2020 Election Results Deep Dive

More than three weeks after this year's Presidential election ended, there's more than enough data available for my biennial comprehensive analysis of this snapshot in time of America.   This snapshot showed us a bitterly divided country the likes of which we'd only begun to grasp 20 years ago when we were first told how split the country was following the photo finish Gore-Bush election.  Where to begin with this cycle....

I was far closer to right than most with my predictions of the Presidential race.  I predicted 49 out of 50 states correctly, and the only state I got wrong was Georgia, which I identified the weekend before the election as my least confident Trump state selection.  Nonetheless, I predicted Biden would win the popular vote by 7 points.  There are currently about two million votes left to count nationally and the majority of them are from New York City, suggesting that Biden's current 3.8-point lead in the popular vote could get as high as 4.5 points.  For most of American electoral history, a win that big would come with a decisive Electoral College victory, but with the current historically large GOP advantage in the Electoral College, Biden's win was close enough that a combined 45,000 votes in three states would have flipped the race to Trump, which is astonishing.

Even more astonishing is that Biden's above-average national margin of victory not only came with zero coattails, it came with negative coattails.  The Democrats somehow managed to not capture control of the United States Senate and stand poised to lose about a dozen House seats they held last month, in dramatic contrast to the dozen or more seats everybody, including me, predicted they'd pick up.  It was the same story at the legislative level, with Democrats failing to pick up a single legislative body anywhere in the country and more likely to have lost existing seats than picked up new ones.  The only person who ostensibly paid a price for the national embarrassment that is Trumpism was Trump himself.   His Congressional and legislative allies who abetted his destructive behavior yet acquitted themselves with merely a tick more professionalism were rewarded for it, and stand poised to benefit from it further in election cycles to come when the GOP is well-positioned to be on offense.

By the second week in October, I was concerned that Biden had peaked too soon, giving voters enough time to hedge their bets and embrace divided government downballot figuring that Biden would win, just as I suspect happened in 2016.  It's certainly possible that's what happened, but at this point I'm unconvinced that either Biden or the Democrats were ever poised for a big win.  It's more likely that the polls were just as wrong in early October as they were in early November, failing to sufficiently factor in support for Trump and Republicans yet again.  Part of the problem was that polling models likely didn't fully account for the modest shift toward Trump among nonwhites, a shift that was decisive in some jurisdictions, but there was more going on than that.  Lindsey Graham was probably never any closer to losing his seat than what election results proved, as one example.  It's just more likely that soft supporters of Lindsey Graham didn't bother responding to pollsters in disproportionate numbers, a phenomenon I suspect was prolific in would-be competitive race after would-be competitive race.

So what the hell happened?  The short answer is that the same electorate who rejected Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party in 2016 returned to reject them again four years later.  As objectionable and indefensible as Donald Trump and his allies were then and now, enough Americans still find themselves more fearful or more appalled by what the Democrats are offering to deny them anything close to a governing majority.  I feel like I saw this coming and have been warning about it for well over a year, and that it would have ended even worse for the Democrats if a global pandemic that the incumbent President badly botched hadn't changed the national conversation away from one that Donald Trump was poised to win back in February.  I'll get more into this at the end of my writeup, but for now, let's proceed to the state-by-state analysis....

Alabama--My topline predictions weren't bad as Biden did make some headway in suburban Birmingham and in Huntsville, but he lost ground even to Hillary in most of the rest of the state.  Trump won by an impressive 25 points, close to my 23-point prediction.  The Yellowhammer State remains the toughest terrain for Democrats in the Deep South, an already extremely tough region.  Reinforcing that is the spanking that accidental Democratic Senator Doug Jones received in his pursuit of a full term, losing by more than 20 points to a guy who can't identify the three branches of American government when asked.  My original instinct from last summer of a 20-point Jones drubbing was vindicated, but by October I allowed myself to believe he was making up some ground against moronic Republican challenger Tommy Tuberville to the point of only losing by margins in the mid-teens, but I should have stuck with my original instinct.  If Roy Moore had somehow managed to wrestle the nomination again in 2020, he'd have beaten Jones with this year's electorate.  That's how hopeless Alabama is.  The state maintained its 6-1 GOP House delegation as predicted.

Alaska--Given that it took them so long to count their mail vote, it's flown under most people's radar that Alaska was comparatively close this year, at least compared to its history as a 2-1 GOP stronghold.  I predicted as much, guessing Trump would prevail by 10 points which is exactly where the margin currently stands with almost all of the vote counted.  It's a bit unclear why Alaska has moved rather dramatically to the left of where it was in the past generation as one would think the state's extraction industry-heavy economy and white working-class demographics would make for a particularly Trumpy electorate, but a combination of increased racial diversity and rising levels of environmental consciousness seems to be fostering the shift.  Democrats are in desperate need of more states where they can credibly compete in Senate races and if Alaska's trend line continues, it may be their best shot of a red state poised to deliver for them.  It didn't happen this year though with Independent Al Gross, functionally running as a Democrat, underperforming Biden and losing to nominally vulnerable first-term Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan by 13 points, higher than the 8-point margin I predicted.  Another independent candidate who picked up nearly 5% of the vote was probably the biggest factor in Gross's underperformance.   The dean of the United States House--Alaska Republican Don Young--was re-elected to his 23rd term as well with comparable margins to Trump and Sullivan.

Arizona--At one level, the Grand Canyon State came through for Democrats in 2020, delivering the state to Joe Biden and Senate candidate Mark Kelly.  Unfortunately, they did so with far less of a mandate than many, including myself, were expecting a month ago.  For all the smack the pollsters are getting, they were showing some signs of a tightening race in Arizona in the closing weeks and those polls were vindicated.  On election night, it sure seemed like Biden was running away with the state, so much so that some media organizations prematurely called it for Biden.  But the late-arriving mail vote that was counted last leaned decidedly for Trump, unlikely two years earlier when the same batch of mail ballots favored the Democratic Senate candidate.  It all led to a photo finish where Biden prevailed by only 0.3%, or roughly 11,000 votes.  A win is a win, but clearly my prediction of a 4-point Biden win was far too bullish.  As was the case in so much of the country, there appeared to be far more "shy Trump voters" than expected in those upscale Phoenix suburbs that were supposed to be more solidly for Biden.  The situation is arguably even more bittersweet in the Senate special election where Democrat Mark Kelly prevailed by only 2 points over appointed Republican incumbent Martha McSally.  The margin is bittersweet because I predicted a 7-point Kelly win, more in line with what pollsters were indicating for much of the cycle, and because Kelly will have to run again for a full term in 2022, where he is far more likely to find himself the underdog.  In the House, the Democrats maintained their 5-4 advantage, but came up short of unseating Republican incumbent David Schweikert in the Scottsdale-based AZ-06, a race I thought would go the Democrats way in the expected blue wave.  Schweikert's 4-point win speaks volumes of how far short of expectations that wave crested.

Arkansas--Few states in the country have turned as sharply against the Democrats in the past decade than Arkansas and as expected this year was more of the same with the state being one of only a handful where Trump won by a higher margin in 2020 than he did in 2016. I predicted a 24-point Trump win but he prevailed by nearly 27 points, running up the score to unthinkable margins in eastern Arkansas where he made inroads with the black vote in the Mississippi Delta counties but really consolidated the votes of eastern Arkansas whites who were conservative Democrats until recently.  It's worth mentioning though that Biden made significant gains in the fast-growing northwest corner of the state centered around Fayetteville, Rogers, and Bentonville, the latter being the home of Walmart.  Biden also made inroads throughout the Little Rock metro area, which led me to believe that Democrat Joyce Elliott had a puncher's chance of taking out Republican incumbent French Hill in the AR-02 House race.  But Elliott underperformed Biden as Democrats did throughout suburbia across the nation, losing the race by nearly 11 points and keeping Arkansas' House delegation 4-0 in favor of Republicans.   In the Senate race, Republican incumbent Tom Cotton had no Democratic opposition and cruised to a 33-point win over his Libertarian challenger, close to the 37-point win I predicted.  Also as I predicted, a few blue counties voted for the Libertarian over Cotton, and they were the exact three counties I suspected.

California--The Golden State had delivered nothing but unambiguously good news for Democrats for so many cycles in a row that it never occurred to me that this year, with Trump running for re-election, would be the year when the Democrats would prove to have crested from their peak in California.  Unfortunately, that appears to be the case as California joins Arkansas among the small group of states where Biden's margins shrunk compared to Hillary's four years ago.  Biden is still leading Trump by nearly 30 points with well over 95% of the vote in, but I had expected Biden would win by 34 points, seeing no indication of Democratic attrition everywhere from the Bay Area to the Central Valley to Los Angeles.  I always figured the muscularly progressive agenda of California Democrats would eventually cleave off some of the party's expansive coalition but I figured they'd comprehensively unite around the common enemy of Trump for one more cycle.  Ultimately, the erosion was marginal in the Presidential race, but Republicans drew some real blood in the House races, definitively picking up three seats the Democrats won in 2018 and potentially picking up one more where the Republican leads by a couple hundred votes as of this writing.  One of the Democrats to lose was TJ Cox, who upset Republican incumbent David Valadao in the Bakersfield-based CA-21 in 2018, but has now lost by 1 point in this year's rematch with Valadao.  The other two Democratic incumbents were defeated by Asian-American challengers, which is no coincidence as there was some shift away from Democrats among Asians in California this year, in no small part because of the controversial affirmative action ballot proposition that drew an outsized share of criticism from Asian voters.  Anyway, incumbent Democrat Gil Cisneros from Fullerton-based CA-39 was felled by GOP challenger Young Kim who narrowly lost to Cisneros two years ago.  And Republican Michelle Steel bested Democrat Harley Rouda in the upscale, Huntington Beach-based CA-48, a seat Rouda likely won in 2018 based more on exhaustion with long-time Republican incumbent Dana Rohrabacher than any genuine love for Rouda.  Steel prevailed by 2 points.  The seat still officially undecided is CA-25, based in northern Los Angeles County, where Republican Mike Garcia is more likely than not to prevail over Democrat Christy Smith.  Even if Garcia wins, the Democrats will still have a 43-10 advantage in California House districts which seems very impressive if you discount that their advantage was 47-6 at this point two years ago.  Will the GOP comeback continue to commence in Cali?  Perhaps to a limited degree, but I still see it as a deep blue state that will represent a quarter of the Democrats' national House delegation for the foreseeable future.

