Trump stimulated massive turnout, pro and con. Trump supporters voted down ballot. Trump opponents did not.
A Guest Post by Jeffrey Laurenti
Democrats who read and believed the polls going into the 2020 election expected a Biden landslide. As readers of this blog know, I did not. I expected a massive turnout of people who don't usually vote. I counted banners on pickup trucks. I thought those people might represent a body of people who don't register in polls because they don't usually vote--but will this time. I was right.
I asked Jeffrey Laurenti to address a question about the election. Why did Biden win at the same time Democrats lost Members of the House? The weakness in the House vote confounds the conventional wisdom that big turnouts help Democrats.
Twenty-five million more people voted in 2020 than in 2016, a spectacular increase. As Laurenti writes, a higher number of those extra Trump-supporters voted like Republicans in the sense that after voting for Trump they continued with their ballots to vote for a Republican Senator, Member of Congress, and Republican state officials. There were more Trump opponents than supporters, explaining Biden's win, but those extra Trump opponents were not so "Democratic" in their voting. They just wanted rid of Trump.
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| Laurenti, 2012 |
Jeffrey Laurenti is returning as an author of a Guest Post. He is a college classmate, a political scientist, a former senior analyst with a boutique foreign policy think tank. He lives in New Jersey, where he has been active in Democratic politics. He served as an elector in the 2012 election and cast his vote for Barack Obama.
Guest Post by Jeffrey Laurenti
There's been much angst among Democrats who were expecting a more decisive sweep last month, and much exuberance among Republicans who feared such a sweep and now taste a new House majority in 2022.
True, congressional Republicans have largely given lip service to President Trump's claims that Democrats could only carry traditionally Democratic leaning states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, much less Republican-controlled states like Arizona and Georgia, if hundreds of thousands of "illegal" (presumably black) voters were flooding the polling places.
But most of those Republican congressmen know that they wrested a dozen congressional seats from Nancy Pelosi by winning a higher percentage of those same voters than Mr. Trump won, and as political professionals they know how every ballot, to be counted, had to be checked against a signature in a voter registry. They may be leery of offending Mr. Trump's inflamed supporters in their party, who proved their clout in the "Tea Party" insurgency a decade ago even before Mr. Trump was a candidate.
But they know he lost while they won. They feel lucky that instead of his losing by ten percentage points, as polls late in the campaign seemed to indicate (and which threatened to drag many of them down with him), he lost by just under five points. And they're ready to move on.
Political analysts speculate why Republican House candidates won 47.7% of votes cast for the House of Representatives while their incumbent president won 46.8%, barely higher than he garnered four years ago when there was a lot more attention to several third-party candidates. Were the differentials between the presidential candidates and their congressional ticket-mates primarily attributable to "split-ticket" voting (that sliver of Republicans who found Mr. Trump unpalatable who gave a vote to Joe Biden and then returned to the Republican column for the rest of the ballot), or to a greater propensity of Biden voters to vote only in the high-visibility presidential contest and then walk out of the polling booth?
Maine is the one state in which we can see significant ticket-splitting. Mr. Biden won Maine by nine percentage points. His party's Senate candidate lost to Republican Susan Collins by an equal margin. Elsewhere, Republican senators won reelection with close to the same winning margin as Mr. Trump: in South Carolina by 10 points (Mr. Trump won by 12), in North Carolina by two points (Mr. Trump won by one), in Iowa by seven (Mr. Trump won by eight), in Montana by ten (Mr. Trump won by 16). In Arizona the Democratic Senate challenger beat a Republican incumbent by two points; Mr. Biden edged Mr. Trump by a third of a point.
Nationwide, Mr. Biden won 81.2 million votes, which constituted 51.3% of all votes cast for president. Mr. Trump won 74.2 million votes. (His share was lower than the junior George Bush's 47.9% in 2000 and Mitt Romney's 47.2% in 2012.)
Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives won 77.5 million votes, or 50.8% of all votes cast for House candidates. That was a drop of 3.7 million votes from Biden's totals. Republican congressional candidates won 72.8 million votes, 1.4 million fewer votes than garnered by Mr. Trump. Put another way, if one assumes (as I do) that the 2020 election was essentially a referendum on the incumbent, Mr. Trump inspired 1.4 million voters to come out just to support him and no one else -- and inspired 3.7 million voters to come out just to vote against him and for no one else.
