Paper for which a friend of mine was the lead researcher. On the one hand, an obvious conclusion: unhappy voters yields anti-incumbent sentiment. On the other… no, it wasn’t (predominantly) racism or anger or distrust of Clinton. He has the numbers.

My feeling is that this accounts for the “base” of the movement of the electorate, but not the last nudge over the top that Trump got from Russian meddling, the Comey letter (http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-real-story-of-2016/), and Dems feeling like they didn’t need to be careful with their vote, for whatever reason (overconfidence, lack of belief that votes matter).

Population wellbeing, an aggregate measure of positive mental, physical, and emotional health, has previously been used as a marker of community thriving. We examined whether several community measures of wellbeing, and their change since 2012, could be used to understand electoral changes that led to the outcome of the 2016 United States presidential election. We found that areas of the US which had the largest shifts away from the incumbent party had both lower wellbeing and greater drops in wellbeing when compared with areas that did not shift. In comparison, changes in income were not related to voting shifts. Well-being may be more useful in predicting and understanding electoral outcomes than some more conventional voting determinants.

Source: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0193401