It has been 24 hours since most of the results of Tuesday’s election and we’ve heard a lot about how voters in rural areas turned out to vote for president-elect Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton and help tip the scales on Maine ballot questions.
Political correspondent Steve Mistler took a deep dive into the numbers and spoke with Nora Flaherty.
Nora: You’ve been digging into the election returns to see if the numbers tell us a story of the election. What have you found?
Steve: Nationally the diagnosis of Trump’s win pointed to a surge in support from working-class whites who are anxious about jobs and demographic changes. It appears to be no different in Maine.
Trump won all of the interior of Maine, including nine of the state’s 16 counties. Clinton won most of the more affluent coastal areas. He also won rural areas that have voted for Democratic presidential candidates before.
For example, President Barack Obama won Maine statewide by 16 points four years ago. He won every county except Piscataquis. Clinton won Maine by three points and she lost in dozens of places that Obama won.
In Somerset County, according to the U.S. Census, 15 percent of residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with nearly 28 percent in Maine. The county is 97 percent white — whiter than all of Maine.
Obama edged Mitt Romney in Somerset in 2012 by about two percentage points. But Trump won it by nearly 13.
If you drill down even further and pick the town of Madison, which lost a major employer when the paper mill there shut down in the May, in 2008 and 2012 the town went for Obama. This year it went for Trump: 57 percent to 37 percent.
You can see these kind of results all over the country. Take the Rust Belt: Obama won Youngstown, Ohio, by 12 points. Clinton and Trump battled to a draw.
Nora: I’ve read that Clinton suffered from an enthusiasm gap. Was that the case in Maine?
Steve: It looks that way. Close to 740,000 people voted in the presidential election this year, about 30,000 more than four years ago. That’s a pretty high turnout.
Turnout didn’t appear to help Clinton, but it appears to have helped Trump. Clinton got 44,000 fewer votes than Obama did four years ago, and Trump got 43,000 more than Romney.
If you overlay that nationally, Clinton received 5 million fewer votes than Obama did four years ago, and Trump received 1 million less than Romney.
Take, for instance, Question 5, which swaps Maine’s election system for ranked-choice voting. When we talked to voters, some people were confused by it and said they either voted against it or just skipped the question.
However, nearly 27,000 more people voted for ranked-choice, despite the confusion, than for Clinton.
The divide was even wider for Question 4, which raises the minimum wage. Clinton received nearly 60,000 fewer votes than those who voted for Question 4. And she even supports raising the federal minimum wage to the same dollar amount.
Trump suggested at one point that there should not be a minimum wage.
Incidentally, many rural parts of the state favored Question 4.
Nora: I’ve wondered if Question 3, which would have strengthened background checks on gun sales, helped with the rural voter turnout, as well Trump or congressman Bruce Poliquin. Is that conclusion in the data?
Steve: More Mainers voted on Question 3 than anything else on the statewide ballot — even more than the presidential election.
You could certainly say that the parts of the state that supported Trump also opposed Question 3. The maps are almost identical to the presidential one: People who voted yes for Question 3 were along the coast and southern regions of the state, those who voted against it were everywhere else.
More people voted against Question 3 than voted for Trump — 56,000 more.
Gun control and stronger background checks were part of Clinton’s policy platform. So it’s possible Trump benefited from the anti-Question 3 vote.
You could argue Poliquin benefited, too, especially since Emily Cain backed Clinton.
But you could also make a strong case that Poliquin’s enthusiastic public support for what remains of the manufacturing jobs in the 2nd Congressional District was a bigger factor.
After all, Poliquin was speaking to the same working-class voters that turned out for Trump and who previously turned out for Democrats, including Obama just four years ago.
This interview has been edited for clarity
