2020 pollsters never left their blue bubble

Shy Trump voters clapped back at pundits

I spent some time staring into the witches’ cauldron of presidential politics, also known as the exit polls.

I used data collected by Edison Research and used by CNN, for whom I serve as an on- air contributor. These exit polls combine in- person interviews of nearly 8,000 Election Day voters at 115 polling locations nationwide, with nearly 5,000 phone interviews of early and absentee voters.

Coverage of the Donald Trump vs. Joe Biden campaign largely focused on four groups: women, racial minorities, senior citizens and suburban voters. Conventional wisdom held that Trump would be slaughtered by all of them, thereby handing Biden a landslide.

Turns out, that was almost entirely incorrect. Trump improved over his 2016 performance among Black women (+ 4 percentage points), Black men (+ 5), Latinas (+ 3) and Latinos (+ 4).

It is almost certainly true that minority voters turned out in far larger numbers in 2020 than in 2016, racking up critical votes for Biden in battleground states, but Democratic strategists must be wondering what it means that Trump earned a larger share of the nonwhite vote than any GOP presidential candidate since 1960.

The Biden landslide that wasn’t

Think of all of the breathless speculation you heard over the past four years about “draconian” immigration policies and race issues — especially this year! — and now consider just what a fun- house mirror that really was.

But the women! Surely they abandoned ship, right? Nope. Trump performed exactly as he did in 2016, losing them by 13 points. In national polls the gender gap was enormous, with Trump losing women by 20 points or more. Yet that margin failed to materialize. Among white women — often screaming the loudest at anti- Trump protests — Trump improved by 3 points.

As we search for reasons why polling seems to capture Democratic vote share but not Republican, a narrative is emerging: Some minorities and women were indeed shy Trump voters the pollsters missed.

Where did Trump lose support? Senior citizens (- 4 points over his 2016 performance) and white men. In fact, Biden might have white men to thank more than any other group. In 2016, Trump won white men by 31 points. This time? Just 18 points, the only racial cohort to show degradation.

White males with college degrees really hurt the president. Last time, Trump won them by 14 points; this time he lost them by 2 points, a massive swing. We spent our time talking about yoga moms, but their husbands were swinging harder than they were.

Where do these white college educated elites live? The suburbs! In 2016, Trump won the ’ burbs by 4 points but lost them by 3 this year, a 7- point swing. At least that part of the punditry was accurate.

What’s apparent to me is that Donald Trump has realigned the two parties, with the GOP emerging as a working- class party and the Democrats becoming a home for privileged elites who tend to be more educated and have more money ( high incomes, trust funds, inheritances).

Democrats abandon rural America

Rural America again sent a loud and clear message that it isn’t happy with the Democratic Party. Even though Biden won the race, you can see in the election results that rural, workingclass voters feel completely abandoned by the Democratic Party, a trend that began during the Obama years and truly ruptured in 2016.

Identity politics has once again failed the Democratic Party, and elite scolding of rural Americans has backfired tremendously. The application of different coronavirus standards, for instance, rankled rural conservatives greatly. Want to go to church or a Trump rally? That makes you a murderer to many in the media and the Democrats. But go to a protest, a riot or an antiTrump event and you get magical COVID- 19 immunity, apparently.

The failure by liberal elites to admit that it was leftist protesters tearing up cities left a bad taste in the mouth of law- abiding Americans who would never dream of breaking society’s laws and norms. Trump’s voters know that if they burned a building or knocked down a statue, they would be tossed in jail immediately. But they saw anarchists destroying property with impunity on their television screens for much of the year — and the liberals coddling them, even denying that it was happening at all — and wondered: Why don’t the rules apply to everyone?

Working- class Americans aren’t rich enough to be woke; they just want to go to work, attend church and take their kids to school without being condemned for it.

How did the pundits and pollsters get it wrong? Simple — most of them live in blue bubbles that distort their understanding of nonurban America. They look at millions of people as political properties — where race, income and education determine your politics — instead of as fellow Americans. Rural, working- class Americans and minorities are tired of the double standards, the browbeatings, and being taken for granted by liberals who clearly don’t know them at all.

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