Colorado--One of the few states that was an unqualified success for Democrats this year was Colorado, which solidified as a blue state completely outside of the Presidential battleground for the foreseeable future with a 13-point Biden win, above and beyond the 10-point Biden win I predicted that I considered bullish at the time.  Almost every corner of Colorado shifted toward Biden compared to Hillary with the biggest gains coming from metropolitan Denver.  Even Colorado Springs, the long-held GOP foothold in the state, showed signs of serious Republican slippage this year.  In the Senate race, former Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper stomped Republican incumbent Cory Gardner by 9 points, the exact margin I predicted last month, with a coalition very close to Biden's.  The only place where Democrats fell short was in the CO-03 House race where far-right Republican candidate Lauren Boebert prevailed by 6 points in the western Colorado district that is one of the few places in the state where Democrats have lost some ground in the last decade, leaving the existing 4-3 Democratic advantage in Colorado's House delegation intact.

Connecticut--Another state where Democrats generally and Biden specifically did very well on November 3rd was Connecticut.  This was no surprise as I predicted the northeast would be the region of the country where Biden would see the most improvement compared to Hillary, although even here the Democratic coalition saw some of the same shifts that coalitions nationally did, with white working-class eastern Connecticut sticking with Trump while some of the wealthiest zip codes in the country like Darien and New Canaan moved hard toward the Democrats.  Biden won Connecticut by 20 points, a bit less than the 23 points I predicted but still a 6-point improvement compared to Hillary.  The Democrats maintained their 5-0 advantage in their House delegation with ease, winning every race by double digits, and I understand the Democrats did well in the legislative races as well.

Delaware--On the surface, Biden's 19-point margin of victory in Delaware seems very impressive, until you realize that Obama won the state by 25 points in 2008 with Biden on the ticket merely as a running mate.  Typically, the smaller the state, the bigger the home-state advantage for a Presidential run, which is why I predicted Biden would win by 27 points.  But it appears tiny Delaware has become as polarized as the rest of the country and has settled into a pattern much like New Jersey where Democrats have a high floor but a comparatively low ceiling.  Hillary's 11-point win in 2016 is probably at the low end of Democrats' competitive range but 20 points is an increasingly tough margin to crack.  Democratic Senator Chris Coons did manage to crack it, getting re-elected by 21 points, but his fourth-rate challenger was a QAnon and white nationalist sympathizer and considered a dumpster fire of a nominee, which is why I predicted Coons would win by 26 points!  Democratic Governor John Carney was also re-elected by 20 points while at-large House member Lisa Blunt Rochester also prevailed by double digits.

District of Columbia--Joe Biden won DC by 87 points, the same as Hillary in 2016, but I predicted Biden would win by 89 points.  So why was Biden held to merely 92.1% of the vote?  Somebody on a message board sagely offered that a couple thousand people in Trump's orbit probably temporarily call DC home and voted there, but will be on their way out come January 20th.

Florida--Even when I go into an election cycle setting expectations impossibly low for the Sunshine State, it still consistently finds ways to slither underneath those low expectations.  There was plenty of chatter going into election day that the South Florida Cuban community had warmed up considerably to Donald Trump since 2016 and that Democrats were significantly underperforming benchmarks, but nobody could have imagined how serious the situation would be until around 6:20 central time when the early vote from Florida dropped showing Biden at only 54% in Miami-Dade County.  Hillary was at 64% in 2016.  The Presidential race in Florida was over right then and there and cast a dark shadow on the entire evening from the opening bell.  But as much as Democrats would like to define the Florida disaster exclusively by this huge shift away from the party by South Florida Hispanics, it was only part of the story.  Even if Biden had maintained Hillary's 64% margin in Miami-Dade County this year, he'd still have come up more than 100,000 votes short of statewide victory.  Every positive trendline in the state in places like Jacksonville and the Orlando suburbs is getting canceled out by the pipeline of deeply conservative retirees moving to the state faster than it's able to organically diversify.  This trend shows no sign of ebbing.  In the end, Trump won Florida by more than 3 points.  I was being bearish predicting he'd win by 1 point.  The Democrats had a number of reach seats on their wish list in the House, but fell short by double digits in all of them, all while managing to lose the two House seats in the South Florida Cuban community (FL-26 and FL-27) that they picked up in 2018, meaning their House delegation is back to being 16-11 Republican as it was four years ago.  The Republicans will have control of redistricting and will probably find a way to squeeze out a couple more Democrats next time.  So does the party have a future in Florida?  I would recommend they move quickly to fix this situation with Cubans, Venezuelans, and Colombians who all at once have come to be scared off by the Democrats supporting socialism.  Beyond that though, the state just keeps moving further and further to the right of the country to the point that I have a hard time seeing it as a top-tier swing state any longer and would recommend downsizing advertising investments there in future cycles.

Georgia--It would have been hard to imagine 20 years ago that by 2020 Georgia would be trending Democrat while Florida was trending well to the Peach State's right, yet here we are.  Metropolitan Atlanta is entirely responsible for this shift, with an infusion of African-Americans from elsewhere in the South and a burgeoning film and television production industry bringing creative types to the region, all sending the politics of every corner of the metro area lurching leftward.  Parts of rural Georgia actually trended narrowly toward Republicans this year but Biden was still able to overcome it based on his metro Atlanta landslide, winning the state by 0.2%.  I predicted Trump would win by 2 but was less confident about this prediction than any other state because I didn't know if the demographic shift had quite hit critical mass yet.  Biden did not have the wave election nationally that he and his party were hoping for, but the one place on the national map that makes it look like he did is seeing Georgia painted blue in the southeast corner of the country.  Democrats were not at all successful in picking up GOP-held House seats this year, but one of the few that they did was GA-07, where Democrat Carolyn Boudreaux prevailed by 3 points in the Gwinnett County-based suburban seat previously held by retiring Republican Rob Woodall.  A Republican gerrymander at the beginning of the decade means the GOP still has an 8-6 advantage in the House delegation, but demographic shifts and VRA requirements will make that advantage hard to maintain and even harder to rip apart with the next round of gerrymandering.  The one place where Georgia disappointed a bit on November 3rd is that Biden didn't provide the coattails needed for Democratic Senate candidate Jon Ossoff to get the 50% needed to unseat Republican incumbent David Purdue, as many expected was possible in the election's closing days.  Purdue actually outperformed Trump and only barely missed getting 50% himself, and is heading for a January runoff against Ossoff.  The special election for the other Senate race is also headed to runoff, with Republican Kelly Loeffler facing off against Democrat Rafael Warnock.  I'm highly skeptical of Democrats being able to replicate the November 3rd electorate as will be needed to get Ossoff and Warnock across the finish line, but they certainly have the base needed to pull it off and depending on how they play their cards could outperform expectations.  I'll probably write more about these Senate runoffs in the weeks to come.

Hawaii--Nowhere in the country did turnout increase more than in the Aloha State where vastly increased mail voting helped overcome the usual low turnout that comes with the state's early poll closing times.  Given the state's overwhelming Democratic advantage, this was thought to be a surefire formula for helping Biden run up the score, but it didn't work out that way.  Biden still won by nearly 30 points, but Hillary won by 32 points in 2016.  I predicted a 36-point Biden win, figuring that with the state's population now being only 14% white that Trump had effectively no base.  Obviously nothing can be gleaned from this regarding any degree of increased Republican competitiveness in Hawaii generally, but it does reinforce the lesson this year that sharply increased turnout doesn't guarantee better numbers for Democrats as has been the conventional wisdom for most of my life.

Idaho--The Boise area continues to trend toward Democrats but outside of that there was little for Democrats to hang their hat on in the Gem State, where Trump won by 31 points, only one point less than he did in 2016 and outpaced the 26-point margin I predicted.  Trump showed particular strength in Idaho's chimney and seemed to pick up most of the 2016 Evan McMullin voters in the state's Mormon-heavy southeast corner.  It was an almost identical story in the Senate race where Republican Senator Jim Risch was re-elected by nearly 30 points.  Republicans handily hung onto both of their Idaho House seats as well.

Illinois--Biden seems poised to undershoot my expectations a bit in the Land of Lincoln, where I predicted a 23-point win.  There's still a portion of the vote from Chicagoland lurking out there that's likely to be Biden-friendly, but Biden's current 17-point lead will probably not grow much with what's left out there.  The split between Chicagoland and downstate gets more pronounced every cycle, and this year certainly did nothing to reverse that trend with downstate counties that were key parts of Illinois' Democratic coalition for generations now going 2-1 Republican.  The Mississippi River Valley counties in western Illinois have taken the hardest hit, moving dramatically red even since 2012.  And even though I predicted this intrastate schism would rear its head in the Senate race, it's still jarring to look at Dick Durbin's winning county map and see that it's identical to the Presidential map, with dozens and dozens of downstate counties that Durbin won multiple times in the past now firmly in the grasp of his third-rate challenger Mark Curran, who far as I can tell wasn't even running a functional campaign.  A third-party candidate got 4% of the vote in Illinois and probably limited Durbin's numbers a bit more.  Durbin won by 16 points, well below my prediction of a 23-point win.  The House races in Illinois also underwhelmed.  Even though she was the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee this cycle, Democrat Cheri Bustos prevailed by only 4 points in her northwest Illinois district connecting Peoria and Rockford that was specifically gerrymandered for Democrats' benefit at the beginning of the last decade, reinforcing my earlier comment about the Mississippi River Valley bleeding Democratic support.  And even though Democrats did great at the top of the ticket in Chicagoland, freshman Democrat Lauren Underwood prevailed by only 1 point in her bid for a second term in the exurban Chicago-based IL-14.  Underwood was luckier than many of her colleagues nationally who underperformed the top of the ticket though in that she at least survived.  And Democrats fell 9 points short of taking out Republican Rodney Davis in the Springfield-based IL-13 despite polls showing a competitive race.  Democrats' statewide gerrymander held up well though as they end the decade with a 13-5 advantage in the House delegation.  We'll see if they're able to work their magic again in the decade to come, even with Illinois poised to lose at least one seat and possibly two.

