Election 2020 Predictions: Why You?
Nov. 2, 2020
The day has almost arrived. The long, meandering horse-race that started almost two years ago is finally coming to an end. Tomorrow, the United States picks its next president. Though this race has been often tumultuous, and very often much louder and more pervasive than it needed to be, there is one overarching theme that we must acknowledge before we get started.
For all of its flaws, American democracy is an exceptional system. While some of our fellow countrymen may feel despair and anxiety about the future of the United States and the next president that will lead the charge into that unknowable realm, the despair and anxiety is at the end of it all, a beautiful thing; because it is choice. We spend so much time worrying about who the country will choose as their leader that we never fully recognize the beauty that we get to choose at all.
So, who is America choosing tomorrow? I certainly can’t read minds, but based off of all available evidence, it is difficult to not predict that Joe Biden will be declared the winner tomorrow night. This I believe is for a number of reasons. First of all, Donald Trump has not done much to expand his coalition that he had cultivated in 2016. He has increased his support among Black and Hispanic voters, but whether those voters are enough to supplant his loss of independent voters seems unlikely. The suburbanites that carried him to victory in 2016 are completely turned off by his rhetoric and the way in which he conducts himself. This is not only evident in the monumental shift we’ve seen in polls over the last four years, but also in the results of the 2018 midterms, in which the Republican Party got shellacked.
Second, this race is much more stable and much less volatile than the 2016 race had been between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. According to FiveThirtyEight, models in both 2016 and 2020 show that Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden maintained comfortable leads over Donald Trump. However, Biden’s this year is much larger and much more stable. In 2016, Trump was above water in the national polling average twice and substantially caught up one other time. In 2020, Trump has been down about 6 points the entire race, never once approaching an above-water race with Biden. National polling is of course not representative of the entire race, but can help us sense the level of indecision in voter’s minds, notwithstanding some major, uncontrollable variable entering the equation (e.g. pandemic).
Lastly, and perhaps the most important point, is that of reason. The central question that a campaign must be able to answer, and from there centralize their campaign around is this: Why You? Why are you running? What is the reason for your campaign? Of course, one has to want to become president, but wanting is not enough. This is partially the reason Jeb Bush, the Republican frontrunner and good-on-paper candidate at the beginning of the 2016 primaries, got swept off the field. Is it also in large part the reason Clinton was unable to cross the finish line in 2016. Contrary to popular belief, Trump ran on a pretty coherent, economic populist message in his first run for the presidency. Even more contrary to popular belief, the core message of Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary was much more similar to Donald Trump’s than it was to Hillary Clinton’s in certain respects; in part this resonating message is why Bernie did so well in the primaries, and in retrospect, should have been a giant red flag to the Clinton team.
However, this is not 2016 anymore. The campaigns are not the same, nor is the world that we are living in. Yet that one ingredient is still the requisite for success: why you? The Trump campaign and the Republican party made the decision over the summer to not update or change the official party platform for the 2020 campaign. This either implies that the goals the administration sought to achieve were not completed, or that the world has not changed at all since the administration had entered office 4 years ago, therefore it would be rendered superfluous to update or change the party platform. The central reason as to why Trump is running for president again seems to be either defunct or at least insubstantial.
