Data Shows declines in Democratic votes in African American neighborhoods reflect Clinton's inability to excite Black Votary
/One of Hillary Clinton’s early warning signs came out of West Philadelphia.
When results started pouring in from the predominately black Democratic stronghold, her numbers were good — her vote share north of 95 percent — but not good enough. She would need to turn out more voters there to counteract the flood of Republican votes coming from other parts of the largely rural state, especially in the face of growing evidence that Donald Trump was seeing a Republican surge.
Among the city’s wards that are more than 75 percent African American, Trump got about 1,300 — or 31 percent — more votes than Romney. Clinton saw a mild decline, earning 7 percent — about 16,000 — fewer votes than President Obama did in 2012.
These neighborhoods — and Philadelphia as a whole — are without a doubt significant for Democrats. Pennsylvania is a large swing state, holding 20 electoral votes. Philadelphia, alongside a few other Democratic pockets such as central Pittsburgh, needed to deliver the party enough votes to counter the vast conservative population across the state. Since 1992, these areas had been enough for Democrats — until Tuesday.
However, Clinton’s small losses and Trump’s modest gains in Philadelphia did not decide the election. Had Clinton done as well as Obama there, she still would not have won Pennsylvania, which she lost by about 65,000 votes. And even if Clinton had won Pennsylvania, Trump would have still passed the 270-electoral-vote threshold to win the presidency.
But this pattern of decreased turnout within minority areas and a surge of Trump support across the boards reflects what was happening elsewhere in the country.
In most of the counties nationwide with a nonwhite majority — such as Philadelphia County — Clinton saw a decline in vote totals of 10 percent or more (what we’ll call “significant”) from Obama’s performance in 2012. In most of these counties, Republican votes stayed steady, so the Democratic vote decline reflected a decline in turnout. In a fifth of these counties, Republicans saw small gains in the total number of votes, but since these areas are almost entirely Democratic, that translated into significant percentage gains.
Unsurprisingly, in whiter (and almost always, more conservative) areas, these changes were even more drastic. In nearly half of these counties, Trump saw a significant increase in votes over 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney, and in three-quarters of them, Clinton saw a significant decrease. A good number of votes — three times more than in 2012 — also went to third-party candidates.
Putting these effects — declining Democratic turnout and increasing Republican persuasion — together, the pattern is clear: In left-leaning counties, Clinton performed worse than Obama, and in right-leaning counties, Trump performed better than Romney.
In face of this evidence, it’s hard to pin Clinton’s defeat on a single factor. There was a turnout problem — the declines in Democratic votes in African American neighborhoods reflect her inability to excite that portion of her base, not a swing toward Trump — a fact that’s reinforced by exit polling among that group.
But it certainly wasn’t only a turnout problem. Exit polls show Clinton losing badly among less-educated, working-class whites — a large swath of the American population with whom Obama did much better. As a result, states in the upper Midwest that Obama carried and were expected to go to Clinton fell to Trump.
Now that the election has left the Democratic Party without the presidency, without the Senate and without the House, the party’s focus will soon shift to its path moving forward — which of these groups they’ll attempt to reenergize and win back.