Indiana--The increasingly conservative Hoosier State is not exactly a bellwether of the national political climate, but when I saw the early returns coming out of Indiana (it has the earliest poll closings in the nation), it was pretty clear right away that Trump would be much stronger than pre-election polls suggested.  In the end, Trump's 16-point margin of victory in Indiana split the difference between the 12-point win I predicted and Trump's 19-point margin four years ago.  Most of Biden's gains compared to Hillary came in the upscale suburbs north of Indianapolis, particularly in Hamilton County which had long been the bedrock GOP bastion of the already Republican state.  But Democrats continued to bleed along the Ohio River Valley on the state's southern border and even lost ground in northwest Indiana which rests on the other side of Chicago, contradicting Biden gains on the Illinois side of Chicagoland.  Indiana's industrial towns that went strong enough for Obama for him to pull off an unlikely statewide win in 2008 were all firmly in the Trump camp this year, making it very hard to see what a winning Democratic coalition would look like in Indiana in the foreseeable future.  The Dems' only real priority this year was to win the open GOP-held seat in IN-05, but despite the aforementioned blue surge in the Indianapolis suburbs, they came up 4 points short of victory, keeping the state's 7-2 GOP House delegation intact.  And while Republican Governor Eric Holcomb was poised to get re-elected no matter what, his opposition was split between a Democrat and a libertarian who both got double-digit support, leading to Holcomb prevailing by an outsized 22 points over the Democratic second-place challenger.

Iowa--Disappointments were many for Democrats in the aftermath of Election 2020 but few states fell short of expectations more than Iowa, where despite polls showing close races and Democratic momentum, voters doubled down on Trump and the GOP by ferocious margins.  I didn't take the bait and predicted victories for both Trump and Republican Senator Joni Ernst, but I was still floored by the margins.  Trump won by more than 8 points, double the 4 points I predicted, holding all of the 93 counties he won four years earlier including the 32 counties (!) that voted twice for Obama before that.  The former Democratic base in Iowa, a stretch of blue-collar counties in the Mississippi River Valley in eastern Iowa, mostly became even redder on November 3rd, and it's very hard to see how Democrats can win elections in Iowa any longer if they've lost these places.  The Senate race was scarcely better, despite the near unanimous assumption that Ernst was toast in the weeks before the election.  Ernst beat Democratic challenger Theresa Greenfield by nearly 7 points, much more than the 2 points I thought I was going out on a limb by predicting, picking up the overwhelming majority of Trump's coalition.  It didn't get any less ugly further down the ballot, with a surprise Republican pickup in IA-01 where freshman incumbent Abby Finkenauer was defeated by 2 points in one of the saddest results of the night given Finkenauer's youth and blue-collar profile.  The closest House race in the nation came in IA-02 in the southeastern quadrant of the state, a seat held for a decade and a half by retiring Democrat Dave Loebsack.  Still officially uncalled, Republican Marianette Miller-Meeks holds a 50-vote lead at the tail end of the recount and is favored to be in Congress in January.  The only Democratic survivor is Cindy Axne in IA-03, who thanks entirely to metropolitan Des Moines was able to prevail by 1 point.  Democrats were expected to make modest gains in the state legislature but ended up losing a significant numbers of seats, particularly in those eastern Iowa industrial towns where Trump cleaned up.  It was a complete and utter bloodbath, arguably the worst set of results of any state in the country, made worse by the fact that I live and work in the state.  The Democratic base has been completely and utterly destroyed in just two cycles in Iowa, and winning them back is likely to prove very difficult.

Kansas--After the first debate where President Trump was considered to have put up a poor performance, some "leaked Republican internals" suggested Trump's lead had dropped to low single digits in the Sunflower State.  It's pretty obvious now that it was all a GOP headfake as election night looked much more like a typical election night in Kansas than it did a realigning Democratic wave.  I fell for it just a little bit myself, but less in the Presidential race than downballot.  Trump's 15-point victory was a few points worse than the 11 points I predicted, and to be fair, Biden did see some impressive gains in the Kansas City suburbs and a couple other population centers in the northeast quadrant of the state.  But it was the Senate race where, once again, the Democrats face-planted hardest.  Democratic candidate Barbara Bollier seemed like the perfect nominee for this open seat, a former moderate Republican who switched parties like so many other GOP moderates in the state and seemed better positioned than any Democrat in nearly a century to capture Democratic Governor Laura Kelly's winning coalition from two years ago and win a Kansas Senate seat.  I still predicted Republican Roger Marshall would win by 7 points, but I underestimated just how much the race would revert to the partisan mean, with Marshall ultimately prevailing by 12 points.  An independent candidate flying underneath just about everybody's radar probably took away some would-be Bollier votes, but this race still wasn't close and probably never was.  To whatever extent Democrats moved the football at all in Kansas, it was only a few yards on a 100-yard field.   As expected, the GOP held their 3-1 House delegation advantage, and if I was Democrat Sharice Davids in KS-03, I'd be very nervous about Republicans in the legislature ripping her seat apart and making it unwinnable for her in redistricting next year.

Kentucky--Like Indiana, polls in the Bluegrass State are the earliest in the country to close.  I was under no illusion that Kentucky would be anything less than a disaster for Democrats and it lived down to my expectations completely.  I predicted Trump would win by 26 points and I was right on the nose, with Biden's victories limited only to the state's two most populous counties that are home to Louisville and Lexington.  Believe it or not, Biden's massive loss was still a 4-point improvement over Hillary Clinton.  I was pretty close in the Senate race too, with Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell prevailing by 20 points, just a couple less than the 22 points I predicted, over well-funded Democratic challenger Amy McGrath who only barely outperformed Biden and did much worse than McConnell's 2014 challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes.  As predicted, the Republicans maintained their 5-1 advantage in the House delegation.  The only faint glimmer of good news for Kentucky Democrats was their strong gains in Lexington and its outlying areas, suggesting they're decently positioned for picking up a House seat somewhere down the line if the district is kept mostly intact.  Beyond that though, I suspect Governor Andy Beshear's narrow fluke win last year will be the last Democratic statewide victory in Kentucky for at least a generation.

Louisiana--Another state with pretty predictable bright red results was Louisiana.  I predicted Trump would win the Pelican State by 18 points this year.  He ended up winning by nearly 19, just a tick less than four years ago and with a very similar coalition.  I held out some hope that the notoriously red New Orleans suburbs that flipped to blue and helped re-elect Governor John Bel Edwards last year would stay in the Democratic fold for Biden this year, but they mostly reverted to form while the rural areas of the state, particularly the Cajun region, got even redder.  But once again, Democratic performance was most eyebrow-raisingly unimpressive in the Senate race, with Shreveport Mayor and top young Democratic recruit Adrian Perkins scoring only 19% (!) in the jungle primary with a Democratic field more split than expected, with the third-place finisher scoring 11% of the vote.  As expected, winning the field was Republican incumbent Bill Cassidy who captured an impressive 59% of the statewide vote, good enough to beat Perkins by 40 points, almost double the 23 points I predicted.  The Republicans' 5-1 House delegation held up, and the only Democrat in the delegation (Cedric Richmond of LA-02) is about to take a job with the Biden administration.  I'm highly confident another Democrat will take that overwhelmingly blue New Orleans seat but it's about the only thing I'm confident about as it pertains to Democrats in Louisiana.

Maine--Joe Biden had a pretty good night in Maine, winning statewide by 9 points, just a tick below my 10-point prediction.  But even Biden didn't have a great night in Maine because he still came 6 points short of picking up the electoral vote from northern Maine, making this the second cycle in a row where the state polarized deeply between north and south.  I predicted Biden would narrowly win the northern Maine electoral vote, but I should have known better.  And I also should have known better about the Senate race.  Particularly during the Amy Coney Barrett hearings when Republican Senator Susan Collins was the only Republican to vote no, I had a nagging suspicion in the back of my mind that this fit perfectly into Collins' narrative, allowing her to showcase her "independence" just before an election.  Still every poll and all the anecdotes on the ground pointed to Democratic challenger Sara Gideon unseating Collins.  In the end, it wasn't even remotely close, with Collins prevailing by 9 points, putting the race at the front of the line for the biggest polling miss of the year.  I really don't get what Mainers see in Susan Collins that makes her so beloved, and I guess that's why I beclowned myself predicting a 4-point win for Gideon.  Democrats did manage to hold both House races, and Jared Golden's 7-point win in ME-02 looks all the more impressive considering how well Trump and Collins did there.  Nonetheless, Mainers played a bigger role than anyone else in the country in making this country ungovernable for the next four years and in making the replacement of Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court nearly impossible, so the state's deeply in the doghouse with me.

Maryland--Democrats didn't have a better night anywhere in the country than in Maryland on November 3rd, particularly Joe Biden who scored a huge and geographically comprehensive victory in the state, cracking a few counties that had long been Republican red and improving upon Hillary in almost every county.  I pretty much predicted as much, guessing Biden would win this deep blue state by 32 points.  He ended up winning by more than 33 points, a full 6 points better than Hillary's impressive 2016 margin, making Maryland the second-most Democratic state in the country in 2020.  Democrats had no problem hanging onto their 7-1 majority in the state's Congressional delegation as well.  Unfortunately for Democrats, there are far more states not like Maryland than like Maryland among the 50.

Massachusetts--One of the few states that is quite a bit like Maryland in its aggressive blue tint is the Bay State which ended up being Biden's third-best state nationally, trailing Maryland by only a couple tenths of a percent for that designation.  Biden's 33-point win matched my prediction to the letter.  Given that Massachusetts' Democratic coalition consists of a lot of working-class whites from burned-out old mill towns with Trump-friendly demographic profiles, I was surprised by how dominating Hillary's victory was four years ago.  Biden built on that margin, particularly in the Greater Boston area, and only shed support in the Portuguese-heavy demographics of southeast Massachusetts which continued their generation-long trend toward Republicans in November.   Democratic Senator Ed Markey matched Biden's 33-point margin, just shy of my 34-point prediction, with a map that looks pretty much identical to Biden's right down to the precinct.  The Democrats have held every House district in Massachusetts since 1996, an astonishing 24-year streak that continued to hold in 2020 with the Democrats winning all nine House seats once again.

