directed toward the coalition of the ascendant in mega-cities, which is a decent enough coalition for the popular vote, but is highly problematic for the Electoral College.

We very much doubt that liberal Democrats will like some of policy compromises that winning back these areas probably entails. We suspect, however, that they will find that preferable to the policies that will be enacted over the next four years.

I think he's wrong on that score. The Democrats do need to expand their coalition, but they aren't going to succeed in doing so by winning back socially conservative, evangelical Christian white Southerners.

One really shocking Democratic stumble in this election, with a group that has been tossed back and forth between the parties at least since Reagan, has been a failure to get much support from the people who remain in the economically devastated shrinking cities of the Rust Belt. These people live in what used to be Democratic union strongholds fueled by manufacturing jobs. The manufacturing jobs are gone, but the people are still there and feel deeply alienated.

Non-Citizen Voting Reality Check

How Many Non-Citizens Voted In 2016?

Voting by non-citizens is not a significant problem in the United States. Based upon the data below, a good ballpark estimate for the number of non-citizens who voted in the November 2016 Presidential election in the entire United States is about 1,500 (roughly 1 per 100,000 votes cast). 

Something on the order of 1 in 300 to 1 in 500 illegally cast ballots are cast by non-citizens. Most voters that are cast illegally are cast by felons on parole, disqualified felons in states where a felony conviction disqualifies you from voting, or by eligible voters who cast both an absentee ballot and also vote in person). Most cases of illegal voting of all types, moreover, are examples of honest mistakes and not concerted efforts to rig an election in favor of a particular candidate.

Roughly 1 in 14,000 adult non-citizens in the United States votes in any given Presidential election year.

Moreover, non-citizens who do vote are predominantly legal permanent residents of the United States who have met all or almost all legal requirements except a swearing in ceremony for obtaining U.S. citizenship, who were mistaken about when their U.S. citizenship status would become final. In 2014, the most recent year for which data are available, 654,949 people (a significant number of which are children) became naturalized U.S. citizens. So, something on the order of 1 in 200 to 1 in 400 adults who are on the verge of becoming U.S. citizens accidentally jump the gun and vote before their naturalization ceremony is complete. This percentage is a significantly smaller percentage than the number of felons on parole in the voter registration database who actually vote in states where they are not allowed to do so (which is about 2%).

The number of illegal immigrants who voted in 2016 was probably in the range of dozens to a few hundred, because legal permanent residents of the United States are much more likely to illegally vote than temporary immigrants or undocumented immigrants.

There is no evidence that voting by non-citizens has ever changed the outcome of an election in the United States in the last century. 

Also, it is not always been necessary to be a U.S. citizen to vote anyway. Until 1921, for example, it was legal for non-citizens to vote in the State of Texas.

Trump's estimate of 3 to 5 million non-citizen voters in 2016 is too large by a factor of roughly two thousand to three thousand.

Analysis

There were 251.1 million people in the United States aged eighteen or older in the last election. Nationally, eligible voter turnout was 58.4%. 

About 8.4% of people in the United States who are eighteen years of age of older are not citizens (21.1 million people). There are about 11.3 million undocumented non-citizens in the United States, some of whom are eighteen years of age or older, perhaps 80% of whom (9 million) are adults. 

* A 2006 study found that 4 non-citizens voted out of 370,000 votes cast in one then recent Wisconsin election (a rate of roughly 1 per 100,000 votes cast). In each of the four cases, the individual had almost been granted citizenship and believed that the paperwork was final but was mistaken. By comparisons 12 dead people voted (two of whom were "juniors" who mistakenly voted under the names of their dead, and a third was a woman who had been legally declared dead in a death certificate but was, in fact, alive and trying to sort out the resulting mess), and 361 were felons who had been released from prison but were still on parole and didn't know that they weren't allowed to vote. 

* In the 2004 election in Colorado, a study found that 122 people illegally voted twice, 120 felons on parole cast illegal ballots (2% of the roughly 6,000 who were registered to vote in the state), and no cases of non-citizens voting were identified.

* Few non-citizens voted in Utah according to a 2005 study:

In 2005, Utah’s legislative audit bureau attempted to undertake a systematic study of illegal immigrants who had obtained state identification cards – either driver’s license or state identification cards. Utah determined that some 383 possibly illegal immigrants were registered to vote. Utah asked ICE to review these registered voters to determine if, in fact, they were U.S. citizens. ICE examined a sample consisting of 135 of these individuals and determined that 5 were naturalized citizens, 20 were “deportable,” one was a permanent legal resident and the other 109 had no record and were likely in the United States illegally. Fourteen of these 383 individuals voted in a recent election in Utah, but ICE did not provide enough information to the state to allow it to determine whether these 14 individuals were in fact citizens.

