Initially considered a novelty candidate, Trump emerged as the Republican front-runner, defeating several notable opponents, including U.S. senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, as well as governors John Kasich and Jeb Bush.

[8][9] Clinton emphasized her extensive political experience, denounced Trump and many of his supporters as a "basket of deplorables", bigots, and extremists, and advocated the expansion of Obama's policies; racial, LGBT, and women's rights; and inclusive capitalism.

[11][12][13] Trump faced controversy over his views on race and immigration, incidents of violence against protesters at his rallies,[14][15][16] and numerous sexual misconduct allegations including the Access Hollywood tape.

Clinton's popularity and public image were tarnished by concerns about her ethics and trustworthiness,[17] and a controversy and subsequent FBI investigation regarding her improper use of a private email server while serving as secretary of state, which received more media coverage than any other topic during the campaign.

[88] A June 30 report from The Washington Post also included Senators Bob Corker from Tennessee, Richard Burr from North Carolina, Tom Cotton from Arkansas, Joni Ernst from Iowa, and Indiana governor Mike Pence as individuals still being considered for the ticket.

[115] Although Sanders had not formally dropped out of the race, he announced on June 16, that his main goal in the coming months would be to work with Clinton to defeat Trump in the general election.

[126] Subsequent reports stated that Clinton was also considering Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, retired Admiral James Stavridis, and Governor John Hickenlooper of Colorado.

[183] According to data from the Tyndall Report, which tracks nightly news content, through February 2016, Trump alone accounted for more than a quarter of all 2016 election coverage on the evening newscasts of NBC, CBS and ABC, more than all the Democratic campaigns combined.

[207] On the other side, on October 7, video and accompanying audio were released by The Washington Post in which Trump referred obscenely to women in a 2005 conversation with Billy Bush while they were preparing to film an episode of Access Hollywood.

[211] The incident was condemned by numerous prominent Republicans like Reince Priebus, Mitt Romney, John Kasich, Jeb Bush[212] and the Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.

[217] He was criticized and also supported for his statement at a rally declaring, "Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on".

According to the commission's website, to be eligible to opt to participate in the anticipated debates, "in addition to being Constitutionally eligible, candidates must appear on a sufficient number of state ballots to have a mathematical chance of winning a majority vote in the Electoral College, and have a level of support of at least 15 percent of the national electorate as determined by five selected national public opinion polling organizations, using the average of those organizations' most recently publicly-reported results at the time of the determination".

[339] According to the authors of Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign, the White House had concluded by late Tuesday night that Trump would win the election.

[345] In his speech, Trump appealed for unity, saying "it is time for us to come together as one united people", and praised Clinton as someone who was owed "a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country".

Despite dropping out of the election following his defeat in the Democratic primary, Senator Bernie Sanders received 5.7% of the vote in his home state of Vermont, the highest write-in draft campaign percentage for a presidential candidate in American history.

On November 7, the Cook Political Report categorized Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin as states with close races.

[450] These conclusions were supported by models such as the Princeton Elections Consortium, the New York Times Upshot, and punditry evaluations from Sabato's Crystal Ball and the Cook Political Report.

Meanwhile, Trump increased his lead with non-Hispanic white voters through one percent over Mitt Romney's performance, and American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Pacific Islanders shifted their support towards the Republican candidate using the same relative amount.

[476] However, FiveThirtyEight's model pointed to the possibility of an Electoral College-popular vote split widening in the final weeks based on Trump's improvement in swing states like Florida or Pennsylvania.

[503][504] However, every major forecaster, including FiveThirtyEight, The New York Times Upshot, prediction markets aggregator PredictWise, ElectionBettingOdds from Maxim Lott and John Stossel, the DailyKos, the Princeton Election Consortium, the Huffington Post, the Cook Political Report, Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball, and the Rothenberg and Gonzales Report, called every state the same way (although Cook and Rothenberg-Gonzales left two and five states as toss-ups, respectively).

[541][542][543] However, statistician Nate Silver performed a regression analysis which demonstrated that the alleged discrepancy between paper ballots and electronic voting machines "completely disappears once you control for race and education level".

[546][547] In the years following the election, Hillary Clinton has alleged that official maleficence contributed to and may have caused her electoral loss, saying in 2022, "Literally within hours of the polls closing in 2016, we had so much evidence pouring in about voters being turned away in Milwaukee and not being able to vote in Detroit.

[555] Concurrently, American Delta Party/Reform Party presidential candidate Rocky De La Fuente sought and was granted a partial recount in Nevada that was unrelated to Stein's efforts.

Critics alleged racial bias after comparing the different sentences handed down to two white people and one black person who were convicted of attempting to vote illegally in the 2016 presidential election.

[602] On December 9, 2016, the Central Intelligence Agency issued an assessment to lawmakers in the US Senate, stating that a Russian entity hacked the DNC and John Podesta's emails to assist Donald Trump.

[604] Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper in early January 2017 testified before a Senate committee that Russia's meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign went beyond hacking, and included disinformation and the dissemination of fake news, often promoted on social media.

[613] A formal Special Counsel investigation headed by former FBI director Robert Mueller was initiated in May 2017 to uncover the detailed interference operations by Russia, and to determine whether any people associated with the Trump campaign were complicit in the Russian efforts.

When questioned by Chuck Todd on Meet the Press in March 2017, Clapper declared that intelligence investigations on Russian interference performed by the FBI, CIA, NSA and his ODNI office had found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

[632][606] Special Council Robert Mueller also investigated the Trump campaign's alleged ties to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Qatar, Israel, and China.

[637] In December 2018, a Ukrainian court ruled that prosecutors in Ukraine had meddled in the 2016 election by releasing damaging information on Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.