Michigan--Operating strictly under a "win is a win" principle, Democrats got pretty much everything they wanted out of Michigan on November 3rd.   The margins, on the other hand, were nothing to get excited about, and the election night "red mirage" we were warned about was every bit as spooky as advertised.  There were states where the polls were off by more, but Biden's 3-point margin in the Wolverine State fell far short of expectations.  I predicted a 6-point Biden win and that number was more conservative than most.  It feels a little strange that Michigan has now been more Republican than the country for two cycles in a row, and it underscores just how much Trump has realigned the Midwest with his populism.  Geographically, dozens of rural counties and industrial towns where Obama dominated a decade ago flipped to red four years ago and most of them stayed there, with Biden's victory dependent upon improved margins in upscale Detroit suburbs along with the previously dark red suburbs of Grand Rapids.   As for the Senate race, there was chatter about Democratic incumbent Gary Peters being the weakest Democrat up for re-election this year.  Considering I thought Biden was cruising at the top of the ticket, I figured he'd have sufficient coattails to drag Peters across the line.  In the end, both Biden and Peters limped to victory, with the latter beating GOP challenger John James by less than 2 points, lower than the 4 points I predicted and a far cry from the geographically comprehensive 10-point victory that Peters scored in the otherwise Republican year of 2014.  And just as Democrats pulled it out in the Presidential and Senate races, two House freshman held onto challenging seats in the outer suburbs of Detroit, maintaining the 7-7 split in the state's House delegation.  Since Michigan is losing a House seat once again next year, we'll see what happens to Elissa Slotkin and Haley Stevens next time when their districts change and they're possibly pit against each other.  Whatever the case, this year's victories were nice to have but do little to assuage my concern about trend line of Michigan, among other Midwestern states where Democratic fortunes are in undeniable decline.

Minnesota--It's still a bit confusing how much of an outlier Minnesota was compared to the rest of the Midwest this cycle, shifting several points in Biden's direction while almost all of the Gopher State's neighbors moved only inches to the left of their 2016 numbers.  Obviously the demographically friendly Twin Cities metro area led the way for Biden's impressive surge but even most rural areas in the state saw modest shifts toward Biden compared to Hillary, the latter of whom famously won Minnesota by only 1 point.  Four years later, Biden prevailed by 7 points, and while I'd like to take credit for predicting that exact margin, I was operating under the impression that other Upper Midwest states would be moving parallel to Minnesota, and had I known how far the polls would be off in the neighboring states, I'd have never bet on Biden +7 holding up in Minnesota.  Unfortunately, the Presidential number was the only thing worthy of celebration in Minnesota.  Democratic Senator Tina Smith was re-elected by a modest 5-point margin, a tick better than the 4 points I predicted but still underwhelming considering her weak opponent.  More on what went wrong there later, but the House races were also a bummer.  For the second cycle in a row it was close but no cigar for Democratic challenger Dan Feehan in his effort to unseat scandal-plagued Republican Jim Hagedorn in the southern Minnesota-based MN-01 formerly held by the current Minnesota Governor.  Thirty-year Democratic incumbent Collin Peterson representing the conservative MN-07 in western Minnesota was finally taken out, and by a double-digit margin at that, as his district fully got away from him.  Despite being one of the most effective and influential members of Congress and the head of the Ag Committee, western Minnesotans traded him in for his clownish Republican challenger Michelle Fischbach.  Even Democratic freshman Angie Craig, who dodged a bullet by avoiding a February special election after a third-party candidate died in the south metro-based MN-02, was only re-elected by 2 points in a race where she was expected to skate to victory.  But as a really telling data point on how disappointing the night was for Minnesota Democrats, they were considered heavy favorites to pick up the Minnesota State Senate and managed to even fall short of pulling that off.   And in almost all of the races where Democrats fell short of expectations in Minnesota, there was one consistent bugaboo dragging them down....and that bugaboo was two gadfly marijuana parties that managed to secure major-party status in 2018 because of a quirk in Minnesota election law.  The marijuana parties were almost certainly the difference in costing the Democrats control of the legislature and probably shrunk Tina Smith's winning margin by at least 3 points in the Senate race.  Looking at these results, it's impossible to overstate how big of a threat these marijuana parties are to the Democrats moving forward, and there's virtually no chance they're gonna go away.  In the next defensive cycle, which is likely to be 2022, I suspect these marijuana parties will be the difference that leads to Democratic defeats in every statewide race.

Mississippi--A fair amount of Democratic-skewing late returns have trickled in from the Magnolia State in the past week but I suspect the current numbers are pretty close to final, with Trump winning by 16 points, a tick more than the 14 points I predicted but still far less of a calamity for Biden and his party than in neighboring Alabama or even Louisiana or Arkansas.  I suspect black turnout held up because of Democratic Senate candidate Mike Espy's second consecutive impressive performance in this nearly impossible state.  Espy lost by 10 points to Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith but ran more than 6 points better than Biden.  I predicted Hyde-Smith would win by 12 points considering this time she was on the ballot with Trump in a state where Trump is very popular.  Espy comes out of this race with the distinction of being one of the few Democratic Senate candidates to overperform.  The state's House delegation maintained its 3-1 GOP advantage.

Missouri--Another year, another embarrassing belly-flop for Democrats in the Show Me State, which has officially become more Republican than neighboring Kansas this cycle.  Pollsters clearly have no idea what they're doing in Missouri, missing the mark by huge margins cycle after cycle.  For that reason, I laughed off pre-election polling by more than one outfit showing Trump leading by only 5 points in Missouri and predicted Trump would prevail by 13 points.  It turns out I was still too bullish for Biden as Trump ended up winning Missouri by 15 points.   It was expected that Trump was really bleeding support in the suburbs of Kansas City and St. Louis, so much so that Republican Congresswoman Ann Wagner from the upscale northern suburbs of St. Louis was poised to be unseated.  In the end, Wagner won by 6 points, with the Democratic surge in suburban St. Louis failing to materialize anywhere on the ballot.  Meanwhile, the already stunningly red Missouri interior only got redder.  Nobody gave Democrat Nicole Galloway much of a chance of unseating Republican Governor Mike Parson, at least not in the last six months, but Parson ended up outperforming Trump and beating Galloway by 16 points.  Missouri's long-time reputation as a bellwether for the country is now a distant memory, and while the GOP's 6-2 advantage in the House delegation didn't get bigger, it just might next time if the GOP legislature cracks the Kansas City-based MO-05 with redistricting.

Montana--Over the summer, I anticipated a pretty red year in Montana, not expecting the libertarian-leaning state to cotton to the current state of affairs in the country.  Unfortunately, I allowed myself to get suckered by a bevy of polls showing a single-digit Presidential race and photo finishes for multiple races downballot.  I should have stuck with my gut on this one because it was much closer to what happened on November 3rd than any of the public polls suggested.  I didn't do too terribly badly in the Presidential race, predicting a 12-point win for Trump, but the ultimate 16-point Trump margin was far above and beyond what anybody anticipated, even if it was a few points short of his 2016 performance.  But at the risk of sounding like a broken record, the real disappointment came in the Senate race, where poll after poll after poll was showing a tied race between incumbent Republican Senator Steve Daines and his Democratic challenger, current Governor Steve Bullock.  I never bought that it was a tie but shifted my early prediction several points in the Dems' direction, settling upon a 3-point win for Daines.  In the end, Daines prevailed by 10 points (!), giving pollsters another well-deserved black eye.  The Governor's race was also a disaster, with Republican batterer Greg Gianforte prevailing by 13 points over his Democratic challenger for the open seat vacated by the aforementioned Bullock.  The at-large House seat, abandoned by Gianforte for his gubernatorial run, also went to the Republican by nearly 13 points.  Basically, Montana performed as I expected it would over the summer, if not a little bit worse.  The only good news is that Montana is gaining a Congressional seat for 2022, and if Democrats manage to get a map that combines blue-trending population centers of Missoula, Butte, Helena, and Bozeman into one western Montana district, they'll have a fighting chance of picking up a seat, but it seems unlikely they'll get a map quite that perfect.

Nebraska--In the hopelessly red Cornhusker State, Democrats had exactly one objective this year....to deliver the proportionally allocated electoral vote from Omaha to Joe Biden. Mission accomplished.  Trump prevailed by 19 points statewide in Nebraska, slightly less than the 21-point margin I predicted, but Biden won by a healthy 6 points in the Omaha district.  My guess is the Republicans who control Nebraska state government won't let this happen again and will carve up the NE-02 district like a Thanksgiving turkey so that Democratic Presidential nominees are far less likely to poach an electoral vote out of the state in the decade to come.  And tellingly, even with Biden's big win in NE-02 in the Presidential race, Democrat Kara Eastman still failed to unseat Republican Congressman Don Bacon in the House race.  Eastman lost by 4 points and ran several points behind Biden.  There was no suspense in the Senate race as the Democrats disavowed their controversial nominee, giving rise to a libertarian candidate splitting the hapless opposition and producing a clean lane for Republican incumbent Ben Sasse to win a second term by 40 points, well ahead of the 28-point Sasse victory I predicted.

Nevada--While the story ended with a sigh of relief for Nevada Democrats this year, it was nonetheless a much closer night than widely anticipated, with the Silver State trending GOP in 2020 after years of Democrats consolidating their victories in the fast-growing majority-minority state.  Biden prevailed by only 2 points in the Presidential race, well below the 6 points I predicted.  In this case, the polls weren't too far off as, particularly late in the cycle, Biden's lead appeared soft, so much so that just about everybody dismissed the polls as too bearish for Democrats.  The softness for Biden was felt down the ticket as well, with two Democratic House members nobody expected to have a close race squeaking by with low-to-mid-single digit victories, allowing Democrats to keep their 3-1 advantage in Nevada's House delegation.  Democrats are very lucky that the Reno area continues to trend their way because the greater Las Vegas area, where two-thirds of Nevadans live, shifted a bit toward Trump this year, perhaps with Trump's unexpected strength with Hispanics responsible for some of the shift.  Ultimately Democrats should have seen this coming as the party is highly overexposed in Nevada, controlling the Governor's office and both houses of the legislature, and the state's tourist-centered economy is in shambles during the pandemic, likely making the Democrats' messaging on COVID particularly exhausting for plenty of service workers.  While the Democrats' firewall held serve for 2020, the trend line suggests that Congresspersons Steven Horsford and Susie Lee, and especially Governor Steve Sisolak and Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, have their work cut out for them to keep their jobs in 2022.

New Hampshire--If I only looked at the federal races, I'd have thought the Democrats had a superb year in the Granite State.  After a photo finish in 2016, Joe Biden prevailed by 7 points in the Presidential race, slightly below my 9-point prediction but still impressive.  Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen crushed it with a 16-point win in the Senate race, very close to my prediction of 17 points.  And both incumbent Democrats prevailed decisively in the state's two House races.  But it was a decidedly different night for state Democrats in New Hampshire.  In the Governor's race, pretty much everybody thought Republican incumbent Chris Sununu would easily get a second term, but he doubled my prediction with an astounding 32-point margin, and his voters stuck with the GOP downballot, flipping the state House to Republicans and giving the party full control of New Hampshire state government.  I'm not sure there's a recent precedent for voters given such a polarized mandate for one party in federal races and the other party in state races, at least not since the Deep South in the civil rights era.

