Would any Republican other than Donald Trump have defeated Hillary Clinton and become the 45th president? It’s an compelling question, one that has no clear answer but one that has implications for future policy.
Last fall, I shared the common view that Clinton was the only Democrat who could lose to Trump, and Trump was the only Republican who could lose to Clinton. Given that elections are a zero-sum game because one candidate has to win, that view was more of a resentment than a prophecy.
But that result was also based on polls conducted in the spring, before Trump eliminated his remaining Republican opponents in the May 3 Indiana primary. National polls and some state polls showed Marco Rubio with a wider lead over Clinton than Trump, with John Kasich having an even wider lead and Ted Cruz slightly better.
It made sense at the time. Trump had significantly higher negative ratings, especially among white college graduates, who voted for Mitt Romney 56 percent to 42 percent in 2012. How could he hope to win without similar support?
Now we have an answer to that question. Spring polls seemed to predict the electorate would look much like it did in 2012. The signs that Trump would do significantly better than Romney among whites without a college degree were not very clear, especially after his controversial comments caused his overall ratings to drop.
In the fall, few polls showed any surges that would decide the election in what I called the “Midwest”—the counties outside metropolitan areas with more than a million people, in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and (sort of, midwestern) Pennsylvania—the states that carried Barack Obama’s 64 electoral votes in 2012 and Trump in 2016.
Those out-of-state areas followed the same trends as Iowa, where none of its 99 counties are in a metropolitan area with more than a million people and whose six electoral votes went to Obama and Trump. There, polls showed Trump opening up significant leads over Clinton in mid-September. In Iowa and out-of-state polls, Trump won by a larger percentage than George W. Bush did in 2004, while Clinton trailed Obama’s 2012 results—12 points behind out-of-state Ohio, 11 points behind out-of-state Iowa and out-of-state Michigan, 9 points behind out-of-state Wisconsin and 8 points behind out-of-state Pennsylvania.
These are places with many whites without college degrees and few blacks, Latinos and Asians. Trump’s views on trade and immigration — which differ markedly from those of other Republicans — were certainly partly responsible for his out-of-state advantage, and it seems unlikely that another Republican candidate could match them.
There were two other factors at play that led to Democratic gains in the same areas in the 1970s. One was honesty. The Midwest had turned against Richard Nixon’s Republicans in the Watergate years, and this year those voters responded similarly to Clinton’s email violations and lies. That helped Trump, although it probably would have helped any other Republican candidate.
The second factor was dovishness. The upper Midwest has long been the most isolationist part of the country. In the 1970s, voters there reacted against Republican support for the Vietnam War. This year, they seem to have shifted toward Trump, who opposed military interventions supported by other Republicans. It seems unlikely that another Republican candidate could repeat that appeal.
So I reluctantly conclude that no other Republican could have won, at least not as well as Trump did. Yes, others would have done better among white college graduates, whom Trump won by a mere 49 to 45 percent, and they would have done much better among groups with high levels of social connections, such as Mormons in Utah and Dutch Americans in metropolitan Grand Rapids, Michigan.
But Trump saw, or inadvertently seized, an opportunity that only a few political analysts had seen — the blogger Steve Sailer back in 2001, RealClearPolitics’ Sean Trende in a 2013 series of articles, and FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten in his analysis of Republican Joni Ernst’s sweeping victory in the 2014 Iowa Senate race. I’ve made similar observations, but they weren’t as precise.
That opening was the fact that Democrats took for granted their above-average support from out-of-state voters without college degrees in their determination to build a recent “rising” majority of blacks, Latinos, single women, and millennials. They assumed that Obama’s out-of-state voters were locked into the Democratic Party and didn’t need any special attention. It turns out they didn’t, but they did.
So the familiar party lines of the last 20 years have been redrawn, and now we have a more restrained Republican Party and a Democratic Party cocooned in beach and campus cocoons. We’ll see how that works out.
