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Around 7:22 p.m. on November 8, the night of the 2016 presidential election, a member of Republican candidate Donald Trump's campaign team told CNN reporter Jim Acosta: "It will take a miracle for us to win." The Trump campaign was not alone in this view. Most political observers also expected a win by Trump's Democratic rival, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. The Clinton campaign staff certainly did: They were "all smiles" at 5 p.m., when a Boston Globe reporter arrived at the scene of their anticipated victory party.1
As the night went on, all of this would change. Trump's success in key battleground states-Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin-gave him the presidency, with an expected 306 Electoral College votes against Clinton's 232.2 But Clinton led in the popular vote and, as the days after the election passed, her vote share continued to grow. Ultimately, she won the popular vote by 2.1 points (48.0 to 45.9 percent), or almost 2.9 million people. The divergence between Clinton's popular-vote victory and her Electoral College defeat was extraordinary. The last time popular and electoral outcomes had differed, in the 2000 election, the margins of victory according to both counts had been considerably narrower: Then-Vice-President Al Gore won the popular vote by about half a point, while losing the Electoral College to George W. Bush by only five votes.
There is, then, no simple way to interpret the election outcome. Of course, Trump was the clear victor given the rules of U.S. presidential elections. But he also received many fewer popular votes than Clinton. Any explanation must be able to account for both of these facts. Our analysis highlights three key factors-two that involved the broader social, economic, and political conditions that the candidates faced, and one that resulted from choices made during the campaign itself. The first factor consists of underlying political and economic fundamentals, which include Democratic president Barack Obama's 2016 approval ratings and the economy's growth rate. These were quite consistent with Clinton's popular-vote victory.
To understand how Trump won the Electoral College, we must consider two other interrelated factors. The second factor is increasing racial and ethnic polarization in the Democratic and Republican party coalitions. Particularly during Obama's presidency, voters increasingly sorted themselves by party...