When voters are voting, what are they doing?: Symbolic selection and the 2016 U.S. presidential election

Abstract

The article proposes a view of voting as symbolic selection that enables commensuration among otherwise balkanized electoral theories, focusing on the 2016 U.S. presidential election. When voters select candidates, it argues, what they are doing is selecting a signifier for a coalition of symbols that the candidate has come to signify to the voter over the course of the campaign. This perspective is used to better understand why Trump won by focusing on how different aspects of the campaign redounded to the assemblage and formation of the coalitions of symbols that voters would be voting on when they were voting. The paper argues that these coalitions help explain Trump’s narrow victories in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania that were so decisive in the 2016 election.