Donald Trump’s Election Day victory will go down in history for many reasons.
“This is probably the most incredible election ever in that we’ve never had a time when someone lost the popular vote by so much, and won the presidency without going to a vote in the House of Representatives,” says historian, author and Hedgeye Demography Sector Head Neil Howe.
Howe is referring to the rare case where no candidate wins a majority in the Electoral College and the vote is put to the House of Representatives. This is called a contingent election. “We’ve had this two times before. Rutherford B Hayes in 1876, that was the election that ended the Reconstruction. And we had it with John Quincy Adams,” he says.
What happened?
Well, Trump attracted a new Republican party voter. In the video clip above, Howe explains the breakdown of how Trump won.
Here are a few takeaways.
- In 2012, the gap between the percentage of voters for Democrats versus Republicans in households making $50,000 or less was 12 percentage points wide. Trump halved that gap to 6 or 7 percentage points
- The share rural voters going to the GOP continues to climb; 53% for McCain versus Obama; 60% for Romney versus Obama; 67% for Trump versus Clinton.
- “Hillary piled up all these superfluous votes in New Jersey and California and New York. But it didn’t do any good.”
- Trump got a higher share of Millennial voters than Republicans did in 2012.
- More African Americans and Hispanics voted for Trump than for Romney. “Even though a lot of that had to do with Clinton rather than Obama I’m sure,” Howe says.
All of this means: “Trump is taking the GOP and radically shifting it to a lower income, lower socioeconomic base, which is increasingly rural,” Howe says. “It gets to the future of the party. Is it going to be Trump’s party or is it going to be the high and dry neoliberal globalist party?”
We’ll see. One thing is certain. It’s going to be an interesting four years.
