Too many Barack Obama voters went for Donald Trump, and not Hillary Clinton as expected, according to a new analysis by Democratic strategists that suggests the vote flipping actually accounted for the election upset.
Matt Canter, senior vice president of Democratic political firm Global Strategy Group, told McClatchy News that Trump's ability to flip voters from Obama accounted for 70 percent of Clinton's failure in the election.
"We have to make sure we learn the right lesson from 2016, that we don't just draw the lesson that makes us feel good at night, make us sleep well at night," said Canter.
McClatchy said Canter and other Global Strategy Group members delivered a detailed report of their findings to legislators and Democratic operatives in an effort to educate party leaders about what the data says really happened in last year's election.
A New York Times examination in March came to a similar conclusion that Clinton failed the hold on to the coalition that made Obama president in 2008 and 2012, short circuiting the popular notion that her loss was all about lack of turnout.
"To the extent Democratic turnout was weak, it was mainly among black voters. Even there, the scale of Democratic weakness has been exaggerated," the Times' Nick Cohn. "Instead, it's clear that large numbers of white, working-class voters shifted from the Democrats to Mr. Trump."
"Overall, almost one in four of President Obama's 2012 white working-class supporters defected from the Democrats in 2016, either supporting Mr. Trump or voting for a third-party candidate," said Cohn.
Last week, a new University of Virginia Center for Politics poll also pointed to Trump being able to erode Obama support and turn it into his own. UVA Today reported that the poll of 1,000 Trump voters conducted by the Center by Public Opinion Strategies found that 20 percent had voted for Obama at least once.
The survey said 43 percent of the respondents said that their Trump vote was more against Clinton than for Trump.
McClatchy reported that some Democrats point out even with those problems, if African-American turnout in Michigan and Florida had matched 2012 levels, they could have still run the race. But Canter disagreed.
"This idea that Democrats can somehow ignore this constituency and just turn out more of our voters, the math doesn't work," Canter told McClatchy. "We have to do both."
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