Certainly the Trump brand of politics motivated the highest turnout of voters in well over a century. Fully 15.6 million more voters poured out for Mr. Biden than cast votes for Hillary Clinton four years ago. A fair number of these new voters may have wanted to cast a ballot just to get rid of the Orange Man and then leave the polling booth. Conversely, Mr. Trump managed to gin up another 11.2 million voters over his turnout in 2016. Republicans notably had less fall-off down-ballot.
But most of those Republican congressmen know that they wrested a dozen congressional seats from Nancy Pelosi by winning a higher percentage of those same voters than Mr. Trump won, and as political professionals they know how every ballot, to be counted, had to be checked against a signature in a voter registry. They may be leery of offending Mr. Trump's inflamed supporters in their party, who proved their clout in the "Tea Party" insurgency a decade ago even before Mr. Trump was a candidate.
But they know he lost while they won. They feel lucky that instead of his losing by ten percentage points, as polls late in the campaign seemed to indicate (and which threatened to drag many of them down with him), he lost by just under five points. And they're ready to move on.
Political analysts speculate why Republican House candidates won 47.7% of votes cast for the House of Representatives while their incumbent president won 46.8%, barely higher than he garnered four years ago when there was a lot more attention to several third-party candidates. Were the differentials between the presidential candidates and their congressional ticket-mates primarily attributable to "split-ticket" voting (that sliver of Republicans who found Mr. Trump unpalatable who gave a vote to Joe Biden and then returned to the Republican column for the rest of the ballot), or to a greater propensity of Biden voters to vote only in the high-visibility presidential contest and then walk out of the polling booth?
Maine is the one state in which we can see significant ticket-splitting. Mr. Biden won Maine by nine percentage points. His party's Senate candidate lost to Republican Susan Collins by an equal margin. Elsewhere, Republican senators won reelection with close to the same winning margin as Mr. Trump: in South Carolina by 10 points (Mr. Trump won by 12), in North Carolina by two points (Mr. Trump won by one), in Iowa by seven (Mr. Trump won by eight), in Montana by ten (Mr. Trump won by 16). In Arizona the Democratic Senate challenger beat a Republican incumbent by two points; Mr. Biden edged Mr. Trump by a third of a point.
Nationwide, Mr. Biden won 81.2 million votes, which constituted 51.3% of all votes cast for president. Mr. Trump won 74.2 million votes. (His share was lower than the junior George Bush's 47.9% in 2000 and Mitt Romney's 47.2% in 2012.)
Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives won 77.5 million votes, or 50.8% of all votes cast for House candidates. That was a drop of 3.7 million votes from Biden's totals. Republican congressional candidates won 72.8 million votes, 1.4 million fewer votes than garnered by Mr. Trump. Put another way, if one assumes (as I do) that the 2020 election was essentially a referendum on the incumbent, Mr. Trump inspired 1.4 million voters to come out just to support him and no one else -- and inspired 3.7 million voters to come out just to vote against him and for no one else.
Certainly the Trump brand of politics motivated the highest turnout of voters in well over a century. Fully 15.6 million more voters poured out for Mr. Biden than cast votes for Hillary Clinton four years ago. A fair number of these new voters may have wanted to cast a ballot just to get rid of the Orange Man and then leave the polling booth. Conversely, Mr. Trump managed to gin up another 11.2 million voters over his turnout in 2016. Republicans notably had less fall-off down-ballot.
They usually do. Indeed, in 2016, Republican House candidates actually got 200,000 more votes than Trump's 63 million. Mrs. Clinton's 65.9 million votes exceeded House Democratic candidates' cumulative total by 4.1 million. One might infer that Trump pulled out some voters this year who weren't interested in GOP House candidates. If anything, the surge in anti-Trump Democratic voters this year buoyed House candidates, who kept more voters for their presidential candidate in the polling booth to vote for down-ballot ticket-mates than they had four years ago.
Put another way: it's complicated.
2 comments:
No question America rejected Trump, and now he will peevishly punish all of us as he exits, like a crazy ex-girlfriend taking a baseball bat to the Firebird.
Complicated is right. I would also mention that it may be that while a majority voted for Biden over Trump they aren't quite ready for a Progressive revolution in a pandemic. I think many Democrats expected Trump sycophants to be punished but this may come later. The status quo is holding. 2022 may see the shift once some normalcy is returned.
The question that remains is the future of the Republican party. Will it reform and reject the far right?
These election results, along with things like the recent defeat of affirmative action in California, give me hope.
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