New Jersey--Votes continue to trickle in from the Garden State three weeks after election night.  Several states put forth a red mirage with Republican-leaning election day ballots counted first but New Jersey gave us a blue mirage showing blowout Democratic margins that got whittled down in the days to come.  The outcome is pretty much in line with recent expectations for Presidential cycles in New Jersey with Biden prevailing by 16 points.  I expected he'd run a little stronger and predicted a 19-point win but since Republicans have a pretty high floor in Jersey, it's pretty close to what was expected and Biden still performed a couple of points better than Hillary.  Democratic Senator Cory Booker is running almost identical to Biden's numbers and is also winning by 16 points with presumably all but a tiny fraction of the vote left out.  The Democrats' county map was pretty close to where it's been for the last generation, albeit with Dems hemorrhaging some support in South Jersey while picking up ground in the northern exurbs, finally flipping upscale Morris County from red to blue this year.  The Democrats picked up a few seats in the House in 2018 and mostly hung onto them cycle, with the only real scare coming to freshman Democrat Tom Malinowsky from NJ-07, who had a strong challenger in state Senate President and former US Senate candidate Tom Kean, Jr., but prevailed by less than 1 point and is likely to be shored up in redistricting next year where Democrats control the process.  The Democrats only miss was taking out an incumbent who was part of their caucus two years ago.  South Jersey Congressman Jeff Van Drew ran and won as a Democrat in 2018 but switched parties last year when Trump was impeached.  Democrats were confident they'd beat him this time and polls showed that they would, but Van Drew prevailed by a healthy 5 points in his red-trending district.  The Democrats have a 10-2 advantage in New Jersey's House delegation and I suspect they'll avoid getting greedy and try to keep that ratio with redistricting rather than risk going for an 11th seat and weaken other districts as a result...the mythical "dummymander" that comes when parties spread their gerrymanders too thin and endanger multiple incumbents when the demographics or political landscape changes.

New Mexico--It was a fair night for Democrats in the Land of Enchantment but not a great one like 2018 was.  Biden's 11-point win at the top of the ticket, while strong, fell short of my 14-point prediction and pretty much tells the story of New Mexico not quite living up to expectations.  Obviously, the shift among Hispanics toward Republicans was a factor locally in the nation's only majority-Hispanic state, and just like in Texas, Arizona, and California, the closer you get to the Mexican border, the more disappointing the Democrats' margins were.  The open-seat Senate race defined the mediocrity of the Democrats' evening, with heavily favored Democratic Congressman Ben Ray Lujan prevailing by only 6 points over his Republican challenger Mark Ronchetti, a local TV meteorologist.  I predicted Lujan would win by 11.  As for the House races, the Democrats got lucky in 2018 by winning the conservative NM-02 seat in the southern half of the state due to lagging Republican turnout and a GOP challenger considered too extreme.  It was always gonna be a tough hold for Democrat Xochitl Torres Small in 2020, and she came up nearly 8 points short of repeating her previous win.  The Democrats thus return to their 2-1 advantage in the New Mexico House delegation.  Considering Democrats control the Governor's office and the legislature, they could put forth an aggressive gerrymander and give themselves three solid Democratic seats.  We'll see if they do it.  You can be sure the Republicans would if they were in a situation to do so, and in many states they are.

New York--If I wait for the Empire State to finish counting their votes before I post this, it will be time for the 2022 election!  There are still probably two million votes left to count in New York City before we have a complete read on the 2020 election.  What we're currently seeing in New York is a red mirage of primarily election day votes.  The majority of upstate counties have counted their early vote by now and it's come in very heavily blue, enough to flip several upstate counties that were painted red on election night, and in some cases painted red four years ago as well.  But I'm not yet in a position to determine how close I was with my aggressive prediction of a 31-point Biden win in New York.  Suffice it to say he's got a long way to go with his current lead of 16 points, but I do expect most of the remaining vote to be overwhelmingly Biden-favored.  But as was the case in so much of the country, the Democratic wave fell far short downballot with reach seats on the Democratic wish list like the Syracuse-based NY-24 and even the open NY-02 on Long Island staying in GOP hands.  On the contrary, Democrats have already lost one seat with embattled freshman Max Rose on Staten Island getting felled, and are facing a photo finish in central New York with freshman Democrat Anthony Brindisi coming from far behind as the early vote gets counted.  There are some reports as of this writing that he's running 13 votes (!) ahead of Republican challenger Claudia Tenney, who he beat in 2018.  We'll see how that goes but as of now it's one of only two seats still uncalled and will likely be heading to a recount.  This seat was always gonna be a tough hold for Democrats so if Brindisi can survive it's possible he'll be given a safer seat in redistricting, with Democrats poised to control the process in New York.  Just like the final tally in the Empire State overall, the verdict is incomplete here.

North Carolina--All year long, I've warned about the trail of broken Democratic hearts that the Tar Heel State has left behind in nearly every election cycle of the past decade, second only to Florida.  As a result of this legacy, I couldn't bring myself to predict Biden would win North Carolina even though the polls showed he was narrowly favored, and my gut led me to the right call.  Trump prevailed by 1 point in North Carolina, just as I predicted he would.  He pulled it off with the same formula in which Republicans have been winning most North Carolina elections since Obama's narrow 2008 victory in the state, a year when the stars aligned with a high turnout and united front of black voters, demographically friendly newcomers who took up residence from out of state, and a fading cohort of conservative Democrats that hadn't yet fully realigned to the GOP.  Ever since 2008, the speed at which those conservative Democrats have shifted Republican has outpaced Yankee replacement growth with the black turnout never being as strong or as monolithically Democrat as it was for Obama.  While it seems inevitable that demographics are on the Democrats' side here, it didn't happen soon enough to save Biden who saw further erosion compared to Hillary in most of the state's rural areas, including a number of majority-black counties.  Luckily North Carolina didn't end up being kingmaker in the Presidential race, but it was in the Senate race where Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham, a heavy favorite to take out unpopular Republican incumbent Thom Tillis most of this year, ended up underperforming Biden, losing by nearly 2 points.  I took false comfort in polls showing Cunningham running ahead of Biden in polls even after his sex scandal broke in September and I predicted that he'd win what I expected to be the closest Senate race in the country.  Could Cunningham have pulled it out if he hadn't tarnished his Captain America image with the unforced error of the sex scandal?  Possibly....but it's by no means clear.  And really underscoring how much stronger Republicans were than predicted in North Carolina, the popular incumbent Democratic Governor Roy Cooper who was expected to coast to re-election (I was more conservative than most predicting he'd win by 9 points) ended up winning by only 4 points.  Looking at that mediocre result, Biden actually held up pretty well coming up only 1 point short of victory, and it tells me that Democrats are still the underdogs in North Carolina at least for the near future.  With all that said, Democrats did in North Carolina what they were unable to do anywhere else in the country....they picked up two GOP-held House seats.  But it's not what it looks like.  The courts finally overturned the 2010 Republican gerrymander of North Carolina Congressional districts, enabling Democrats to coast into a bluer House district landscape and temporarily narrow the GOP's 10-3 House delegation advantage to an 8-5 GOP advantage.  And I say temporary because Republicans still control the state legislature and will likely go for another aggressive gerrymander that, even if ruled illegal years later as their last one was, almost assures them of a better hand for the 2022 midterms.

North Dakota--While the Flickertail State has always leaned heavily Republican in Presidential elections, it's only been during the Trump era that the state has become an impenetrable GOP stronghold up and down the ballot where Democrats have no hope of winning or even coming close, as ousted Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp can attest to.  Part of this has to do with the state's oil boom, but even jurisdictions hundreds of miles away from the North Dakota oilfields moved more than 20 points in Republicans' direction these last few years.  In 2016, Trump won North Dakota by an astonishing 36 points, but I gave the state the benefit of the doubt thinking they'd revert at least partially to form this cycle, predicting a 23-point Trump win for 2020.  But Trump's coalition held together and delivered him another 33-point victory, making my Presidential prediction for North Dakota off by more than any state in the country.  That means that for the second Presidential cycle in a row, North Dakota was more Republican than freaking Idaho!  It was an even bigger landslide in the gubernatorial race, not unexpectedly, as incumbent Republican Doug Burgum beat token opposition by 42 points, close to my prediction of a 44-point Burgum win.  The GOP held the state's at-large House district handily as well.  The only positive sign for Democrats in North Dakota is their steady gains in the Fargo area where Biden came only 2 points short of victory, but it's way too little and too late to reverse the Democratic statewide spiral here.

Ohio--For the fourth consecutive election cycle, the Buckeye State was a thermonuclear disaster zone for the Democratic Party, its years as a national bellwether or even a battleground state generally likely being over as it's now realigned as pretty safely red.  Everybody went into this election cycle predicting that Trump was heavily favored to win Ohio after his unexpectedly large 8-point shellacking of Hillary four years earlier, but as the national tide began to rise for Biden and some polls showed him competitive in Ohio, the state returned to the outer edges of the battleground.  I never fully fell for it, but did scale back my prediction for Trump's winning margin to 4 points in my final round of calls.  I should have stuck with my gut from last summer as Trump ended up winning by 8 points once again, matching his win from four years earlier and humiliating clueless pollsters predicting a photo finish.  Biden made some gains in the upscale suburbs of Columbus and Cincinnati as expected, but they're the demographic minority in heavily white working-class Ohio.  Trump dominated with those same working-class whites who twice delivered the state to Obama not that long ago, leaving the Democrats' coalition in shambles with no sign of recovery on the horizon.  And the Republicans' lethal 2010 gerrymander of the House seats held up once again.  Even the aforementioned Democratic gains in suburban Cincinnati and Columbus weren't enough to penetrate the GOP's gerrymander, keeping the GOP's 12-4 House advantage intact.  With the GOP still in charge of Ohio after of the next gerrymander, it's entirely possibly they produce an unthinkable 13-2 Republican map for next time.  Crazy how it only took two Presidential cycles for long-time swing states Iowa and Ohio to effectively realign completely out of the battleground.

