Comparison Of Hilary Clinton And Donald Trump

In 2016 the two candidates, Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump, saw themselves being able to bridge the divide between red and blue. Clinton ran as a Democrat, but her past shows that she used to be a strong republican. As for Trump, he ran as a Republican, but he preaches about not choosing a side, rather just choosing what is best for America.
In comparison to the 2008 election, the divide between parties hardly moved. From the 2004 election to the 2008 election, America was more divided than ever. One would think that the trend would continue, but whatever Trump and Clinton preached must have changed something in America. As a nation, the 2016 election was a close one. However, locally the election was more divided than ever. In 2008, the percentage of voters that lived in counties where either candidate won by 20 or more points was 47.6%. For this election, a whopping 60.4% of voters lived in landslide counties. Furthermore, not many counties switched parties entirely – only 10%. Trump managed to flip 217 counties while Clinton only switched 30. For the most part, voters (and counties as a whole) are fairly set on what party they claim. Only 12% of the nation’s counties switched parties from

What I learned from my research was that as actual politicians move more to the left or the right, Americans are forced to choose a side; which in turn makes them appear more polarized. Culture War applied Abrams and Fiorina’s suggestion of looking at party registration and found that the difference between democrat and republican registrations were hardly worth noting. If anything, they found that in both red and blue states, self-identified independents were the largest group. Bishop seems to completely disregard the idea of independents because he hardly mentions them, if at