Demographics and the 2016 Election Scenarios
Sean Trende & David Byler: Demographics and the 2016 Election Scenarios
Here is a fun table where you can adjust the GOP nominee’s percentage of the vote from whites, african-americans, hispanics and asians/others, and turnout for each racial group, to see how it would change the electoral college totals. With the GOP nominees using immigrants as pinatas, it seems unlikely that the GOP nominee will be able to even match Romney’s dismal showing with Hispanics, much less surpass it. This means, even if African-American turnout drops significantly and the GOP % of the African-American vote bounces back up to 10% with Obama off the ticket, that the GOP would have to boost its share of the white vote to over 62% to win, unless white voters turn out in significantly higher numbers than they did in 2012. That’s right, the GOP nominee can’t win unless Hillary Clinton does significantly worse with white voters than Barack Obama did in 2012 when unemployment was much higher than it is now. Good luck finding a realistic scenario which gets the GOP to 270 electoral votes!