Oklahoma--In the 2018 midterms, there were a number of leading indicators pointing to the long-time Republican stronghold of Oklahoma City shifting to Democrats.  Based on that alone, I predicted Biden would make some inroads in the ruby-red Sooner State, and while that did happen, the shift was less strong that I expected.  Trump won the state by 33 points, and while that's 3 points better than Hillary four years ago, it still fell short of my prediction of a 28-point Trump win.  For the fifth consecutive Presidential cycle, all of Oklahoma's 77 counties went Republican, including Oklahoma County, the state's most populous and home to the majority of the Oklahoma City metro area, although Trump prevailed by only 1 point there, far less than the 11 points he won by there four years earlier.  Unfortunately for Democrats, most of the rural regions of the state, including the ancestrally Democratic "Little Dixie" region of southern and eastern Oklahoma, swung even harder for Trump and keeps Oklahoma well out of reach for the party for the foreseeable future.  In the Senate race, octogenarian Republican incumbent Jim Inhofe was returned for a fifth term as expected, winning by 30 points and basically "within the margin of error" of my 27-point prediction.  All of that was expected, but Democrats' only objective for the night in Oklahoma was seeing a repeat performance from Democrat Kendra Horn who won a surprise victory two years ago, knocking off a Republican incumbent in the Oklahoma City-based OK-05 district, but even with OKC trending blue, Horn lost her seat by a 4-point margin this year.  It was a bummer, but considering Oklahoma Republicans would likely have ripped her seat apart in redistricting, she was very likely to lose in 2022 anyway.

Oregon--Democrats matched expectations better in Oregon this year than most other states, which surprised me a bit as I anticipated at least some backlash to the left-wing excesses of Antifa-dominated Portland.  I still predicted a decisive 14-point Biden win but he exceeded those expectations and won by 16 points, improving versus Hillary in just about every corner of the state.  The anti-Portland backlash I expected wasn't entirely nonexistent though, as evidenced in the Senate race where incumbent Democrat Jeff Merkley's GOP challenger was a fourth-rate QAnon kook who had no semblance of a functional campaign.  Merkley handily prevailed by an 18-point margin, but he fell short of my 20-point prediction and three-quarters of the state's counties voted for the QAnon lady just because she had an (R) next to her name, something that never happened a decade ago when Democratic Senator Ron Wyden routinely won comprehensive statewide victories and picked up nearly every county in the state.  In the House races, Democrats maintained their impressive 4-1 advantage in the state's House delegation, with their two incumbents outside of the Portland area hanging on with modest single-digit margins.  If I remember right, Oregon is gaining a seat in redistricting, but given how thin the four Democrats are already spread, I think it's more likely than not the new seat will be Republican-held.

Pennsylvania--Expectations were lower for Biden and Democrats in the Keystone State than the other two "blue wall" states since pre-election polls routinely showed thinner Biden leads in Pennsylvania than in Wisconsin or Michigan.  With that in mind, Biden and the rest of the Democratic ticket came through in Pennsylvania, nudging his margins up just a little bit in most of the state's counties and turning Trump's 1-point win from 2016 into a 1-point Biden win in 2020.  The Biden victory was a tough slog though, and fell short of the more decisive 4-point victory I predicted he'd get.  He outperformed Hillary by just enough in the Philadelphia suburbs, the Pittsburgh metro area, the Lehigh Valley, and his home turf in the Scranton-Wilkes-Barre area.  Biden even flipped Erie County in the state's northwest corner back to blue, which was no easy task knowing how badly he got spanked across the border in northeastern Ohio.  But the fact that the state proved this hard for Biden to claw back doesn't fill me with confidence about the Democrats' chances in Pennsylvania moving forward.  The party did very well in the 2018 midterms, but right now that cycle looks more like the outlier than 2016 when Trump and Toomey both won.  Reinforcing how tough of a slog the state proved for Democrats was how tenuous their grasp proved to be in multiple House races where the party fell dramatically short in the reach seats on their wish list and where a few favored incumbents only narrowly won, including Susan Wild who won by 4 points in the Lehigh Valley-based PA-07, Matt Cartwright who won by 3 points in the Scranton-based PA-08, and rising star Conor Lamb who prevailed by only 2 points in the Pittsburgh suburbs-centered PA-17, hounded by the GOP's modestly effective messaging about fracking.  It'll take a pretty friendly court-drawn district map and quite a bit of luck for Democrats to hang onto the 9-9 split they currently enjoy in their House delegation, particularly since they never seem to be able to take out Brian Fitzpatrick in the Democrat-tilting Bucks County-based PA-01.

Rhode Island--Despite its reputation as one of the foremost Democratic strongholds in the nation, the Ocean State has pockets of decidedly Trumpy demographics, particularly its working-class Italian-American population, so it was terrifying to look at the early returns from Rhode Island and see Trump ahead.  Fortunately, it was the small bloc of election day votes counted first and those numbers were quickly overwhelmed when the early vote rolled in showing a more predictable and decisive win for Biden.  In fact, Biden's 21-point victory exceeded my prediction of a 19-point win, and handily blew past Hillary's 16-point win four years ago.  In the Senate race, popular long-time Democratic incumbent Jack Reed did even better, scoring a dominating 33-point win over his Republican challenger and matching my prediction perfectly.  The Democrats handily hung on to both of their House seats, but that's more of a bittersweet story as Rhode Island is poised to lose a seat in redistricting and have only one Congressman for the state at-large starting in 2022.

South Carolina--Plenty of states disappointed Democrats on November 3rd but one of the most annoying teases of the night was the Palmetto State where Democrats had a couple of lofty expectations and a couple more modest ambitions, none of which came to pass.  In the Presidential race, nobody expected Biden to win, but polling suggested Trump's lead was in the mid-single digits, with anecdotal evidence pointing to a sharp leftward shift in the Charleston area along the Atlantic Coast.  I fell for the hype to a limited degree, predicting Trump would prevail by only 7 points, which would have been the weakest GOP margin in South Carolina in a generation.  When the votes were actually counted, Trump won by 12 points, only a couple of points less than four years earlier against Hillary.  But it was the Senate race where pollsters and Democrats ended up with the most egg on their face.  The much-ballyhooed challenge from Democrat Jamie Harrison to odious long-time GOP incumbent Lindsey Graham was advertised as a nailbiter, but Graham prevailed by 10 points, wider than anybody anticipated, including me as I predicted Graham would hang on by only 3 points.  Meanwhile, the same erroneous polls indicated that freshman Democrat Joe Cunningham, who had a surprise victory in 2018 in the Charleston-based SC-01 House district, would cruise to a second term.  Not only did Cunningham fail to win big, he didn't win at all, losing by 1 point to Republican Nancy Mace and returning South Carolina's House delegation to a 6-1 GOP advantage.  So what went wrong here?   The Democratic tide fell short of expectations in Charleston area but not dramatically so.  The Democrats even made gains in the evangelical Greenville-Spartanburg region in the South Carolina Highlands.  But the surprise laggard for Democrats was in the impoverished stretch of majority-black counties in the state's interior where both Biden and Harrison fell decisively short of the numbers just about every traditional Democrat gets in the region.  With that in mind, it's easy to see why pollsters' models were off a bit...and it's hard to see how Democrats can ever make serious inroads into South Carolina if their support is dropping by double digits in some majority-black counties.

South Dakota--Like its neighbor to the north, the days of bipartisanship are over in the Mount Rushmore State as the state has moved sharply to the right, meaning this year's Presidential and Senate results were quite predictable.  Biden did manage to shave Trump's 30-point margin four years ago down to 26 points this year, but that's obviously still a blowout and exceeded the 23-point margin I predicted for Trump.  Interestingly, most of the libertarian West River counties moved a few points leftward this year while Trump grew even stronger in the farm counties of eastern South Dakota that used to be the base for Democrats such as Tom Daschle, Tim Johnson, and Stephanie Herseth.  Also disappointing was the Sioux Falls area, which despite demographics similar to Fargo and Omaha, neighboring cities on the Plains states' I-29 corridor, only moved a couple of points in Biden's direction and stuck with Trump by double digits.  The Senate race was even more of a blowout with freshman Republican Mike Rounds cruising to a second term by more than 31 points, right in line with my 30-point prediction.  The Republican in South Dakota's at-large House ran without Democratic opposition at all!  Hard to believe that three Presidential cycles ago, Obama held McCain to a mere 9-point margin of victory in South Dakota.  We're not likely to see even that level of Democratic strength here again anytime soon.

Tennessee--Democrats haven't had a good night in Tennessee since the early 90s, and haven't even had a mediocre night since 2006, so the bar couldn't have possibly been any lower for the Volunteer State in 2020.  Based on that hopeless standard, there were a few faint signs of a quarter-hearted comeback with significant improvement for Biden in the Republican suburbs of Nashville as well as more modest gains in Chattanooga and Knoxville despite their staying red.  But even with these gains, Biden still lost Tennessee by more than 23 points, an improvement of only 3 points compared to Hillary and nearly matching my prediction of a 22-point Trump margin.  The biggest problem remains Tennessee's considerable rural areas, which still leaned Democrat a generation ago but have completely realigned to some of the nation's biggest GOP strongholds in the past decade.  Predictably, the result was even worse in the Senate race, despite being an open seat vacated by retiring Republican Lamar Alexander. After yet another candidate fumble by Tennessee Democrats, Republican nominee Bill Hagerty skated to a 27-point victory, one point short of my predicted 28-point win.  Republicans easily held together their 7-2 majority in the state's House delegation again this year--a delegation that was still 5-4 Democrat as recently as 10 years ago--and if Republicans in the legislature split apart Nashville in redistricting next year, it could well be 8-1 Republican at this time in 2022.

