Oddity In The 2016 Presidential Election

The outcome of 2016 United States presidential election astonished voters and political scientists alike; this lead voters and many political scientists to believe that something unusual must have happened in the 2016 United States presidential election that eventually lead to Trump winning. After almost a year and a half to review data gathered during and after the election, many political scientists have come to the conclusion that 2016 is “surely the most unusual [election] in modern American history” . While many others now claim that the 2016 election fits the patterns that would classify it as ordinary or normal.
Political scientist such as Mellow points out a number of election-specific anomalies that when combined may account for trumps …show more content…
This would suggest that 2016 was not a year of realignment, rather it was an oddity due to there still being consistency in the 2016 congressional elections. This can be seen in favorability ratings, in 2012 Romney was disliked by 8% of his own party. In 2016 Trump was disliked by 30% of his own party, despite the 22% jump in disapproval. 97% of republican’s incumbents and 99% of democrat’s incumbents were reelected to the House, while 91% of incumbent republicans and 100% of incumbent democrats were reelected in the Senate. This aligns with a classic article by David Mayhew (1974), where he explains that many Incumbents choose to insulate themselves from national-level issues, scandal, presidential popularity, and other national conditions; therefore if 2016 was a year of realignment we would see more incumbents stepping down not being reelected. In 2016 we see the continued relationship between incumbency and electoral outcomes, as expected the relationship between incumbency status and reelection has not changed. In 2016 we also see the continued decline of vote advantage of incumbency, in 2000 the value of incumbency was 8.6 since then we have seen the numbers steadily decline to 2.4 in 2016 . This could be because of the consistent weakening of party loyalties that have been seen since the 1960’s, the value of the personal vote has significantly declined. This lead to the expansion of resources in hopes of reaching new constituents. Unfortunately, “deeper party divisions in the public have substantially reduced the number of voters susceptible to personal cross-party appeals” . This can be seen in Mayhew’s

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