In the 2004 election, 1,012,000 people voted in Utah, so the number of possible non-citizens who voted was again roughly 1 in 100,000. 

* Studies in Harris County, Texas and Oahu, Hawaii, likewise found that the percentage of people registered to vote who were non-citizens was tiny and found no evidence that any significant number of non-citizens who were registered to vote actually did vote.

Zillow Values White House

According to Zillow, what is the White House worth?

1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20006

16 beds, 35 baths, 55,000 sq. ft  

OFF MARKET Zestimate®: $445,259,914

Quite a deal at $445 million. Then again, the person taking occupancy tomorrow at noon apparently thinks that it isn't adequate for his family's needs, so maybe it is overvalued.

The Ideological Remaking Of The Republican Party

The 2016 election has been a powerful example of how partisans change their views to match the public statements of their standard bearers, instead of the other way around. Republican attitudes about a variety of issues have swung dramatically this year in the direction of President-elect Trump's public statements.

From Pew via Fully Myelinated.

This chart should be right at the top of the list of demonstrations of how powerful partisanship is and how shallow popular attachment to policy positions can be.

Two years ago, there was almost no partisan difference between Democrats and Republicans on the question of whether free trade agreements are good for the United States. 

Since then, largely due to Trump's strong anti-trade campaign, the Republican support for free trade has gone from 55-36 to 24-68, a roughly thirty percentage point swing.

This isn't by any means the only issue upon which Republicans have changed their opinions either. 

For example, in July of this year, Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, had a net -55 percentage point favorability rating. Now, his favorability rating is a net -10. About 22.5% of Republicans have gone from having an unfavorable view of Putin to a favorable view of Putin (whom Trump has said that he admires and who supported his campaign).

From here.

Republicans are also overwhelmingly convinced that Trump's election will be a godsend for the economy, while Democrats and independents are decidedly more glum.

From here.

And, Republicans are now huge fans of the Electoral College. In 2012, 54% of Republicans wanted to abolish it. Now, that has fallen to 19% (a 35 percentage point drop).

From Gallup via this post.

Predictions For The Next Four Years

The following predictions are for the period from January 20, 2017 to January 20, 2021 (i.e. President Trump's current term of office), unless otherwise stated.

War and Peace

* U.S. defense spending increases significantly: 75%

* The number of active duty U.S. military personnel is significantly increased: 70%

* The B-3 bomber program enters production: 60%

* Russia adds territory (with or without further military actions): 40%

* The U.S. enters a new ground war: 40%

* The U.S. will return to regularly using torture: 40%

* A carrier based drone fighter aircraft enters service: 35%

* All future Littoral Combat Ship purchases are canceled: 35%

* The U.S. ends military aid for Saudi Arabia and/or Egypt: 30%

* An A-10 fighter replacement program is commenced: 30%

* The U.S. recognizes greatly increased Chinese territory in the South China Sea: 30%

* There is a conventional war in Europe: 25%

* The U.S. commits at least several thousand U.S. ground troops to fighting ISIS: 25%

* The U.S. fires upon Iranian military ships or boats in the Persian Gulf: 25%

* NATO is dissolved: 20%

* The F-35 program is canceled or dramatically reduced in units purchased: 20%

* The F-22 program is reopened: 20%

* The U.S. bombs nuclear facilities in N. Korea: 15%

* The U.S. institutes a draft: 15%

* An isolated nuclear weapon (perhaps by a N. Korea or Iran, not necessarily a major nuclear power) is used: 10%

* A genuine nuclear war: 5%.

Immigration and Trade

* Increased border controls including an expanded border wall are enacted: 85%

* Anti-refugee laws are enacted: 60%

* The U.S. and the U.K. enter into a bilateral post-Brexit trade deal: 50%

* Increased deportations: 50%

* Tougher immigration laws: 45%

* The Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty is passed: 40%

* NAFTA is terminated: 25%

* The number of undocumented non-citizens is reduced by several million: 15%

Politics and Government

* Republicans lose control of one or both houses of Congress in the 2018 election: 40%

* Civil service and.or union protections for federal workers are greatly reduced: 15%

* Trump resigns for lack of interest: 10%

* Trump is impeached: 10%

* An anti-Trump conservative party elects or wins over at least one federal politician: 10%

* There is an attempted assassination of Trump that is a publicly known near miss: 10%

* Trump successfully abrogates the constitution: 5%

* Trump is assassinated: 5%

* Enough Republican Senators defect to the Democratic party to cause it to lose control: 5%

