Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America

In their second post-presidential election analysis, John Sides and Lynn Vavreck, this time with Michael Tesler, make sophisticated political science analyses accessible to non-experts, while simultaneously satisfying experts’ desire for details and nuance. Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America is written in the same vein as The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election. The focus of the 2016 book—identity crisis—appears at first glance to refer to the drawn-out natures of both the Democratic and Republican nominating contests, but the authors take it a step further. They argue that because the focus of the 2016 presidential election was on immigration, racial discrimination, and feelings toward Muslims rather than more mundane issues, the 2016 election was “symptomatic of a broader American identity crisis” (p. 10) that raised issues of who is American and what the values of the country are. Identity Crisis pushes back against several pieces of conventional wisdom articulated in the months after the November 2016 election. First, the authors disagree with the claim that during the 2016 presidential election cycle, Americans were angry, anxious, fearful, and looking to channel their frustrations into voting for outsider candidates, instead claiming that those feelings largely “depended on partisan and racial identities” (p. 31). Second, Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck question those who claimed that Clinton had an inevitable path to victory, instead showing the fundamentals—the state of the economy, the fact there was no incumbent in the race, and that Democrats were trying to hold the presidency for the third consecutive term—indicated the 2016 race would likely be a toss-up. Finally, Identity Crisis dismisses the idea that since Trump’s margin of victory in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin was just over 77,000 votes, “‘anything’ or ‘everything’ could have mattered” (p. 155). Instead, they carefully examine many plausible explanations for the outcome, ultimately concluding that the racially charged rhetoric of the campaign, particularly from Trump, activated voters’ pre-existing divisions on racial issues and caused them to rely on identity rather than issues when casting their votes.