Get thank-you notes ready
Today’s analysis of the presidential electorate of 2020 relies on exit-poll numbers. That necessitates an introductory concession to the fact that the presidential electorate of 2020 again eroded confidence in polling.
In the end, Joe Biden achieved a 51-47 percent nationwide popular-vote win over Donald Trump, which was reasonably in line with the pre-election poll margins. That had been the case as well with Hillary Clinton’s 4846 nationwide popular vote win four years before.
But, again, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, primarily, were closer than polls indicated. That led pollsters to begin to acknowledge that there is a Trump factor in polling.
If he’ll go away, polls will recover along with the nation.
The Trump factor arises largely in pollsters’ screening of registered voters to weed out infrequent voters and rely for their numbers on the likeliest voters. That works most of the time.
But it turns out that a preponderance of infrequent voters will vote only when Trump is on the ballot, and for him. Their lack of broader civic interest—thus an informed vote— buoys him.
That aside, we can still trust exit-polling of persons questioned after they have voted. It will get us in the ballpark of demographic truth.
Such as: We can thank non-white people.
It’s not unusual for white people to be Republican. Still, it is striking to know that, if left to white people, the presidency would be manned by madness for four more years.
I know a lot of white people. I have grown up among many, some of them very nice. I thought more of them valued decency than that.
By narrowing the data, we can state confidently that Biden owes his presidency to Black women and college-educated white women, both in the percentages of those groups that favored him and the heaviness of their turnout.
White women without college educations again favored Trump substantially. I’m sure they have their reasons. They probably fall in part along the axis of religion, culture and economic resentment of perceived Democratic elitists.
Black women favored Biden by 90 percent. College-educated white women favored him by a margin of 20 points or so, more than double the single-digit margin they gave a woman, Clinton, four years ago.
That Clinton-Biden difference among college-educated women probably stemmed from the fact that Clinton rubbed people the wrong way regardless of gender and education level. It’s also likely that college-educated white women could recognize a detestable bully—all bluster and no substance—when one showed himself to them over four long and dreary years. Biden owes his presidency to a Black man, U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, who resuscitated him with an endorsement in the South Carolina primary, along with the Black women who voted in streams for him then and voted for him again nationwide Nov. 3.
Kamala Harris didn’t hurt with Black women on Nov. 3, and Biden’s association with Barack Obama didn’t hurt before that.
Nonetheless, exit polling says Black men gravitated to Trump this time. Data suggests he got 20 percent of their vote, more than they’d given him against Clinton.
It seems that Black men can be conservative just as white men can, though in much smaller numbers, and that Trump appealed to that conservatism in ways conventional Republicans haven’t.
As with everything Trumpian, the question is whether Republicans can be encouraged by this dynamic or if they stand to gain nothing post-Trump with the likes of Ted Cruz, Mike Pence, Marco Rubio, Mike Pompeo and Tom Cotton.
You begin to see the power of Trump among Republican office-holders who disapprove of him but know better than to say so. They are simple hostages to a cult of personality.
Even more pronounced from the data of 2020 is the indication that, more than ever, Latino/Hispanic voters are politically nuanced.
Trump owed his victory in Florida to Cuban-American voters and other Hispanic and Latino voters concerned about socialism. He owed his margin in Texas to getting to 40 percent or so, according to preliminary data, among Latino voters in south Texas in the shadow of the border.
But, at the same time, Latino voters overwhelmingly fueled Biden’s narrow win in Arizona.
Some analysts are saying that race and ethnicity are becoming less firm and less divisive in American politics than gender and education levels, where the political differences are becoming starker and less color-conscious.
But these things are forever complicated. The vaunted gender gap was less this time than with Trump-Clinton in 2016. Yet it wasn’t so much because women voted differently.
Women stay pretty steady in their views. The gender gap fluctuates with men. It closed a little this time because more white men voted for Biden than for Clinton four years before.
Maybe that was more predictable than anything else.
Maybe the most notable thing was that those few white men voting for Biden but not Clinton did so while knowing they would be putting a woman an aging heartbeat from the presidency.