popular vote totals for 2016 presidential election

For this project, we developed original turnout and support estimates by combining a multitude of publicly available data sources including the American Communities Survey (ACS), the November supplement of the Current Population Survey (CPS), the American National Election Study (ANES), the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey (CCES), our own post-election polling, and voter files from several states. The most vexing issue for electoral analysts exploring these voting trends is determining which, if any, of the existing data sources provide the best and most reliable information on vote composition, turnout, and support rates.

For a thorough analysis of what determined the vote, the recently established Democracy Fund Voter Study Group produced an excellent series of papers, including one by two of the authors of this report, examining the Trump and Clinton coalitions and the issues and social beliefs that shaped people’s voting decisions in 2016.

The second category focuses primarily on public opinion data and other qualitative research methodologies to see how views of the candidates, campaign dynamics, and specific attitudes and policy beliefs among voters shaped the overall vote choice.įor the purposes of this paper we are examining the former category, with a particular focus on vote composition, turnout, and party support rates by demographic group, to get a more precise read on what actually happened in the vote itself in 2016. In the first category are items including vote composition, or the percentage of various demographic groups as a share of all voters turnout rates, or the percentage of eligible voters in various demographic groups that actually voted support rates, or support for the Democratic or Republican presidential candidate by demographic group and shifts, or increases or decreases in vote composition, turnout, and support rates compared to past elections for various demographic groups. In the immediate aftermath of the election, and over the ensuing months, electoral analysts have tried to assess two main components of how the 2016 election unfolded: the breakdown of the vote itself and the motivations for these vote choices. Although Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton won a plurality of the national popular vote-48.2 percent-with a nearly 3-million vote margin, Donald Trump carried 30 states and won the Electoral College vote by a 304-to-227 margin. The unprecedented and largely unanticipated election of Republican candidate Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2016 set off intense debates about how his victory was achieved and which factors mattered most in determining the outcome.

Popular vote totals for 2016 presidential election