* The Democratic party schisms between a progressive and center-left wing: 5%

Economics

* The estate tax is reduced or eliminated: 90%

* Economic inequality increases in the U.S.: 90%

* Interest rates will increase: 90%

* Unemployment increases: 85%

* The number of uninsured Americans increases significantly: 80%

* The U.S. budget deficit grows substantially: 75%

* U.S. corporate tax rates are reduced: 75%

* Obama's new overtime regulations are scrapped: 75%

* There is a recession in the U.S.: 70%

* Section 8 housing subsidies and/or public housing expenditures are cut: 60%

* Oil prices will increase: 55%

* Social security and/or Medicare are materially cut: 55%

* Food stamps are cut: 55%

* Legal rights for private sector unions will be significantly weakened: 50%

* There is a crash by October of 2017: 35%

* Economic growth will be greater than under Obama's first term: 10%

Domestic Policy

* SCOTUS regains a conservative majority: 95%

* Environmental indicators stall or get worse: 65%

* Roe v. Wade is narrowed: 60%

* The federal government abandons efforts to protect transgender individuals: 60%

* Significant amounts of federal land is transferred to the states: 55%

* Some federal gun control legislation is repealed: 50%

* Trump replaces a Justice Kennedy or a liberal SCOTUS Justice: 45%

* The federal government cracks down in recreational marijuana: 35%

* Federal civil rights/voting rights legislation is weakened: 35%

* Roe v. Wade is overturned: 25%

* Major federal sentencing reform is enacted: 20%

* SCOTUS reverses it gay rights jurisprudence: 15%

Other

* There is a rise in U.S. hate crimes and discrimination: 90%

* There is a major first family scandal: 85%

* There is a major Trump cabinet scandal: 60%

* The plan to put a woman on U.S. currency is scraped: 55%

* Trump cronies are pardoned: 40%

Median Income By State and County County and The 2016 Presidential Election

Most of Appalachia and the South have low median incomes, while much of the rural Midwest that went for Trump in the last election is comparatively affluent, as illustrated below. New Mexico is the only low median income state that chose Clinton.

Trump Voters Still Delusional

People who voted for Trump in the last election remain likely to believe a lot of basic facts that are completely false or are absurd.

-40% of Trump voters insist that he won the national popular vote to only 49% who grant that Clinton won it and 11% who aren’t sure. 

-Only 53% of Trump voters think that California’s votes should be allowed to count in the national popular vote. 29% don’t think they should be allowed to count, and another 18% are unsure. 

There’s been a lot of attention to the way fake news has spread and been believed especially by Trump supporters and that’s borne out in our polling: 

-73% of Trump voters think that George Soros is paying protesters against Trump to only 6% who think that’s not true, and 21% who aren’t sure one way or the other. 

-14% of Trump supporters think Hillary Clinton is connected to a child sex ring run out of a Washington DC pizzeria. Another 32% aren’t sure one way or another, much as the North Carolinian who went to Washington to check it out last weekend said was the case for him. Only 54% of Trump voters expressly say they don’t think #Pizzagate is real. 

There’s also been a lot of discussion recently about how we might be in a post-fact world and we see some evidence of that coming through in our polling: 

-67% of Trump voters say that unemployment increased during the Obama administration, to only 20% who say it decreased. 

-Only 41% of Trump voters say that the stock market went up during the Obama administration. 39% say it went down, and another 19% say they’re not sure.

From Public Policy Polling.

Who cares what the truth is if you are rewarded by voters, and you can convince voters that things that are patently false are actually true?

George W. Bush looks "reality-based" compared to Trump and his supporters.

One of the biggest challenges for Democrats and liberals over the next four years will be figuring out how to get conservative perceptions of reality to correspond more closely to reality itself.

More On Urban v. Rural Turnout In 2016

A county level data set shows urban America having about the same levels of support for Clinton and Trump respectively in turnout and partisan affiliation as for Obama and Romney, but rural and small town America shifted dramatically in favor of Trump and away from Clinton, relative to Romney and Obama respectively. 

There are also unconfirmed hints that a lot of this shift comes from discouraged rural Democrats and higher turnout among lapsed rural Republicans, rather than primarily from unaffiliated voters shifting their allegiances. 

Thanks to Rob‘s tip I was able to download all county level returns. I sorted out the counties in Census designated Urbanized Areas with at least a quarter of a million population (2010). This allowed me to look at the results for big cities (Metro America) and Rural America (rural +smaller metros). 

1) Metro American actually voted slightly more Democratic than in 2012 both in terms of the share of the vote and the total number of Democratic votes cast. In 2012 Democrats won Metro America 55%-44% and in 2016 they won it 54%-41%. The Democratic margin increased from 11% to 13%. Republicans won almost exactly the same number of votes but their share fell as Democrats added 2 million more voters. I think that the speculation about disenchanted Democrats not turning out is looking unsubstantiated based on these aggregate numbers. It also looks like most of those Republicans who said they weren’t voting for Trump came back to the GOP. It was almost a carbon copy of the 2012 election here. 

