Eight years later, people are still getting the 2016 election wrong

After an election, politicians, citizens and journalists look for the lessons: What groups and ideas prevailed? What messages and issues resonated with the electorate, and which ones tanked? What does the result tell us about the priorities and values of the nation? After a surprising election result like we saw in 2016, these questions seemed especially pressing. Political analysts wondered what they’d missed before Trump’s unexpected victory and got to work trying to understand the forces behind it. As a result, we got lots of pieces about “forgotten Americans,” Midwestern diners and Democrats supposedly losing their way.

Collectively, we have massively overlearned those lessons. For one thing, Trump didn’t actually win the popular vote in 2016. There’s at least as much to be gained from speaking to voters who voted for someone else as from those who cast a ballot for Trump. But that’s not how things have unfolded, and a few lessons from 2016 have been deeply absorbed by the political world, driving decisions in 2024 based on ideas that may or may not have even been true nearly a decade ago. Let’s go through some of those main lessons and the problems with continuing to believe them.

After Trump’s 2016 victory, pundits, journalists and experienced politicians were convinced that Hillary Clinton lost because she championed the needs of women, people of color, LGBTQ voters and others, but never specifically spoke to the needs of working class whites. The evidence for this argument was never very strong, but it exerted an outsize impact on Democrats going into the 2020 contest, persuading many that they needed to nominate a moderate, white, male candidate. President Joe Biden’s narrow victory only reinforced this belief among many Democrats.

It’s not entirely clear that “identity politics” is even the liability that it was made out to be after 2016.

Arguably, this has made it harder for Democrats to even consider replacing Biden, despite the fact that it might be good to at least have a backup plan for an octogenarian nominee. But white, Christian, straight men in the Democratic Party who enjoy the trust and support of Black politicians and voters aren’t exactly plentiful. Many of the party’s other rising stars are part of historically underrepresented groups — women; or racial, ethnic or sexual minorities — and nearly all are to Biden’s left. And nominating, say, California Gov. Gavin Newsom over Vice President Kamala Harris would lead to some very divisive and difficult arguments within the party.

What’s more, it’s not entirely clear that “identity politics” is even the liability that it was made out to be after 2016. Clinton won the popular vote after Barack Obama won a majority twice (a feat accomplished only three times in the previous century, by Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan). The majority of Americans support DEI initiatives. Race, gender and cultural questions are all complex and fraught, but as the country grows more diverse, the prospects for a more diverse set of presidential candidates have grown as well.

What made Trump’s victory even more significant was that he had succeeded where past Republicans — presumably with wider appeal — had failed. Many conservative Republican activists and voters backed John McCain and Mitt Romney very reluctantly, after others in the party made the case that they needed a more mainstream nominee in order to capture swing voters or even a few Democrats. They both lost anyway.

The argument that candidates need to be “electable” has typically carried less weight among Republicans than among Democrats. But the losses of “electable” candidates like McCain and Romney, followed by the victory of a candidate most pundits dismissed as unelectable, weakened that argument’s buy-in among Republicans even further. Recent surveys of county chairs demonstrate that Republicans are far more interested in nominating a candidate they agree with, and less interested in one whom people will vote for, than Democrats are.

This lack of interest in electability likely has been costly to the GOP.

This lack of interest in electability likely has been costly to the GOP. Not only did Trump likely underperform how most other Republican candidates would have done in 2016 and 2020, but a greater emphasis on nominating electable candidates for House, Senate and governor’s races probably would have led to fewer Republican defeats in the 2022 midterm elections. Now, even as Trump seemingly coasts to the nomination, polls suggest that another Republican, like Nikki Haley, could defeat Biden easily this year, probably bringing along control of the House and Senate.

Because Trump went from punchline to president-elect in less than 18 months, it’s easy to imagine that he brings a magic formula for appealing to the masses. He also benefits from the vestiges of an era in which personality was seen as equally important — maybe even more important — than ideology or party label. Trump’s inroads into traditionally Democratic constituencies, like noncollege white voters in the Midwest, made it easy to slot him into the kinds of narratives that previously emerged about Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton — two presidents renowned for their charisma and their connection with voters.

But Trump has never commanded a national majority, not in polls nor at the ballot box. Yes, his 2016 victory was a surprise, but as already mentioned, he actually underperformed political science forecasts of how a more typical Republican would have performed that year. And on top of that, the 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2023 elections have all been fairly poor showings for the Republican Party. In the 2022 midterms, for example, with an unpopular Democrat in the White House and widespread economic concerns, there should have been a “red wave.” Instead, Trump-style politics, especially election denialism, played a key role as Republicans took just a handful of House seats, lost a Senate seat, and lost a number of state legislatures and gubernatorial contests.

As Jamelle Bouie recently noted, “If Trump has a political superpower, it’s that other people believe that he has political superpowers.” This mistaken belief has real-world stakes. If we believe Trump is an electoral juggernaut with a strong following, that makes it even more difficult to think about holding him accountable for the numerous crimes with which he has been charged. Reversing the political majority and minority in this country, where distrust and dissatisfaction with institutions have become widespread, makes the situation even more unsustainable. And it undermines the idea of electoral competition — the basis of legitimate opposition and accountability — by pushing the Republicans to embrace positions that are further and further away from what most voters actually want.

Interestingly, if one of the patterns of the past few years has been Trump underperforming, another has been Biden overperforming, from the primaries of early 2020 right through to the present. Yet somehow, this doesn’t seem to be among the conclusions people draw from this era. The lessons we learn from elections are important: They give us a way of saying what a very large and diverse multiracial democracy “wants” and what it stands for. But it’s important that those lessons are grounded in fact rather than mythology.