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....
posted by Mark at 7:22 PM
Nicholas Sweedo said...
It's appalling and disgraceful how many votes Trump got, after 4 years of people seeing everything that he's about. I know that a large portion of his voting bloc is immoral and/or stupid, but I still would have hoped that more of them would have been put off by his authoritarianism and criminality. I think a big factor in his support is his supporters' desire to "own the libs", and they love his politically incorrect way of speaking about the other side as the enemy.
Assuming they can pry him out of office, what do you think he does? The conventional wisdom seems to be of him as a pundit/podcast host/tv star, but I wonder if he would either resign with a Pence pardon or flee the country in hopes of avoiding prison. His drivel will still carry a lot of weight with his supporters and the GOP, but hopefully he won't be in the news so goddamned much.
Charles Handy said...
Absolute disaster of an election. Even if Biden wins, he will be the first Democratic President in history to come into office without having both Houses of Congress. Without that, he will be able to get almost nothing done outside of issuing executive orders and will be pretty much a lame duck. The failure of Dems to gain the Senate likely means Dems will never again control the chamber any time soon. In 2024, it’s doubtful Biden even runs again and its likely that a more self controlled version of Trump (someone like Tom Cotton of Arkansas or Ron DeSantis of Florida) will be the Republican nominee and win the election with a fully Republican Congress. It’s really hard not to see this coming around the corner.
Mark said...
Trump has a cult of personality following that shouldn't be ignored electorally. When people feel some sort of kinship with a politician for whatever reason, they are capable of ignoring or brushing off astounding levels of bad behavior. My home county in Minnesota, a former Democratic stronghold that went for Obama by 14 points, went for Trump by 14 points on Tuesday night. As I said in list of bullet points, the trade issue looms really large in these factory towns and Trump has completely realigned places like that.
What do I think Trump does if he's removed from office? Prepares to run again in 2024, where he'd be the instant frontrunner for the Republican nomination.
Charles Handy said...
Trump probably won’t even be alive in 2024.
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.