National Post (National Edition)
Minority vote cost election, report says
Clinton didn’t retain Obama’s base
Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election partially due to her poor performance among African-American, Latino and Asian voters, according to a report prepared by Canada’s embassy in Washington. The Nov. 11 report, sent just three days after the 2016 U.S. election, offers a detailed look at how the embassy was explaining Donald Trump’s surprise victory to Ottawa.
“Clinton fell behind Obama’s showing among African-Americans by 5 points, among Hispanics by 6 points, and among Asians by 12 points. Her underperformance with these communities rendered Mr. Trump’s over-performance with whites that much more significant,” reads the report, drafted by embassy staffer Meaghan Sunderland.
Postmedia obtained the report using an access to information request. The report was submitted to David MacNaughton, Canada’s ambassador to the United States, and David Morrison, assistant deputy minister for the Americas with Global Affairs Canada.
The report focuses on the demographics of Trump and Clinton supporters based on early voter and exit polls. It emphasizes that Trump primarily had white voters to thank for his victory, although his support among them could have been overcome if Clinton had been more popular among those demographic groups who had backed Obama.
“White voters make up 70 per cent of the U.S. electorate (down from 84 per cent in 1984) and they overwhelmingly preferred Trump over Clinton (58 per cent to 37 per cent). This in itself is not terribly surprising, since Mitt Romney won whites by only one point less in 2012.
But if Hillary Clinton was looking to make up for that difference with an outpouring of support from minorities, that support didn’t manifest itself sufficiently,” wrote Sunderland.
Global Affairs Canada did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Since their election loss in November, Democratic partisans, Hillary Clinton chief among them, have pointed to a number of factors to explain her loss. This past week, Clinton cited Russian hacking, and the actions of FBI director James Comey as reasons why she lost the 2016 election. After the Republicans lost the 2012 election they commissioned a detailed post-mortem into how they went wrong. The Democrats have so far resisted any attempt for serious introspection, preferring to blame outside forces for their loss.
The Canadian embassy report has no such qualms. It points to exit polls indicating voters wanted a candidate who could bring change.
It flags an exit poll analysis from ABC News showing that 23 per cent of those who voted for Trump didn’t think he was qualified to be president, while 20 per cent viewed him unfavourably. It argued that the desire for change was more important to voters than any concerns they had about Trump himself.
The Canadian report shows that many groups Clinton was hoping to win did not show up for her on election day. Young voters backed Clinton overwhelmingly, but to a lesser extent than they backed Obama. Female voters backed Clinton to about the same degree as they did Obama, despite the fact that her victory would have made her the first female president of the United States.
In the comment section, Sunderland cites a pundit pointing out that the Democrats’ focus on educated, urban populations in traditional red states backfired. She writes that their lack of focus on white workingclass people may have hurt them in particular.
“This election, one-third of the 700 counties that twice supported Obama flipped to support Trump. Those counties are, on average, 81 per cent white,” wrote Sunderland.