Talk Elections

This one is a mystery to me. Trump even won a county there, which no Republican has been able to do since Reagan.

Trump was the first Republican nominee since Ford or H.W Bush who was not a hard line Christian theocrat. This certainly helped in the Upper Midwest, West Coast, Northeast and especially New England, which have been disgusted by GOP social Conservatism.

Ah yes, Dole, McCain, and Romney were well-known "Christian theocrats."

Same reason Trump did so much better in non-college educated and working class white parts of New England and New York.

They had hardcore Christian running mates

No...but they had no personality. Lifeless candidates who ran lifeless campaigns in political climates that didn't favor them

I hate to say "MUH WORKING CLASS WHITES", but RI probably has more of them than any other electoral jurisdiction in the Northeast (save for maybe ME-2). It's also poorer than most of the NE.

No correlation at all here. (Pence) It's because of Trump's economic populism.

Trump won a county in every New England state, except for Massachusetts.

This is not true.

Most socially liberal, well-educated areas trended Democratic.  Take a look at Massachusetts, the West Coast, the D.C. Metro, and numerous college towns.  Hillary also performed very well in traditionally Republican but socially moderate areas like suburban Chicago.

Trump meanwhile achieved record performance among white Evangelicals (never mind that Trump may not be sincerely religious himself).  He also overperformed among culturally conservative Democrats, which is why he turned so many rural counties Republican.

2016 clearly widened the urban-rural, social liberal-social conservative divide. 

By Atlas standards, 99% of people who lived before the year 2000 would be considered theocrats.  In 30 years, views that are considered normal now will be labeled as "theocratic."

Yes but most people living in the rural/ small city northeast as well as large amounts of the Midwest are not evangelicals. Many social moderates in these areas even if they don't have degrees we're turned off by the GOP's southern flavored evangelism. Many working class whites especially outside of the south are fairly secular (just like a lot of college educated whites in the south and Midwest are very religious)

The Republican party has been increasingly Southernized and socially conservative over the last 30-40 years.  That certainly helps them in the bible belt, but it has repelled a lot of voters. All of a sudden the Republicans nominate a big city Yankee from NYC who has not pandered to the religious right. Hillary Clinton, who is a mainstream Methodist, was more religious than Trump. People knew that Trump did not care much or at all about abortion or gay rights. The Republican leaders' holy book is the Art of the Deal, not the bible. This was a pretty revolutionary perception change that helped Republicans in the North.

Rhode Island has a disproportionately high number of culturally conservative Democrats. This is why RI was the last state in New England to recognize gay marriage.

I agree with this, except that Trump did worse than prior GOP nominees in the west coast. He lost CA by 30 points, the biggest margin since Alfred Landon 1936.

St Alphonso is on the money here...

Most people living in rural and small town America (Outside of the Deep South and certain parts of the border states) are not evangelicals.

Where I currently live and work in "Deer Hunter" (Reference to the movie, check it out of you haven't yet) country are much more motivated by basic issues such as steady and decent paying employment to help support their family, and religion is pretty much the only item I haven't heard discussed out in the smoking area....

I am still extremely skeptical about this whole argument regarding Trump and Rhode Island (Let alone anywhere else in the country) over-preforming as a result of the evangelical vote.

Last time I checked it was "the economy stupid" and a sense of relative deprivation between rural and Metro America when it came to the economic recovery after the Great Recession.

Bob Dole is a very funny person.  Maybe he didn't show that enough in 1996.  I remember at the 1988 Republican Convention in his speech he said "America doesn't need Michael Dukakis and his Dukakied ideas."

That made me laugh.

A Republican Presidential Candidate hasn't carried a county in MA since 1988 with Bush H.W.

Rhode Island has more in common with the rust belt than the rest of New England.

Been a lurker here for a while. Thought I'd comment (although it's mostly been answered)!
RI has similar demographics to Massachusetts but with more Italians, Catholics (more socially conservative) and fewer wealthy areas (meaning it was more receptive of Trump's economic populism). Extremely Italian mid-size middle/working class towns like Johnston and West Warwick managed to vote for Trump after voting for Obama by huge margins because of this. Then there's the WASP factor (White anglo-saxon protestant, think ME-02 or eastern Connecticut) that voted for Trump in huge margins, that you don't see too much in Massachusetts but is common in western and southern Rhode Island.
These differences are also why RI voted for Bernie in the primary while Mass voted for Hillary.

Republicans love to stereotype the Northeast as a region filled with Coastal Elitist Latte Liberals,which is false.

Trump did much better with poor whites. Also see Maine.

Well Massachusetts, Vermont, and New York City have latte liberals. Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Maine, and NOVA are just Center-Left. New Hampshire and Pennsylvania are Purple States.

This past Election was about a  little more about Trumps winning margins Non-College Whites vs College Educated Whites rather than just about singularly income.

