United States presidential election, 2016

The United States presidential election, 2016 was held on 8 November 2016. In one of the most hotly-contested and controversial elections in United States history, the Republican Party ticket, New York businessman Donald Trump and Indiana governor Mike Pence, defeated the Democratic Party ticket of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Virginia governor Tim Kaine with 304 electoral votes to 227, while the Republicans lost the popular vote by a margin of almost 3,000,000. Trump won the swing states of Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Iowa in addition to the solidly-Democratic states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, turning the tide of the election. Trump won the election with the backing of Russian intelligence services, which conducted cyberattacks against the Democrats to undermine faith in the democratic process of US elections, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.

The election was widely seen as a turning point in American politics. The primaries for both parties had seen the rise of radical populist candidates such as the social democrat Bernie Sanders from the Democratic Party and the far-right nationalist Donald Trump from the Republican Party, and while the Democratic leadership had managed to suppress Sanders' nomination in the favor of the establishment candidate Clinton, the anti-establishment Trump managed to clinch his party's nomination and defeat neoconservative candidates such as Marco Rubio and John Kasich. Trump's hateful rhetoric was frequently covered by the news media, which broadcast his attacks on Hispanics, liberals, women, and Muslims (among other groups), but this was counter-productive; Trump gained free publicity, and he gained more followers as tensions grew between supporters of the two parties. The defeat of Sanders by Clinton in the primary was widely seen as rigged, as it was revealed that DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz had encouraged other Democrats to oppose Sanders, and many "Bernie bros" stayed home during the elections rather than vote for "Crooked Hillary". Other factors leading to Clinton's defeat were a renewed FBI investigation into her use of a private e-mail server to discuss allegedly-classified information, as well as her refusal to travel to some Democratic states during the elections, making them feel forgotten. With the backing of the alt-right and fake news sites on the internet and the inadvertent promotion by the news media on television, Trump won the electoral votes needed to become president, despite losing the popular vote by over a 2.1% margin.