2016 Election Night

Jonathan Bernstein posted an underreported statistic about the election the other day (citing Boris Shor): 73 percent of Democratic state legislators are endorsing Clinton, while 5 percent of Republican state legislators are endorsing Trump. This strikes me as incredibly important. Yes, a number of prominent Republicans have refused to back Trump and have even urged a vote for Clinton, and a few others like John McCain have gone back and forth in their support. But only in the state legislative endorsements do you get a sense of the dramatic differences between the major-party candidacies this year. Like most other information about state legislators, this hasn’t been well-covered. Yet it might have given Republican voters greater confidence in casting a vote for someone else or even skipping the presidential race altogether if they knew how many of their party’s elites were opposed to its presidential nominee.