Hillary Clinton, while not an economic progressive, personifies the concept of an "enemy of the church".  Christians recognized that Hillary's Justice Department would do everything it could to force churches to perform same-sex marriages and hire gays in ministry positions, regardless of what Scripture says.  Part of the WikiLeaks revelations included Podesta and Palmieri talking about a "Catholic Spring" where liberals would actually infiltrate the Catholic Church and seek to change its doctrines.  Her "deplorables" comment didn't help, either.  Trump is not my idea of a devout Christian, but he is willing to leave the Church alone and not force every secular doctrine on it.

New England as a whole has become the Solid Northeast because of the resistance to the Religious Right in the GOP.  Trump cooled this somewhat, but what made this worse for Democrats was the hostility Christians feel toward Hillary.  This is something Hillary brought on all by herself.

The ironic thing is Hillary was criticized from the left during the primaries of being insufficiently pro-gay, and not coming out for gay marriage until 2013.

Hillary's a middle class girl whose entire interest in politics 50 years ago started with her pastor, and has remained in the same denomination ever since that time. The religious right rejected her for a son of wealth and privilege who makes a mockery of Christian values, largely out of an obsession with abortion, a word that is not even mentioned in the Bible and even implicitly condoned, and is only mentioned in the apocrypha.

Comparing RI to MA Italian vs Irish descent according to Wikipedia last demographic demographics(not sure if the demographic breakdowns in the Wikipedia article are from 2010 or 2014.)

MA(% of ancestry group)

Irish: 23% of the Population
Italian: 14% of the Population

RI:(% of ancestry group)

Irish: 19% of the population
Italian 19% of the population

The major ancestry groups in RI seem to be a bit more distributed across the state compared to MA (except the Irish, and the English outside of the inner Boston metro). In MA, southern Bristol is a Portuguese stronghold, Italians are a plurality in a few north of Boston towns, west-central MA has a lot of French, the eastern Cape and western Mass have lots of English, the Springfield area has quite a few Poles, and the South Shore is arguably the most Irish area in the country. In RI, the overall county percentages for ancestry are lower (no counties over 30% for a single ethnic group), and most towns are 10-25% Irish/Italian/French/English, much (several MA towns are over 40% Irish/Italian).

Trumps gain among-st Non Educated Whites and Working Class Whites and Poor Whites. You can see this can trend across New England as a Matter of Fact. Just look at Essex County in Vermont

Here's a post I just made on this topic that might be interesting to those of you who were involved in this discussion. I look at swing toward Trump by town and then test the correlation with income (using race as a control): https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=271665.0

The people in this thread who have gotten the closest to understanding why Trump over-performed in RI have only scratched the surface. You guys are right that RI has a lot of non-college whites compared to other New England states, but Trump also did better there because a similar dynamic to what happened in the Midwest occurred there: Hillary Clinton was the worst fit for it as a Democratic nominee since Dukakis/Mondale. Bernie Sanders winning big in the primary there couldn't have helped Clinton either.

Trump won a county in every New England state aside of Massachusetts.

Sure--- although honestly the whole concept of discussing Presidential election results in detail by County in New England can become an absurd proposition, since really NE county level discussion is frequently a much less fruitful endeavor than comparing cities/townships across the region (Precinct level results are always tough anywhere you go, especially in NE).

That Trump was appealing to many voters in RI, as in most parts of NE, "swing voter types" that might have voted along the following lines: Dukakis/Bush '88, Clinton/Perot '92, Clinton/Perot '96, Gore/W. '04, Obama '08, Obama/Romney '12....

Let's face it--- really we are talking about swings here, and elections aren't just a giant collection of   W & Ls like a football game.

Just because all of the EVs in NE have gone Dem since '08, with the exception of ME-02 ('16), doesn't mean that there won't be dramatic swings within given states.

Also, I might note that Trump only bagged only 38.7% of the vote in '16, hardly a definition of the provocative thread title: "Why was RI so close?".... Meanwhile Romney managed to capture an amazing 35.2% in '12, W. 35.2% in '04.

The key question should be where did the 3.5% of voters that hadn't voted Republican in '04 and '12 come from? They didn't just materialize from nowhere overnight, as a result of some random Russian election hacking gig unless that's what you choose to believe (rhetorical you---and def not shooting darts at you Bandit for realz).

Odds are these are voters that have generally voted Democratic at a Presidential level in the past, but for whatever reason felt that Trump alone was sufficient to change years of voting for Dem Pres candidates at the Pres level.

Now, the other question is why did HRC perform so poorly in RI (54.4% !), but I suspect we already know the multiple answers to that question.

RI isn't anywhere close to voting 'Pub Pres anytime in the near future, and it really looks like most of the Democratic drop-off were Millennials and WWC Bernie supporters voting to the Left as part of an "Anyone but Trump/Clinton Movement".