The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
More Conn. voters backed Trump in 2020 than 2016
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump may not have won Connecticut, but he received about 38,000 more votes in the state in 2020 than he did in 2016.
That trend held true across the country, where nationally Trump received over 10 million more votes in 2020 than four years prior. But it was not enough to push him ahead of the wave of support for President-elect Joe Biden, who was called winner Saturday and has secured 290 electoral college votes, the Associated Press projects.
While Trump fell to Biden, the GOP held strong in other races. tightening the margins in the House by gaining a net of at least five seats, according to latest results, outperforming expectations. In the Senate, Republicans have thus far fended off a Democratic majority, although two Georgia races will advance to run-offs that may decide control of the chamber
Both parties are now conducting a post-mortem, looking for answers about their strengths and weaknesses in the body of still incoming results.To many Democrats, the results do not show the clear repudiation of Trump they hoped for, but instead a mixed victory.
“I know that my leadership is saying, ‘It’s a win, it’s a win,’” said U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-4. “No, no, no, no.”
“My celebration of Joe Biden’s victory is deeply tempered by my realization that around the country, when we offered an alternative to a corrupt, incompetent president, we convinced almost no one,” Himes said. “The story of this election will be more people voting than ever before and in a handful of states that Hillary Clinton lost narrowly, we’ll win narrowly. But it is far from clear to me that we’ve changed anybody’s mind and that’s a brutal indictment.”
For Republicans, there’s reasons to be hopeful in the results. Republican National Committee member John Frey of Ridgefield said “a lot of people were surprised at the closeness of the race.”
“He did marginally better [in Connecticut] and considering he didn’t have any presence in the state,” Frey said. “In my neck of the woods, there was seemingly more Trump supporters than you would think. People were kind of quiet about it.”
Drilling into the Connecticut numbers, Trump received a smaller percentage of the vote in 2020 than 2016, but a greater total number. He snagged up 673,215 votes for 41 percent of the total in 2016. This year, he upped his count by about 38,000 to 713,780 votes, unofficial results from the Secretary of the State’s office Monday show, but that was just 39 percent of the total.
The reason: Biden this year topped the 2016 total of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by more than 180,000 votes, bagging 1,079,278 Connecticut votes, or 59 percent of the total. Clinton tallied 897,572 in 2016, which was less than 55 percent.
Massive voter turnout supported both Biden and Trump in 2020. Both candidates have surpassed the popular vote record of 69,498,516 set by Obama in 2008, according to data from the Associated Press, and in some states ballots are still being counted.
“Despite all that has happened Trump got many, many more votes this time than last time. He has captivated the Republican base,” said Philip Klinkner, professor of government at Hamilton College. “It’s all about identity. He is using appeals to racial identity, religious identity, national identity… he’s tapped into an elaborate and very powerful sense of grievance.”
With polling looking favorable for Biden and other Democrats in September and October, with a pandemic, high unemployment and low approval numbers plaguing Trump, both House and Senate Democrats poured resources into races in traditional Republican turf, with varying amounts of success.
House Democrats notched several unexpected losses and were outflanked by Republicans in some races, prompting U.S. Rep. Cheri Bustos, D-Ill., to leave her post as leader of House Democrat’s campaign arm on Monday.
In a long and emotional caucus call last week, House Democrats started diagnosis of what went wrong and found different opinions among the party. Some representatives, like U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., blamed progressives for embracing the “defund the police” movement and not shaking off Republican claims that Democrats favor socialism, multiple outlets reported. Himes said Democrats who lost or nearly lost their campaigns told him the narrative that Democrats are anti-police took them down.
“I don’t know an elected Democrat who is in favor of defunding the police, so it’s not an easy problem to solve,” he said. “None the less, Americans were afraid that that’s what we would do and I think that requires some unpacking. It may be that we weren’t clear enough that we’re not socialists... it is certainly true that we’re not listening to vast swaths of this country that used to vote Democrat and now are driving pick-up trucks with Trump flags in the back.”
One of the most progressive voices in the party, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., in a lengthy Twitter commentary attributed some the races lost by Democrats to poorly run campaigns with small internet and social media presence.
GOP Chairman J.R. Romano said Republicans had a stronger economic message than Democrats and have succeeded in winning more working class voters.
“When it comes to the economy and making sure people are employed, they failed,” said Romano. “When you look at the shifting demographics within party registration, you can see the most affluent are turning to the Democratic party out of this misguided notion that somehow Democrats care for more people and when you go to working class communities, you can see that Trump is doing better.”
Former Rep. Chris Shays, the last Republican to represent Connecticut and a Biden supporter this election, said 2020 was “the opposite” of a blue wave, although Biden won at the top of the ticket. He agreed that Democrats came off as antipolice and gave a mixed message on immigration with their support of sanctuary cities, weakening the ticket. While he saw Republican success in the 2020 results, he also forecast future problems as Trump moves to side stage.
“There was support for some of the positions the Republicans have taken,” Shays observed. “But the Republican party is in deep trouble.It can’t be the Trump party, so what party is it?”
Still hopeful that Democrats might have a shot with the Senate after the Georgia run-offs, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, DConn., voiced a sunnier outlook.
“We are all going to be focusing energy, resources and full court press of Georgia,” Blumenthal said. “The nation will be watching Georgia and all of us will be fully engaged in this battle because it will help determine how effective a President Joe Biden is.”
He said Biden will try to bring the country together — those who voted for him and those who didn’t.
“We have never faced a crisis of this urgency, with people dying in the tens of thousands as a result of this virus, with people out of work and struggling to put food on the table,” Blumenthal said. “Small businesses hanging by a thread. We are in the midst of multiple crises that are too large for these divisions to exist. We need to come together in some sense of normalcy and unity. And to all who voted for Donald Trump, let’s come together in our common purpose, our shared values in the urgency of these economic and health care crises.”