Texas--Unlike Florida and North Carolina, most Democrats never quite allowed themselves to believe the hype that the Lone Star State could officially flip blue this year, but speaking from personal experience, I have a feeling most of them at least entertained the possibility somewhere in the back of their mind.  It was entirely fair to do so based on a litany of tea leaves, but in the end it wasn't particularly close.  Trump won by 5.5 points, meaning Biden didn't come nearly as close as 2018 Democratic Senate candidate Beto O'Rourke.  While a Democrat coming within 5 points in Texas is no small accomplishment, most polls indicated a much closer race and my prediction of Trump +3 was much closer to the expectation.  What went wrong?  Hispanics!  The Rio Grande River valley counties of south Texas swung unexpectedly to Trump by double digits, and even in the state's most populous county with the highest number of Hispanic voters (Harris County, home to most of metropolitan Houston), Biden only improved his margin by one percentage point over Hillary.  It's easy to see why pollsters missed this given the durability of the Hispanic vote for Democrats, particularly in the Rio Grande Valley.  Suburban whites seemed to do their part, flipping a number of upscale counties in the Dallas and Austin suburbs, and if Hispanics had voted for the Biden in the numbers they usually do, the margin probably would have been more like 2 or 3 points.  For that reason, the Senate race which was thought to be vaguely close was not, as plenty of the suburban whites who voted for Biden stuck with Republican incumbent John Cornyn while the same Hispanics that flipped to Trump also went for Cornyn.  The result was a nearly 10-point victory for Cornyn, double the 5 points I predicted and a disappointment for promising Democratic challenger M.J. Hegar.  The disappointment in Texas was felt most greatly in the House races though.  Given the surge of suburban momentum for Biden, it was expected a half dozen or more Republican-held seats would flip to the Democrats.  Remarkably, zero did, underscoring just how nonexistent Biden's coattails were and how ambivalent voters turned out to be for the Democratic Party's messaging.  So Republicans head into redistricting with their 23-13 advantage in the Texas House delegation intact and, since the Democrats failed to pick up up the Texas state House as well, the GOP will control redistricting and could realistically grow that advantage in 2022.  Clearly, the path to Democratic competitiveness in Texas is gonna come more slowly than was anticipated, and the party's inability to make any inroads at all in such a promising cycle was one of the evening's biggest disappointments.  The fact that an ebbing tide of Hispanic support was the primary reason for the lack of inroads makes it all the more disappointing for Democrats, reinforcing my doubts about the effectiveness of the party's maximalist identity politics strategy.

Utah--The 2016 cycle was the ultimate outlier in Utah politics.  The conservative majority-Mormon state was not fond of Donald Trump's brand of Republicanism, and a third-party conservative option who happened to be a Utah Mormon tossed his hat into the race and finagled 21% of the vote in his home state.  Trump still won the state, but with only 45% of the vote and with Hillary getting 27%.  There were no such complications in the 2020 Presidential election in Utah.  The good news for Biden is that he improved on Hillary's margin by double-digits....but the bad news for Biden is that Trump improved by double-digits as well.  With that said, it's no longer your father's Utah, the state that was handily the most Republican in the country for at least a half century.  Trump beat Biden by a little over 20 points, but that compared to Mitt Romney's 50-point win as recently as 2012.  I predicted Trump to win by 22 points, but there was more continued resistance to Trump than I anticipated among Utah Mormons, with Biden scoring the best numbers for a Democrat in heavily Mormon jurisdictions in generations.  If the Republicans nominate a less flamboyant emissary in future cycles, I expect the Beehive State to revert to form a bit, but with demographic change it's unlikely to revert to its GOP margins from decades past.  We saw this to a degree in the low-profile Governor's race this year, an open seat in which Republican Spencer Cox prevailed by 33 points, although that was well below my prediction of a 40-point Cox win.  Unfortunately for Democrats, they had a single goal in Utah this cycle and it was to return Congressman Ben McAdams for another term.  McAdams eked out a narrow win in the least Republican Utah Congressional seat two years ago in the Democratic wave, but it was gonna be a tough hold in a Presidential cycle, especially with a strong GOP challenger.  McAdams put up another strong fight but ended up losing by 1 point, returning the state's House delegation to 4-0 Republican.  If Democrats could get a clean Salt Lake City-based district, they'd easily be able to hold a Utah House seat, but with Republicans in charge of redistricting they'll never get that, meaning that even if McAdams had survived this cycle he'd have a very hard time winning in 2022. 

Vermont--Four years ago, Hillary underperformed the usual landslide Democratic margins that come out of the Green Mountain State, in large part because thousands of voters wrote in the name of favorite son Bernie Sanders.  Lefty voters were more cohesive this cycle and, for the first time ever, gave the Democratic nominee the largest victory margin in the country.  Biden won by 35 points, just a tick better than the 34 points I predicted, improving upon Hillary's margin by 7 points.  This would be a much more compelling narrative for the Democrats if incumbent Republican Governor Phil Scott had not won his race by an even bigger margin than Biden!  There was some wishful thinking on the part of Democrats that Biden's coattails might improve their gubernatorial nominee's chances but that didn't even come close to happening, with Scott obliterating him by 41 points and dominating in communities that went more than 80% for Biden.  There wasn't much polling data for this race but I'm still embarrassed for having predicted Scott would win by only 15 points.  Scott was definitely the outlier though, as the state's at-large House seat remained safely in Democratic hands.  With that said, if Democratic Senator Pat Leahy retires in 2022, you can be sure the GOP is gonna be pleading with Phil Scott to run for the open seat.

Virginia--The vote count typically goes the same in Virginia, with conservative areas coming in first and the Democratic strongholds rolling in late.  Still, it was peculiar to go into this cycle expecting a double-digit Biden blowout but still seeing Trump with a lead with more than 80% of the precincts in.  The Old Dominion delivered for Biden in the clutch though, with a surge of friendly precincts in northern Virginia, the Tidewater region, and metropolitan Richmond, the trifecta of doom for Virginia Republicans in the last decade as so much of Virginia has become an extension of the Washington DC "deep state" that it scarcely resembles the capital of the Old Confederacy any longer.  Biden went on to win by an impressive 10 points although he still fell a bit short of the 12-point win I predicted.  In the Senate race, moderate Democrat Mark Warner ran ahead of Biden as I expected he would and won by 12 points, although I overshot the runway with my prediction of a Warner +18 victory.  But Warner's county map was nearly identical to Biden's, looking nothing like the comprehensive Warner win from his first time in 2008 when he won nearly every county in the state.  The outcome was a little less decisive in the House races.  Democrats held onto their 7-4 majority in the Virginia House delegation, but fell far short of picking up the VA-05 reach district in central Virginia while the narrowest wins went to freshman Democrats Elaine Luria and Abigail Spanberger in their suburban Biden-Warner seats.  The good news for Democrats is that they control the redistricting process in Virginia and should be able to shore up their seven members districts...and possibly go for an eighth if they're feeling adventurous.

Washington--Biden ran strong in the Evergreen State.  My prediction of a 19-point Biden win was right on the nose, but I was surprised by the comprehensiveness of his victory, improving upon Hillary's numbers in all but a handful of the state's counties.  I expected more of a backlash in the state's rural areas against the left-wing excesses of Seattle but voters seemed willing to compartmentalize.  I also underestimated Democratic Governor Jay Inslee who was re-elected to a third term by 13 points, higher than the 10 points I predicted, getting another mandate for his progressive policy agenda and not being penalized for his quixotic Presidential run.  Democrats maintained their 7-3 advantage in the Washington House delegation, hanging on by 3 points in WA-08 in the eastern exurbs of Seattle.  Dems fell far short of taking out Jamie Herrera Beutler in WA-03, however, and appear to be losing substantial support in the working-class district in southwest Washington.

West Virginia--Polling was pretty bad this year, but one state where polling has been atrocious for as long as I've been tracking polls is the Almost Heaven State.  The limited supply of 2020 polling didn't disappoint, indicating that Biden had cut Hillary's deficit by more than half against Trump in what was Trump's second best state in 2016.  Unsurprisingly, that didn't happen but West Virginia actually bounced back to Biden even less than I expected, with Trump prevailing by 39 points, only 3 points less than in 2016.  I predicted Trump's victory would shrink to 33 points.  Biden's gains tracked pretty closely to the map of winning Democratic Senator Joe Manchin in 2018, with improvements in the small cities of Charleston, Huntington, and especially Morgantown, with further Democratic erosion in the rural coal counties that not that long ago were the Democratic base vote in West Virginia.  For the third consecutive election cycle, the Democrats didn't win a single West Virginia county.  The Democrats also didn't win any counties in the Senate race, where Republican incumbent Shelley Moore Capito actually outran Trump, winning by 43 points against an environmental activist challenger, 2 points better than my prediction of Capito +41.  Tough guy Richard Ojeda, who lost the Democratic primary, had no chance of winning this race, but I'd have been curious to see how much better Ojeda did that actual Democratic nominee Paula Swearingen.  Same story, different verse in the Governor's race where former Democrat Jim Justice switched parties early in his term and ran for re-election as a Republican, winning by 33 points, far better than the 21-point Justice victory I predicted.  As expected, Republicans easily held on to their 3-0 majority in the West Virginia House delegation.  Looking at these results, it seems all the more amazing that Manchin found a way to win as a Democrat in this state just two years ago.

Wisconsin--Four years ago, the battleground state where polls were the least reliable was the Badger State.  Every single public poll showed Hillary had a decisive lead, making it all the more stunning when Trump pulled out a 1-point win.  Four years later, Wisconsin once again had the dubious honor of the worst polling of any battleground state, with poll after poll suggesting Biden's victory might be poised to reach double digits.  Instead the race tracked almost identically to 2016, except Biden nudged his margins up just enough in just the right places to win by 20,000 votes rather than lose by 20,000 votes like last time.  My prediction of a 5-point Biden win was much more conservative than the polling suggested it would be, but it still seems naive in retrospect.  Biden's victory was made possible by weakened GOP margins in the ring of suburbs and exurbs surrounding Milwaukee along with a continued surge of Democratic votes coming out of the liberal bastion of Madison.  Most of the rest of the state failed to impress, with the biggest disappointment coming from the dairy counties of southwest Wisconsin which had long been among the most the Democratic rural areas of the country before realigning for Trump just like the demographically similar counties across the Mississippi River in eastern Iowa.  The "Driftless" region was so disappointing that long-time Democratic Congressman Ron Kind only hung onto his seat by 2 points, even though the district was designed by Republicans to be a vote sink for Democrats.  Kind will have a hard time getting himself a better district in redistricting, meaning that the existing 5-3 GOP advantage in Wisconsin's House delegation only stands to grow in the years to come.  It was a victory for the Democrats that Biden squeezed out this win, but it was wimpy enough that it doesn't say much for Democrats' prospects in Wisconsin moving forward.  And I'll never again look at a Wisconsin poll without taking it with a huge grain of salt.

