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“It’s a very bad thing, Twitter’s role in that. If it’s true that he wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Twitter, then yeah, I’m sorry.”
— Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, quoted by the New York Times, on Donald Trump’s claim he wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Twitter.
10%
Pew Research: “Those who study politics have long known that a person’s party affiliation is a strong predictor of how they will vote and what their opinions will be on most political issues. Some of the power of partisanship comes from its relative immutability: Most people remain loyal to a political party. … But over a 15-month period encompassing the 2016 presidential campaign, about 10% of Republicans and Democrats ‘defected’ from their parties to the opposing party.”
300,000
Associated Press: “By one estimate, 300,000 eligible voters in the state lacked valid photo IDs heading into the election; it is unknown how many people did not vote because they didn’t have proper identification. But it is not hard to find the Navy veteran whose out-of-state driver’s license did not suffice, or the dying woman whose license had expired, or the recent graduate whose student ID was deficient.”
59.6%
Pew Research: “The black voter turnout rate declined for the first time in 20 years in a presidential election, falling to 59.6% in 2016 after reaching a record-high 66.6% in 2012. The 7-percentage-point decline from the previous presidential election is the largest on record for blacks. (It’s also the largest percentage-point decline among any racial or ethnic group since white voter turnout dropped from 70.2% in 1992 to 60.7% in 1996.) The number of black voters also declined, falling by about 765,000 to 16.4 million in 2016, representing a sharp reversal from 2012. With Barack Obama on the ballot that year, the black voter turnout rate surpassed that of whites for the first time. Among whites, the 65.3% turnout rate in 2016 represented a slight increase from 64.1% in 2012.”
164
Number of times candidate Donald Trump mentioned Wikileaks in the last 30 days of the campaign according to ThinkProgress, which “calculated the number by reviewing transcripts of Trump’s speeches, media appearances and debates over the last 30 days of the campaign.”
48%
Of Americans said a family member shared with them a false story that they believed to be true; 32% said they avoided talking politics with family because they supported a different candidate; 31% said they got into a heated argument with family or friends for supporting a different candidate; 22% reported being harassed for their political beliefs; and 17% said they blocked or unfriended someone on Facebook or another social-media platform because of the presidential election, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
2,864,974
Margin that Hillary Clinton had over Donald Trump in the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election, with voting results now certified in all 50 states, according to the Cook Political Report.
Perhaps the most important lesson is that any major party nominee, no matter how seemingly awful or unpopular, has a shot at winning. This is a lesson not so much for the general election campaigns, but for the parties: Be careful whom you nominate. Pick someone you’d be comfortable seeing in office. You’d be surprised who can lose. And who can win.
200
Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) “was so eager to celebrate Hillary Clinton’s presidential inauguration, he booked 200 hotel rooms in DC for family, friends and supporters of his possible future bid for the presidency,” the New York Post reports.
56
The Cook Political Report compiles 56 interesting observations about the 2016 presidential election. Here’s a sample: Trump won the White House by winning 76 percent of counties with a Cracker Barrel Old Country Store and 22 percent of counties with a Whole Foods Market. This 54-percent gap is the widest ever recorded. When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, it was 19 percent; when George W. Bush was elected in 2000, it was 31 percent; and when Barack Obama was elected in 2008, it was 43 percent.