2) In Rural America Republicans increased both their vote share and their votes cast. Republicans gained 2.3 million more votes in Rural America and Democrats lost 1.9 million votes there. In 2012 Republicans carried Rural America 56%-42% but in 2016 they won it by a landslide margin 59%-36%. Democrats lost Rural America in 2012 but they didn’t get crushed there and that was the difference. Democrats lost ~2 million and Republicans gained more than 2 million. Where these Obama voters who switched? Or was this a case of 2 million discouraged Democrats staying home and 2.3 lapsed voters showing up and voting Republican? We really need someone to go through a rural county voter file to get answers. YouGov suggested it was 85% lapsed voters but I regard this as something to be confirmed. 

3) Bottom line is that if you lived in Metro America 2016 shaped up almost identical to 2012. What surprises me most about that is that Romney was a much more qualified candidate than Trump and yet Trump matched Romney’s performance. There was essentially no penalty in Metro America for breaking norms and other things that voters supposedly cared about. When we look at Rural America we see a dramatic shift from 4 years earlier. Honestly anyone who fails to focus on the shift in rural and small metro America isn’t looking carefully at the data. It’s very clear where the electoral shift took place.

Regional Breakdowns: Metro America.

2012 Dem 61% Rep 36% 2016 Dem 59% Rep 38% Northeast Metro.

2012 Dem 55% Rep 43% 2016 Dem 52% Rep 42% Midwest Metro.

2012 Dem 49% Rep 50% 2016 Dem 49% Rep 47% South Metro.

2012 Dem 57% Rep 41% 2016 Dem 58% Rep 35% West Metro.

2012 Dem 55% Rep 44% 2016 Dem 54% Rep 41% USA Metro.

Note: In the South Metro areas Democrats did better mostly because Republicans lost 3% to minor parties.

Regional Breakdowns: Rural America.

2012 Dem 50% Rep 48% 2016 Dem 43% Rep 52% Northeast Rural.

2012 Dem 42% Rep 56% 2016 Dem 32% Rep 62% Midwest Rural.

2012 Dem 38% Rep 61% 2016 Dem 34% Rep 63% South Rural.

2012 Dem 44% Rep 53% 2016 Dem 40% Rep 52% West Rural.

2012 Dem 42% Rep 56% 2016 Dem 36% Rep 59% USA Rural.

Note: Rural South used to be an outlier, but rural Midwest voted almost identical in 2016.

Matthew Gunning on Facebook via Steve Greene (emphasis mine).

I would also be very interesting in seeing the breakdown, within "Rural America" between small cities on one hand, and truly rural and small town voters. Other data from Florida suggest that Trump made more gains with suburban voters than with truly rural voters, which gives the story a very different feel and meaning.

Another data point is how late deciding voters broke:

The polls were wrong, and now Donald Trump is the president-elect of the United States. Everyone knows this. 

Except that's not the whole picture. Some of the polls were wrong to a degree, yes, but there was also something at work in the final days of the election: People who decided late broke strongly for Donald Trump in the states that mattered, according to exit polls. And without this apparent late surge, Hillary Clinton would be our president-elect — not Trump. 

In fact, if you look at the four closest states where Clinton lost — or, in the case of Michigan, where she's expected to lose — exit polls show late-deciding voters in each of them went strongly for Trump in the final days. In Florida and Pennsylvania, late-deciders favored Trump by 17 points. In Michigan, they went for Trump by 11 points. In Wisconsin, they broke for Trump by a whopping 29 points, 59-30.

And these weren't small groups of voters. The number of undecided and third-party-supporting voters who were still free agents in the final week was as many as 1 in 8 voters nationally -- an uncharacteristically high number for the eve of an election. (As Nate Silver noted, it was just 3 percent in 2012.)  

In Florida, 11 percent said they decided in the final week. In Pennsylvania, it was 15 percent. And in Michigan and Wisconsin — states where Trump made a late push — fully 20 percent of voters said they arrived at their choice in the last seven days. 

This isn't terribly surprising. As Philip Bump notes, we kind of saw it coming in the closing days of the campaign — particularly as backers of Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson migrated to Trump.  

What caused these voters to decide so late and break even more for Trump? Could it have been WikiLeaks or James Comey? (We're skeptical.) Or maybe Trump running a more disciplined campaign down the stretch? Or maybe it was just undecided voters breaking for the opposition party, as they are reputed to do. It's not clear why, but it seems they broke solidly in Trump's direction.