Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton raised at least 18.9 percent more than Obama did from donors giving more than $200, but won 1.6 percent less of the two-party vote. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
BY: ANDREW MAYERSOHN
The 2016 presidential election was decided in flyover country. Though Democrat Hillary Clinton currently leads the popular vote count by more than 900,000, Donald Trump's surprising strength in the swing states of the Midwest proved decisive in the electoral college. As pollsters puzzle out why they missed the Rust Belt's right turn, commentators have speculated that everything from yard signs to Twitter polls should have hinted at Clinton's weakness there.
Campaign finance data are some of the earliest indicators we have about electoral strength. Did changes in Clinton's 2016 state-by-state fundraising versus President Obama's in 2012 offer any clues or foreshadow voting patterns?
Clinton's biggest decline in donations relative to Obama came in his home state of Illinois. Though she herself was born in Chicago, Clinton raised $3.8 million less than he did statewide. In percentage terms, her biggest drop-off was in Vermont (down 59.7 percent from what Obama raised), where she had to compete for donors' affections with her primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders, for much of the cycle. While Clinton's performance on Election Day didn't suffer in Illinois, her vote share in Vermont was 3 percentage points smaller than Obama's 2012 margin. (Note: Through Oct. 19, Clinton had raised 18.9 percent more than Obama did from donors giving more than $200; she won 1.6 percent less of the votes cast for a Republican or Democrat than he did. Increases and decreases in individual states should be measured against those benchmarks.)
Clinton's financial gains were greatest in her adopted home states of New York, where she raised almost $56.6 million to Obama's $37 million, and Arkansas, where she nearly tripled Obama's paltry 2012 total of $774,327. Neither state matched its dollars with votes, though. Her 35.8 percent of the two-party vote in Arkansas was even worse than Obama's 37.9 percent, and she ran 3.2 percentage points worse in New York than Obama did. Clinton did out-raise Obama in two major states where her Election Day performance also improved: California (29.5 percent more donations than Obama, 3.2 percent increase in two-party vote share) and Texas (27 percent and 3.3 percent).
None of the above is exactly a battleground, though. How did Clinton's fundraising fare in the states that cost her the election?
The swing states that showed the largest declines in the Democratic share of the two-party vote (four points or more) from 2012 to 2016 were Iowa, Maine, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Among those, Iowa and Ohio saw modest rises in donations to Clinton (4.1 percent and 18.1 percent), both smaller than her national increase. Michigan produced a small decline, down 6.5 percent, while Maine and Wisconsin saw much more significant drop-offs, down 27.4 percent and 23.4 percent respectively, the largest declines among states where Clinton received at least $1 million in itemized donations. For what it's worth, Wisconsin's losing Democratic Senate candidate Russ Feingold didn't have the same problem, raising nearly twice as much from his home state as 2012's victorious nominee, Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin.
Of course, we wouldn't expect campaign finance data to capture the big story of Democratic losses since 2012: a much smaller margin of victory among low-income voters. According to exit polls, Clinton won 53 percent of people making under $50,000 a year, a substantial decline from Obama's 60 percent. Few of these voters, we'd guess, make the campaign contributions of more than $200 necessary to show up in FEC disclosure forms.
(Note: The data in this post refers only to funds raised for Clinton's and Obama's campaign committees, not for super PACs supporting them.)