3 Lessons of the 2020 Election

Well, that went well. Really, it did. Sure, it looked scary when Trump led in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania on election night, but we were prepared for the "red mirage" phenomenon ahead of time. For all the doomsaying about the election, it went surprisingly smoothly, as of this writing, at least. (That we are currently being inundated with baseless claims of voter fraud is not surprising, considering the President signaled this coping strategy far in advance of election night.) Which is definitely not to say that everything went as expected, however. Here are three surprises and lessons we learned from the election.

1. I'm Always Right, Even When I'm Wrong
The Standard predicted Joe Biden would win the election, 306 electoral votes to 232, and as of this writing, that appears to be the likely outcome. But this doesn't mean my prediction was entirely correct; I expected Trump to win Georgia, and for Biden to win North Carolina and Maine's 2nd district. This didn't happen. Trump won Maine's 2nd, and as of this moment, it appears that he'll hold onto North Carolina and that Biden will win Georgia. By accident of fate, these electoral votes add up to 306 for Biden and 232 for Trump. I claim unjustified vindication.

But in all seriousness, The Standard's election coverage was wrong in several important ways. Biden was "comfortably ahead" in Pennsylvania, I wrote—as of this writing, he's winning there by 0.08% of the vote.[1] I also wrote, of the 2016 election, that "in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, [Trump] won by less than 1% of the vote, a spectacularly unlikely outcome." This year, it appears that Pennsylvania and Wisconsin will again be decided by less than 1% of the vote. Clearly, this is not an "unlikely outcome." I underestimated the durability of Trump's support, especially in the Industrial Midwest.

My prediction relied too much on the polls, which turned out to be wrong. (Most notably, polls in North Carolina and Maine's 2nd district predicted the wrong winner, as did I.) Averages of state polls in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania showed Biden leading in each state by 6 to 7 points. The magnitude of this polling error was even greater than in 2016. My prediction assumed that the polls were skewed in Biden's favor, but not by this much. I scolded those of you who didn't trust the polls, only to find that I shouldn't have trusted them either. I will be much more hesitant to do so in the future.

Nate Silver, the polling guru at FiveThirtyEight.com, offered this point: "Voters and the media need to recalibrate their expectations around polls—not necessarily because anything’s changed, but because those expectations demanded an unrealistic level of precision."[2] This point is well-taken by me.

2. Trump Gained (A Little) Among Minorities
Let's not get carried away with this one. Yes, Trump improved upon his 2016 numbers with black men and women and with Latinos and Latinas—but only by 3 to 5 percentage points. [3] Biden still won black voters overwhelmingly (87% to Trump's 12%) and Hispanic voters (66% to 32%). Still, it has been observed that Trump won the largest share of the non-white vote of any Republican candidate since 1960, even while he lost support among white men, winning them by just 18 percentage points this year compared to 31 points in 2016. In fact, with white voters amounting to 65% of the electorate, this diminished support among white men was undoubtedly a significant factor in Trump's defeat, despite his gains among minorities.

"[Trump] will continue to be influential in Republican politics for at least the next four years."

Far more perplexing, though, is Trump's support among LGBT voters. He doubled his vote-share among this group, from 14% four years ago to 28% this year. Considering the Trump administration's well-documented hostility to the LGBT community,[4][5][6] I have no explanation for this—other than the fact that LGBT people are more than just their sexual identity and aren't necessarily single-issue voters. A plurality of voters this year cited the economy as their top concern (35% overall, and 25% of LGBT voters[7]), and Trump won them overwhelmingly, 82% to 17%. LGBT voters—and black and Hispanic voters, for that matter—have the same economic concerns as anyone else. (It's obvious to say this, but it clearly wasn't obvious enough to Democrats this year.)

So I suspect the lesson here is that the economy is an issue that crosses demographic lines, and during the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression, Joe Biden's economic message (to the extent he even had one) missed the mark. By a lot. Enough to be felt even across traditionally Democratic-leaning demographics.

3. Trumpism Is Here to Stay
This election was not the repudiation of Trumpism that the left hoped for. If and when Trump is ever finished espousing absurd and unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud, he can boast of having won the most votes of any incumbent President ever—over 72 million, as of this writing. Biden did manage to win back several states which Trump won in 2016, but his margin of victory in these states was incredibly small; Biden is currently leading by 0.03% in Georgia and Arizona, for instance. I've already heard his supporters say that Trump would have won if not for the pandemic (bearing in mind that it was Trump's botched response to the pandemic, not the pandemic itself, that cost him votes.)

Moreover, Trump-supporting Senators, such as Lindsey Graham in South Carolina, held onto their seats in a year in which Democrats expected, but failed to win a Senate majority. Currently, Graham and most other Republican officeholders are tacitly endorsing Trump's refusal to concede; their unwillingness to defy Trump, even in abject defeat, shows that the GOP is still held firmly in the grip of Trumpism. Indeed, 93% of Republicans voted for Trump this year, an even larger share than in 2016.

With this much support among Republicans, Trump remains a very credible candidate for the party's nomination in 2024, if he wants it. And with an election this close—and what I anticipate to be a milquetoast Biden term—Trump could yet win re-election. This means that Trump isn't going away. He will continue to be influential in Republican politics for at least the next four years, if not as a candidate himself, then as a kingmaker. His cult of personality will endure as a menace to democracy.

[1] https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/president/
[2] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-werent-great-but-thats-pretty-normal/
[3] https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/11/07/election-2020-exit-polls-trump-minorities-race-women-column/6191966002/
[4] https://www.hrc.org/news/the-list-of-trumps-unprecedented-steps-for-the-lgbtq-community]
[5] https://www.glaad.org/tap/donald-trump
[6] https://transequality.org/the-discrimination-administration
[7] https://morningconsult.com/2020/06/25/lgbtq-voters-2020-trump-biden/