The US presidential race isn’t over. It seems to be leaning heavily toward Democratic former vice president Joe Biden. But even if Donald Trump defies the odds and manages to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, mounting evidence from Tuesday’s results suggests he may have hurt the GOP’s prospects at the ballot box.
It’s rare for an incumbent president to lose a second-term bid. If Trump loses, he’ll be the first incumbent since 1932 to do so without a major third-party showing upsetting the race. (George H.W. Bush had to contend with Ross Perot drawing 18.9% of the vote in 1992, Jimmy Carter with John B. Anderson’s 6.6% in 1980.)
A loss to Biden isn’t in itself proof of political weakness, of course. That’s especially true when 2020 saw a dramatic spike in turnout on both sides of the ledger.
But Trump did worse than Republican House and Senate candidates in the key battleground states, caused measurable disquiet among voters who lined up to vote for him, and was named by almost half of Biden’s voters as a key reason they had come out to vote.
It isn’t just that a July Pew study found one-quarter of Trump voters were uncomfortable with his “temperament.” On Tuesday, Republican House candidates generally did better than their party leader, while a Washington Post examination of Senate races in nine battleground states found that in seven of them Trump did worse than the Republican Senate candidate.
In Maine, for example, Biden won the state, while Republican incumbent Senator Susan Collins defied months of bad poll numbers to emerge the winner. It’s a similar story in Georgia, Michigan and North Carolina.
Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine speaks on November 4, 2020, in Bangor, Maine, after Tuesday’s election. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)
While both sides saw a run on the polls this time around, Republicans have only won the popular vote once in the past 28 years (George W. Bush’s second-term win in 2004). This time was no different; and, indeed, and under Trump’s leadership, the popular vote gap has only grown. According to the Federal Elections Commission’s final tally of the 2016 popular vote, Clinton led Trump by 2.87 million votes. As of Thursday afternoon, with hundreds of thousands of votes still unannounced, Biden leads by a larger 3.7 million margin, a lead expected to grow as more mail-in ballots are counted.
The popular vote doesn’t decide an American election, of course, but it’s a bellwether that over the long term Republicans can’t afford to ignore.
Trump also slipped among many vital constituencies. According to an ABC News analysis of exit polls collected by national media outlets, Biden won suburban voters by three points; Trump had won them by four points in 2016. Trump’s lead shrank among longstanding Republican-leaning constituencies, including white voters, Evangelicals, and military voters (where a 24-point lead dropped to seven). Biden won independents by 14 points, a 20-point swing from Trump’s six-point lead in 2016. First-time voters favored Biden by a 34-point margin, up from Hillary Clinton’s 20-point lead in 2016.
Again, none of these details in and of themselves define the race. But taken together, it’s fair to suggest that even at a time of soaring turnout — the highest since 1900 — Republicans fell further behind this year even among their core voters.
There are numerous hints that concern over Trump’s personality has something to do with that slippage. There is Republicans’ insistence that “issues” matter over “personal qualities” in selecting a president, according to exit polls. Among Biden voters, for every voter who cited “personal qualities” as the reason for their vote, two cited the “issues.” Among Trump voters, it was one to five.
It’s already clear that the polls showing an easier Biden victory were consistently off the mark. But it’s not yet clear why. Some Republicans have suggested that left-leaning media bias and social shaming had made Trump supporters “shy” when talking to pollsters.
That may be true. It’s also possible that some Trump-leaning voters simply hesitated to make the decision until the very end. Exit polls showed Trump leading 54%-40% among voters who said they had made their decision in the last week of the race.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden speaks during a drive-in campaign rally at Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) Park on November 1, 2020 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images/AFP)
But perhaps the most salient signal of Trump’s weakness: he appears to have served as the major factor in the unprecedented Democratic turnout, with nearly half of Democratic voters telling exit pollsters that getting rid of Trump was a top voting priority.
The Republicans did well on Tuesday, likely holding the Senate and narrowing the gap with the majority Democrats in the House. By both popular and Electoral College results, their presidential candidate did less well.
Hardening of positions
But what explains the massive Republican turnout — currently some five million votes up from 2016 — if Trump was such a problematic candidate for many of his own supporters?
It’s too early to give a definitive answer. But it’s possible even in these early days to discern a basic pattern. To wit: voters seemed to be voting less to give support to their own camp than they did to go against the opposing one.
A woman poses for a photo during an election night watch party organized by a group called “Villagers for Trump” in The Villages, Florida, on November 3, 2020. (Ricardo Arduengo/AFP)
A lot of evidence points to this hardening of positions. For one, there’s the low numbers of undecideds. In 2016, 13% of voters said they decided in the last week. In 2020 it was scarcely 5%. Then there’s the decline in those who say the other side’s candidate would be a good president — down from 24% in 2012 to just 8% this year.
Fundraising soared this year to some $14 billion, twice as much as the next-highest presidential race in history — another sign that Americans are increasingly anxious about the race’s outcome.
And yet another: The exit polls asked voters to rank the issues they were voting on, and demonstrated landslide wins tied closely to voter priorities.
A voter marks his ballot at a polling place in Dennis Wilkening’s shed on November 3, 2020 in Richland, Iowa. (Mario Tama/Getty Images/AFP)
Voters who prioritized the coronavirus pandemic went for Biden by a whopping 82%-14%, as did those who prioritized racial inequality (91%-8%) and healthcare (63%-36%). Trump won those who prioritized the economy (82%-17%) and crime and safety (71%-28%).
The two sides were demographically even. Those who prioritized the Trump-favoring issues made up 46% of voters; those who prioritized the Biden-leaning issues made up 48% of voters.
Woke, unwoke
These differing priorities are a window into the culture war that helped drive the massive turnout, with the progressive “woke” movement champing at the Democrats’ heels and the conservative backlash led by Trump.
The fact that Biden won the 20% of voters who prioritized racial inequality by a 91%-8% landslide suggests that he benefited from the “woke” political moment, which has elevated questions of race and identity to the top of the national agenda.
Voters wait in line in a hallway at Harlem’s P.S. 175 on the last day of early voting, November 1, 2020, in New York. (AP/Kathy Willens)
That Trump won the 11% of voters who said “crime and safety” was their top issue by 43 points suggests he, too, benefited from the clash, or at least from the widespread disquiet with the protests and violence that have accompanied the movement.
Both candidates drew double-digit percentages of their voters, and quite likely a great deal of their newfound support, from among those who prioritized the progressive-conservative culture war.
The upshot: Positions are hardening, turnout is rising, and the middle ground so vital to victory is shrinking.
So it matters more than ever that that middle ground appears, at least in these early days of analyzing the returns, to be less comfortable with the Republican incumbent than with his Democratic challenger.
If Trump loses, Republicans will have to grapple with the unpleasant evidence that another Republican could have won.
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Win or lose, results suggest Trump was a liability for Republicans - The Times of Israel
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