2020 Election Aftermath Part 1
With the dust settling of the 2020 election, there is a lot about the results to be broken down that will help us understand the direction of US politics.
Expectations, The Results, and Why They Occurred
All polling and forecasts leading up to the election indicated we were going to see a blowout for Biden, gained House seats for Democrats and a more likely than not possibility they would take the Senate. With Trump being unpopular, coronavirus raging, and the economy on the downswing, all of the indicators for predicting a presidential election would back up all the polling we saw that showed huge discrepancies. All this combined with turnout higher than the past two decades all would seem to line up for a cataclysmic defeat.
And while Biden did still net over 300 electoral votes, his margin in key swing states was nearly as small as Trump’s was in his victory in 2016. Democrats lost seats in the House and the Senate will now be decided by two run off elections in Georgia that are technically winnable, but will be incredibly difficult. Vulnerable senators like Susan Collins and Thom Tillis were able to win their races, the former being a decisive victory.
With polling being significantly off the mark for two presidential elections in a row, it’s clear these can’t be reliable indicators to predict presidential elections. One potential theory to explain this is that Trump voters simply are not answering polls anymore. Nearly all polling is done by mainstream news organizations that Republicans are demonstrating outright hostility towards. Trump’s own disdain towards “fake news” polling just means that his supporters are likely to not want to participate at all and validate it. In doing so, polls can’t gauge the proper support and enthusiasm for Trump. He increased his support with Republicans from 2016, a perfect encapsulation of the failures of the Lincoln Project.
In 2018 and 2020, we’ve seen substantial Republican turnout in both elections, demonstrating that Trump is a clear turnout machine for the Republican base. This massively helps Republicans down ballot that would normally be washed away in a wave election. Another help down ballot is that because the Democratic strategy was still to not tie the Republican Party as a whole to Donald Trump, which created more split ticket voters that would go Biden and then Republicans down the ballot.
Why Coronavirus Was Not a Wave Generator
While this all helps explain why predictions were wrong, what is still unexplained is how could Trump not be thoroughly defeated along with the Republican Party given the state of the country. This requires us to take a closer look at how coronavirus has been metastasized by the country as an issue and compare it to similar election year defining issues from the past. The Great Recession and Iraq War became focal points of the 2008 election, with both being total disasters for Republicans, but also their being a clear presented alternative in presidential candidate Barack Obama. Not only were people doing far worse but the party not in power was explicitly running on the issues that were affecting people the most at the time.
Coronavirus is certainly on the same disaster level, but the way people saw the issue was different because of how it played out as a political issue. Not only was there little difference between how prominent blue and red states handled the issue, with California, New York and Illinois experiencing break outs alongside Texas and Florida, but the crux of the coronavirus was not about the material response to it, it was about a disposition to the problem itself.
In April, the Democratic Party quickly acquiesced to the CARES Act which sent 1,200 dollar checks to everyone, expanded UI payments, but spent far more money ensuring that banks and corporations would not suffer from the supply chain issues and store closures that arose from the global pandemic. Defacto leader of the Democrats at the time, Nancy Pelosi, said they would be able to get far more of their demands later on in a second deal. Presumptive nominee Joe Biden had little to say about the CARES Act inadequacies.
When a second deal was falling through at the end of the summer, Nancy Pelosi went on CNN to tell people to “calm down” and obviously something would get done. The biggest thrust of the criticism of Trump was that he didn’t “believe science.” And on the other end, Trump argued that Democrats wanted to kill the economy via lockdown so he would lose the election. While believing science is certainly better than just sending people off to work, when politicians like Gavin Newsome and Dianne Feinstein end up breaking their own rules, it’s easy to point out blatant hypocrisy. People can easily discount these arguments as just scolding and not take it seriously precisely because people in power aren’t to begin with. At no point was the discussion of coronavirus focused on the economic conditions that people were dealing with, and what little economic help people got, Trump could take plenty of credit for.
Joe Biden’s campaign focused on having a plan and listening to scientists, not that he would give everyone a check, or cancel rent, or any significant forms of redistribution that would give people a clear alternative. The choices people had were of personal disposition, or cultural. One is going to tell you to wear a mask because you believe in science, and the other one is going to tell you to go to work because eventually coronavirus will go away and you have to make money right? There was no indication that you were going to get anything from voting for either of these candidates.
Changing Demographics
I thought Biden was going to win in a blowout, but one thing that was well known throughout this election was that Biden was not lagging badly with Latino voters. And that if this panned out and Biden’s gain with other voters wasn’t enough that we could see a much closer election. And this materialized in a big way on election day, doing worse than Clinton among Latino voters in major counties across the country.
While we need a better dataset than exit polls to do a full and proper analysis of the election results, Democrats doing worse with Latino voters and Trump also gaining with black voters depending on the region in the country shows that there is a degree of shift happening in politics right now. Increasingly the electorate is being divided by education level, with college educated voters going for Democrats and non-college educated voters going for Republican, aligning with the focus of US politics going from material issues to ones of culture. According to new analysis from the New York Times, Democrats were able to flip Georgia despite a decline in the share in the black electorate thanks to their performance in the very white Atlanta suburbs.
While some of this better performance from Trump could have to do with nonwhite voters simply not voting when they were previously voting Democrat, these shifts around education and college are creating a precarious situation for those that are deeply invested in current party politics as a means of changing the United States. In the next part, I’ll go further into depth about how culture is now totally subsuming material politics within both political parties.
What Does a Vote for Biden Mean?
It can’t be stated enough that this is the exact election the Biden campaign wanted. While they’d probably like better margins, this almost entirely went according to plan. They ran a campaign on a return to normalcy, about bringing back decency and on nothing fundamentally changing. This was about restoring the “soul of America”, a line so devoid of meaning and substance it would be like trying to eat air. They promised nothing to nobody other than having a guy with a better temperament in the White House. While there may be many people, several of my peers and those I know personally among them, who voted for Joe Biden for anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-xenophobic and anti-corporate reasons, that is not what their vote meant outside of their intentions. This was a hollow moral crisis presented to people while just weeks later Harris is fist bumping Lindsay Graham on the Senate floor.
A vote for Joe Biden was a vote for manners and etiquette, not for anything material. This election result could not be more of a repudiation of the progressive project within the Democratic Party over the past 12 years, especially if you consider the outcome of the ballot propositions in California. The architect or key driver of nearly every ill in the country has been elected President of the United States after handily defeating the left-wing candidate and running on doing nothing of note in office. His transition team is already being filled with key corporate figures from across the worst companies in the country. With the Democratic Party rushing to blame left wing activists, “defund the police”, and “socialism” for their lackluster performance, it’s clear they don’t plan to suddenly govern as left-wing figures. A vote for Biden was simply meant to display you care about an array of social issues, but not to do anything about them.
