Instead of having footnotes, I'm just going to say at the start that Dave Wasserman's Twitter feed is a treasure trove of interesting 2020 election factoids and he's my source for much of what follows. Wasserman is House Editor of The Cook Political Report.
1. The congressional district in which I live, Minnesota's Fifth, which is Minneapolis and many of its inner ring suburbs, may have led the nation in widest gap between presidential and US House vote. In the presidential race, Biden defeated Trump in the Fifth District by 80 to 18 percent. In the congressional race, however, Democratic incumbent Ilhan Omar defeated Republican Lacy Johnson by "only" 64 to 26 percent. (Note to Mr Wasserman: Cook Political Report's "partisan voter index" for the district—D+26—may be in need of review.)
Explanations that I've seen for Omar's under performance have focused on her liabilities. I think her opponent ran a fairly effective campaign. He was awash in cash, thanks to Omar haters around the country determined to invest in a lost cause, and he appears to have used a lot of it on TV ads that never mentioned he's a Republican. Instead, he came out against "divisiveness" while necessarily displaying the fact that he's Black. That can't be the whole story, however. Note that the two-party vote for president sums to 98 percent, whereas 10 percent of voters in the House race voted for neither Omar nor Johnson. Plainly these voters chose Biden for president but not their Democratic representative in Congress.
The main thing I like about Omar is that she criticizes, however awkwardly, the Israeli government. But just as only Nixon could go to China, it seems only Jews can say that Israel's settlement policies in the occupied territories are morally repugnant and violate international law.
2. The state Trump won by the most, in terms of raw vote margin, was Tennessee. In the recent past, this award usually went to Texas. Since Tennessee isn't a huge state, the conclusion would seem to be that big states are all either Democratic or competitive. Running down the list of biggest states tends to confirm this judgment: California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, New Jersey . . . .
3. A staple of the conspiracy tales advanced by the MAGA crowd concerns how Biden improved on Clinton's 2016 performance only in the swings states he needed to win the election. Highly suspicious!
This, however, is poppycock. In the swing states that delivered to him the Electoral College, Biden outperformed Clinton in Wisconsin by 1 percent, in Pennsylvania by 2 percent, in Michigan by 3 percent, in Arizona by 4 percent, and in Georgia by 5 percent. But he also improved on Clinton's performance in: Indiana (3 percent), Connecticut (6 percent), Rhode Island (5 percent), Alaska (5 percent), Iowa (1 percent, same as neighboring Wisconsin), Montana (4 percent), West Virginia (3 percent), Tennessee (3 percent), Kansas (6 percent), Oregon (5 percent), Nebraska (6 percent), Minnesota (5 percent), Colorado (8 percent), Texas (3 percent), Washington (4 percent), South Dakota (4 percent), North Dakota (3 percent) . . . .
The point is that the swing states, where Biden's performance is said to have been "suspicious" and marked by "irregularities," behaved pretty much like most of the others.
4. The New York result is interesting. In New York City, Trump did 7.5 percent better than in 2016, but in the rest of the state he did 5.1 percent worse. Within the city, Trump's biggest gains were in the boroughs with the highest percentages of nonwhite voters (Queens and the Bronx). In the whitest borough (Staten Island), he gained nothing at all—actually went backwards by a fraction of 1 percent.
I say this result is "interesting" but it's not in any way anomalous. Compared to four years ago, Trump, in New York as in the rest of the country, did better with nonwhite voters and worse with white voters. Yet for some reason his meritless claims of fraud have called attention to supposedly "irregular" results in places such as Wayne County, Michigan, home to Detroit, a heavily African American city. In 2016 Trump lost Wayne County by 37 percent and this year he lost it by 38 percent. Meanwhile, in suburban Oakland County, just to the north of Detroit, Trump's deficit went from 8 points in 2016 to 14 points in 2020. The biggest town in western Michigan is Grand Rapids, in Kent County. Trump won the county by 3 points in 2016. This year, he lost it by 6 points. Two big counties in which he went backwards by 6 points and 9 points, but he cries foul about the African American county where, in fact, he held his own.
None of Trump's complaints stand up to the slightest scrutiny, which helps explain why Rudy Giuliani et al kept getting laughed out of court, often by Trump appointed judges.
5. Biden won 17 percent of the country's counties, up just a single tick from Clinton's 16 percent. This may seem odd, considering that he more than doubled Clinton's 3 million popular vote margin, but the country is divided, and, generally speaking, the blue counties got bluer and the red ones stayed just as red. But the blue counties are much bigger and growing. Clinton won 87 of the 100 biggest counties, to which Biden added 4, including the two largest Trump had carried in 2016: Maricopa (Phoenix) and Tarrant (Fort Worth). Of the 50 biggest counties, Trump carried only two, one of them, Suffolk, on the eastern end of Long Island, by only 232 votes out of more than 760,000 cast. In 2016 Trump won Suffolk County by more than 45,000 votes. Trump's other biggest-50 county victory was in Collin, which is suburbs north of Dallas, where he won by 4 points. Four years ago he carried Collin County by 17 points. No mislick on the keyboard. Seventeen, down to 4.
6. According to an analysis by the Brookings Institute, the 17 percent of counties carried by Biden generate 70 percent of our Gross Domestic Product. That, and the fact that the divide is not between states but within them, metropolitan versus "outstate," should probably squelch Rush Limbaugh's daydreams of secession and a new MAGA nation.
7. Immediately after the election, there was brave talk by some Democrats about how Trump's gains with Hispanics were limited to Cubans in south Florida. Better reconsider. The ten counties that from 2016 to 2020 swung hardest toward Trump are all in Texas, all heavily Hispanic, and mainly in the Rio Grande valley. For example, in Hidalgo County, where nearly a quarter million votes were cast, Biden's margin was 58-41: sounds pretty good but Clinton carried the county by 68-28. The returns from New York City suggest that Democrats slipped with Hispanics in Queens and the Bronx as well. It appears to have been a nationwide phenomenon and probably prevented something that might have qualified as a "landslide." Texas, for instance, would have been very close if Biden had maintained Clinton's level of support from Hispanics. Similarly with Florida, where Biden suffered a meltdown in Miami-Dade. The Republicans have had a challenge holding together a coalition that includes country club types, chamber of commerce types, and evangelicals. Democrats have made significant inroads with the first two groups, but not with evangelicals, and one can see how Hispanics, who are Catholic as the pope, might have some of the same political inclinations as evangelical Protestants.
With both parties, the things you say to rev up The Base may alienate your less committed voters, and I wonder whether there is a kind of parallelism between the erosion of Democratic support from Hispanics and the exodus of educated, white, suburban women from the GOP. Hispanic Catholics are put off by "woke" young people. Suburban women roll their eyes when the superannuated white men of the GOP mount a soapbox to discuss what's good for "housewives." It's shocking, but true, that politics requires political skills.
8. Speaking of superannuated: the gap between the Electoral College, a relic of the 18th century, and the popular vote continues to grow. A uniform shift toward Trump of just two-thirds of one percent would have resulted in his "reelection" even though Biden would still have won an absolute majority of all votes cast, about 51-47 percent. Wasserman estimates that it was the last million of Biden's 7.1 million vote victory that secured for him the Electoral College. Had he merely doubled Clinton's 3 million vote advantage, Trump would have been "reelected" despite a 6 million vote deficit in the land. The Electoral College, two senators for every state, and a gerrymandered congressional map: instruments of minority rule, affirmative action for Republicans.
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