The 2016 election outcome may have been a shocker to many people, but not to statistician Salil Mehta, faculty for Columbia’s Master of Science in Applied Analytics program.
Mehta looked at the voting patterns across the country, to try to find data that explained the surprising election outcome.The economic data points with potential electoral consequences fall into a few broad types.
The first are those red states that voted for Trump where growth and GDP were below the national rate. Mehta explains: “Republican states had a collective GDP per capita (chained to 2009 dollars) of $45,000, which is fine relative to some other nations; but for Democratic states it was nearly 25 percent higher at $57,000.” Those doing better economically tended to vote status quo/incumbent, while those doing worse tended to vote for the change/challenger candidate.
Along the same lines, Mehta noted that “Republican states saw only a 2.7 percentage point improvement in unemployment, since the last election, while Democrat states saw a 3.6 percentage point improvement.”
Read more at Bloomberg.
