We spoke about this last time but, there’s been this 20-year - or arguably 40-year - trend toward less ticket-splitting on the Senate, House, and state-legislative levels. And this is especially true now that all politics is national. ![]() And, broadly speaking, the worse that you do with non-college-educated whites, the more structurally disadvantaged you are in the American electoral system. The public polling suggested that a bunch of non-college-educated whites were going to come home to the Democratic Party, and while that may have been true in a few discrete places, nationally that did not happen. As a whole, the Midwest continues to trend against us, and I think this election in a lot of ways was a natural continuation of the trends that happened in 2016. Now, it looks like the Electoral College gap is significantly larger than it was in 2016, and there’s really no indication that that gap is going to narrow over the course of this decade.īecause of education polarization, or regional trends, or. Going into 2020, we faced large structural biases in the House and in the Senate and the Electoral College. So, while unseating an incumbent president is cool and good, it seems to me that this election also produced a lot of very bad news for Democrats down-ballot. Pretty sure that was more than three, but we’ll let it slide. So that was the big picture at the presidential level. And the sum total of all the things was that we were able to narrowly win the Electoral College. And Hispanic voters swung against us by a lot. Education polarization, which is the gap between how college-educated white people vote and how non-college-educated white people do, continued to grow. There was a uniform swing of roughly 1.5 percentage points toward us, relative to 2016. How would you summarize the upshot of the 2020 election results in three sentences or less? Intelligencer caught up with Shor this week to discuss the 2020 results, why progressives might be in for a lost decade at the federal level, and the socialist case for ruthless moderation. Most recently, Shor spoke with Vox’s Dylan Matthews about his theory for why the 2020 polls were so inaccurate: In short, voters with low levels of social trust don’t answer surveys (but do tend to vote Republican these days), while liberal voters cooped up during the pandemic and George Floyd protests started answering pollsters’ calls at exceptionally high rates. (On the other hand, right after the Nevada caucuses last February, Shor did tell me that Bernie Sanders would be the Democratic nominee, so sometimes his data does lie.) Back in July, he told Intelligencer that Democrats were bleeding support from Hispanic voters, that the combination of education polarization and the decline of ticket-splitting was creating big problems for Democrats in the Senate, that Biden would likely need to win the popular vote by about four points to secure a comfortable Electoral College majority, and that the presidential race was likely to end up much tighter than public polls were suggesting. Most Democrats weren’t prepared for these disappointments.Ī veteran of the 2012 Obama campaign and the Democratic consultancy Civis Analytics, the 29-year-old data scientist currently advises liberal super-PACs on advertising. What’s worse, these losses appear attributable to trends that raise ominous questions about the party’s electoral prospects going forward: The most xenophobic Republican president in modern memory made large gains with Latino voters, while white rural America continued its steady rightward march. Even as Biden won the popular vote by as much as five points, Democrats saw their House majority shrink, most of their top Senate challengers fall flat, and their attempts to flip state legislatures come up empty. The reason for this odd state of affairs is simple: Barring an unlikely triumph in Georgia’s Senate runoffs in January, the 2020 election will go down as a down-ballot disaster for the Democratic Party. ![]() Democrats retained control of the House - and still have an outside shot at eking out a Senate majority.Īnd yet the party’s activist base is licking its wounds, while its elected officials claw at each other’s throats. The Rust Belt shed some red, while the Sun Belt trended blue. Joe Biden won a larger share of the popular vote than any presidential challenger since 1932. ![]() Photo: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Imagesįor the Democratic Party, the 2020 election was a devastating victory.
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