A week ago, Donald Trump won the US Presidential election. The outcome wasn’t a surprise, many polls had him just ahead and all the prediction markets gave him a sizable lead. The shock was the size of his victory, with him sweeping all swing states and winning the popular vote.
There has already been a lot of commentary trying to explain the reason for this. Most of it is stale generalisations about what ‘Americans’ believe and various cultural assumptions about differing ethnic groups, age groups and genders. This is just speculation and parsing out the size of the impact of any individual variable is impossible.
One true thing though is that this was a horrible year for incumbent governments. This was pointed out by the Financial Times chief data reporter John Burn-Murdoch who showed that every governing party facing an election in a developed country this year lost vote share for the first time ever. This includes left wing Democrats in America, the right wing Conservatives in the UK and the increasingly nationalist governments in Turkey and India.