Wyoming--A much easier state to predict was Wyoming, which was the strongest state for Trump four years ago and was again this year, unsurprising given that it's a coal-producing state full of libertarian cowboys.  I predicted Trump would win by 43 points this year....and he did.  Believe it or not, that's a 5-point improvement for Biden compared to Hillary's margin.  Given those blistering numbers for Trump, it's kind of an odd quirk that there are still two blue counties in Wyoming out of only 23 counties in the state, one being a granola tourist destination in the Tetons and the other the home to the University of Wyoming.  The open Senate seat vacated by retiring Republican Mike Enzi was an even bigger blowout, with Republican Cynthia Lummis prevailing by 46 points, exceeding my prediction of 40 points for Lummis.  Dick Cheney's daughter kept the state's at-large House seat in family hands--and GOP hands--for another term.

For any number of reasons, I'd liked to have seen a decisive national mandate rejecting Trump and his enablers.  For one thing, it requires a governing majority to unravel the country from its current pandemic entanglement.  The inevitable hyper-cynical partisanship of Mitch McConnell's Senate will produce anything but a governing majority for President-elect Biden.  Instead, he comes in to office very close to already being a lame-duck, the product of an unwieldy coalition held together by toothpicks which was united around opposition to a man leaving office in 60 days.

Unfortunately the reality check that voters handed the Democratic Party will come with consequences for the country, but for reasons I've been shouting from the rooftops for well over a year, the reality check was inevitable later if not sooner.  The Democrats did themselves incredible harm with last year's Presidential primary debates when nearly everybody on the stage was pandering to the furthest reaches of lefty Twitter auditioning for campaign donations, tethering themselves to positions on a litany of hot-button issues with 65% disapproval ratings.  I suspect plenty of moderate and conservative Democrats in Middle America finalized their divorce with the Democratic Party as they watched every hand on the debate stage go up in support of decriminalized borders, free health care for illegal immigrants, firearms confiscation, and slavery reparations.  The summer of protest that followed was also a catalyst for coalition cleaving, and as we saw in the exit polls, does not fit as neatly as Democrats hoped it would along racial and ethnic lines.

And the response to COVID-19 also created complicated and diverging electoral consequences.  In one sense, COVID changed the national conversation and prevented Trump from running the kind of campaign he planned to, and that likely ended up saving Democrats from defeat in the Presidential race.  After all, seniors shifted from Trump +8 four years ago to Trump +5 in 2020, largely because of his handling over COVID.  One could argue that that right there was the election.  But on the other hand, most voters are exhausted with the pandemic and are receptive to Trump and the GOP's messaging about ignoring or downplaying the risk.  The Democrats' cautious response has reinforced their image as the party of self-righteous scolds who like to boss the peasants around.  But most people don't like to be bossed around....and when they bossed around, the bad boy flaunting authority lurking in the shadows becomes increasingly appealing.  

And the politics of COVID won't get any less complicated moving forward when it comes time to frog-march hundreds of millions of skeptical Americans in for vaccines, demanding another full year of mask-wearing and social distancing among the already vaccinated because of residual threat, and dealing with the trillions of dollars of economic wreckage wrought to businesses--especially small businesses--that are bankrupted due to the closures.  The downstream consequences are impossible to fully conceive right now, and as of January 20, 2021, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi will own all of it.

In the end, the Democrats won the Congressional popular vote by only 2.5%.  That may sound like a decent victory, but given how heavily gerrymandered the districts are in the GOP's favor, it's really surprising the Democrats even held their four or five-seat majority.  Certainly after the Republicans snuff out another dozen or so Democratic seats in redistricting next year, the landscape will be even more challenging for the Democrats.  The Dems' 2.5% popular vote win in House races would almost certainly not yield a House majority in 2022, meaning they're underdogs even in a neutral environment.  And from a historical standpoint, a neutral political environment is by itself asking a lot as Biden and Pelosi's ownership of a troubled nation is much more likely to put the Democrats on considerable defense next cycle.  And the flimsy coalition Democrats put together this year really puts into question their ability to avoid a 2010-style historic wipeout if they find themselves on defense next time.

I think there's about a 50% chance Donald Trump's electoral days are over...maybe less than 50%.  His ego could very well propel him to make another go for it in 2024, and with a 74-million-voter army marching behind him, the threat of his comeback very much needs to be taken seriously.  Even if he doesn't run again though, he's not going away.  He will spend the foreseeable future settling scores and playing kingmaker, making or breaking GOP political careers with a single tweet.  Pretty much any Republican candidate he endorses becomes the instant frontrunner anywhere in the country.  Any Republican he trash-talks will go the way of former Republican Congressman Mark Sanford.  And now that most of his voters believe the election was stolen from him, they'll be like junkyard dogs ready for a fight.  It looks like the Democrats succeeded in ending Donald Trump's term as President in 2020, but given the show of strength Trump put forth on his way out, the Democratic victory will come with a heavy price that will be felt the rest of the decade.

Post-Election Hot Takes

 I'll do my usual detailed state-by-state analysis for Election Night 2020 later in the month, but for now I'll offer a quick litany of next-day takeaways that have hit me after the first round of vote count analysis....

Demographics are NOT destiny—Much as I loved the 2012 election, I can now definitively say that it lulled Democrats into believing they were assured of 80% support from a fast-growing bloc of nonwhite voters who would unequivocally be in the blue column for the foreseeable future.   Long-range voting patterns based on demographic identity have never worked that way in the past and aren’t sustainable for the future either.   Coalitions splinter and allegiances shift for any number of reasons.  There were warning signs both anecdotally (several high-profile rappers endorsing Trump in the final week of the campaign) and in the pre-election polling data that Trump would be stronger with nonwhites than most other Republicans and stronger than his own performance in 2016.  Those warning signs beared fruit with Biden getting the weakest performance among blacks since George McGovern and, even excluding South Florida Cubans, considerable weakness among Hispanics too.

Look at the early exit poll data—It’s not always right, but it mostly was last night.  I knew at 6:30 eastern that the race was probably gonna be much different than pre-election polling indicated.  And the exit polls in state after state foreshadowed with relative accuracy how each one was gonna go.  People who should have known better were jumping up and down about Ohio at the 9:00 hour based on the early vote.  The exit polls made it abundantly clear that we needn’t spend one nanosecond thinking about Ohio after 7:31.

And speaking of polling.…..the "shy Trump voter” is a real thing--Never go into any election night confident that you have the country figured out.  Hard to know how pollsters even move forward at this point.  Even Republican pollsters were way, way off.  County-level polls and district-level polls were even worse than state-level polling.  I knew early in the night with the way things were going that the only pollster coming out of this with their reputation intact was Selzer polling for the Des Moines Register.

If Biden gets an Electoral College inside straight and wins, he governs as a lame-duck—Barring two Democratic victories in a Georgia runoff, Biden will not even be able to replace octogenarian Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer.  Every part of his agenda will be obstructed.  Perhaps we got Donald Trump out of office, which is no small thing, but it will come with a huge price as Biden will take ownership of a national dumpster fire and Mitch McConnell’s Senate doing everything it can to worsen the situation.   Does anybody think we’re even gonna get a second stimulus at this point let alone any kind of infrastructure bill?

The Democratic coalition is absurdly weak--If Biden wins, he does so because of a relatively small faction of typically Republican seniors and NeverTrump Republicans in upscale suburbs, most of whom will bolt back to the GOP with Trump out of the picture and Biden governing in a no-win situation forced to take ownership of the disaster he’s inheriting.  Reaching new lows with working-class whites even as a sizeable faction of nonwhites go MAGA, the Democrats are poised for even uglier electoral outcomes in 2022 and 2024.

Voters delivered a decidedly mixed message on COVID and racial issues—The same pre-election polls that indicated a comprehensive Biden blowout also insisted that COVID was voters’ top concern and that Black Lives Matter was extremely popular.  Should we believe them?  Because the actual votes point to a significant level of backlash and exhaustion on both.

Trump was rewarded for a “show of strength”--The conventional wisdom was that Trump’s closing message of defiance against the seriousness of COVID was tone-deaf and would likely lead to late-breaking voters shifting to Biden, but instead it probably inspired some level of kinship with Trump.   Or at the very least, Biden’s air of cautiousness did not convey the right tone to a significant faction of voters.  While I’m sure most voters weren’t specifically plugged into the “lids” he regularly put on his campaign activity early in the day even into late October, it nonetheless conveyed an aura of absence from the campaign scene that contrasted sharply with Trump’s daily high profile.  That's not to say Biden didn’t make the right choice to take the virus seriously and limit his campaign footprint, but in the context of the campaign, I think it’s fair to say it disconnected a number of voters from his promise of improved leadership.

Democratic messaging in the primaries was damaging--Even though COVID-19 overtook the issue landscape and forced Trump to scrap his pre-pandemic playbook for running against the Democrats, I still think the muscularly progressive messaging coming out of the Democratic primary season took potential voters off the table.    Even taking single-payer health care out of the conversation, “hell yeah we’re gonna take away your AR-15s”, slavery reparations, and a stage full of candidates raising their hands (including Biden) in support of decriminalized borders was maniacally terrible messaging for the national electorate they’d ultimately face.  Much has been said about the horrific numbers out of Miami-Dade, but how about the equally fierce kick in the crotch Democrats took in the Rio Grande Valley.  Could it be that those who live closest to the border aren't thrilled with the idea of decriminalizing it?

Trade matters big-time in Midwestern factory towns—The trade issue that matters least to the media and Democratic establishment is the primary motivator to the now defunct Midwestern blue-collar base.  Trump promised to renegotiate NAFTA….and he delivered.  From Youngstown to Dubuque, coming through on that issue ensured the ongoing allegiance of a demographic that was a core of the Democratic coalition for generations, but is gone for the foreseeable future now, shutting down the path to Democratic victory in several states.

Even if Trump is gone, Trumpism lives on—From trade policy to general grievance/backlash politics, the Republican Party has, thanks to Trump, found a playbook that will make them competitive in elections moving forward with Reaganism having reached its natural expiration date, and it will be flexible enough to co-opt aggrieved factions of nonwhite voters along the way.  I said three years ago that win or lose in 2020, Trump will be the most realigning figure in American politics since Franklin Roosevelt.  Last night did nothing to dispel that takeaway.

Trump was never THAT unpopular--As of this writing, it looks like Biden is going to win.  I submit that if it wasn't for COVID-19 driving a faction of traditionally Republican seniors to Biden, we'd be looking at November 3, 2020, as a night when Donald Trump was not only re-elected President, but sent back with a majority of the popular vote.