Biden on the other hand has a central message and theme of his campaign, whether is it an effective message or not is yet to be seen. The Coolidge-esque “Return to Normalcy” has been a central factor and certainly the most long-standing message of the campaign. The “why you?” of the Biden campaign I would imagine is receptive to a large share of Americans who not only want to return to normalcy, but also to a quieter politic and a less-polarized society. Only time will tell however whether that is what a Biden presidency would end up producing.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, there are essentially nine different battleground states right now that either Biden or Trump could win: Arizona, Georgia, Florida (always), Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, North Carolina. There are two states that are competitive but don’t have a history of going to the opposition party, Texas and Minnesota. I think Biden pulls out Arizona. Trump is doing better with Hispanic voters but worse with seniors, and on net that will play to Biden’s favor. There are a lot of retired people in Arizona. A lot. Democrats have upped their ground game in Arizona as well and after Sinema won a Senate seat in 2018, along with the attention that Mark Kelly has gotten for the Senate race there, I think there might be enough momentum for Biden to pull Arizona off. The same scenario is happening in Florida, although Trump’s support in Florida is both larger and more steadfast. I think Florida will certainly be closer than Arizona, but still may end up being a narrow Biden win. This will certainly be one of the closer and more volatile states to watch. I think Trump squeaks through Georgia and Ohio, and I think Biden could win North Carolina. I think Biden’s Scranton upbringing (however short it may have been) and his historical appeal to blue-collar workers helps him narrowly win in Pennsylvania as well as Michigan, but both I’m imagining will be exceptionally close as well. I think Trump narrowly keeps Iowa, and keeps Wisconsin. Texas and Minnesota are interesting. I think Trump wins Minnesota before Biden wins Texas, but it is certainly hard to say. If this circumstance were to be correct (it won’t be), that would translate to a 324–213 Biden electoral college win.
Outside of the presidential race, one of the more interesting things about this particular election is the slight comeback that is occurring for Senate Republicans. It is entirely plausible that while Trump may be doomed in many of these states, there may be enough ticket splitting Republicans and Independents (though ticket-splitting is a rarer and rarer occurrence these days) to keep the Senate in Republican-controlled hands. There are signs that voters to some degree are beginning to vote for Republican senators in swing states to maintain a check on a Biden presidency. This phenomenon is visible in the Iowa Senate election with incumbent Republican Joni Ernst pulling back even or ahead of her opponent. A similar situation is unfolding with Lindsay Graham in South Carolina and with Thom Tillis in North Carolina to a lesser degree. Split-ticket voting was certainly more common in past eras of American politics, and the “Nothing-off-the-table retaliation” of Democrats in response to the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation hearings certainly did not help them in this situation. Whether or not this late surge will be enough to get enough Republicans over the finish line will be enough is, like all things, impossible to tell now, it might be just enough to keep Joni Ernst, Susan Collins, Thom Tillis, in their Senate seats. Depending on how Trump and Biden do in Michigan it might be enough to get John James, the Republican hopeful in a competitive potential Senate seat, over the finish line.
Regardless of who wins this election, the perhaps cheesiest yet most important thing that we do afterwards is work to treat one another better. This will not be a fascist autocracy if Donald Trump wins, nor will it be a communist dictatorship if Biden wins. The United States is a strong country, with an incredible founding document and story that is larger than the whims and wants of a single person. The Constitution allows no individual to rule absolutely over the American people, unless the American people were to give them the right to. We are lucky in this country simply by being in it. The apocalyptic shows we perform every four years to prove that the world ends if the other guy gets elected does not hold a candle to the struggles of those around the world who actually do live under oppressive regimes and dictatorships. We can vote. We can speak freely. We can do better, always. If one thing prevails in this election, I hope that it is our capability to care about each other again and understand that there are truly bad things that happen in this world, and if we stopped pointing our fingers at each other all the time we could, together as Americans, be a force for extraordinary good in the world again.
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Nov. 10, 2020
I will be the first to admit that I received a failing grade in election predictions during this cycle. While I correctly guessed that Biden would get over the 270 electoral vote finish line, his path to the presidency was not at all what I had imagined. Credit where credit is due however, I did predict that most of my predictions would be wrong, so that has to count for something right?
All joking aside, it seems pretty clear that while Donald Trump lost this election, Republicans won. Votes in a handful of states are still being counted, but it is clear that this election was a repudiation of Donald Trump’s personality, but not necessarily his policies. Republican senate and house candidates consistently ran ahead of the president. In an election that had been forecast as a Democratic wave election, Republicans maintained their hold on state legislatures, even closing the deficiency in Democratic-held statehouses (see: Oregon).
Let’s not waste a moment in analyzing where my predictions fell apart. On a state-to-state basis, I incorrectly predicted where Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida would fall. While I hadn’t written it beforehand, I also did not imagine that the margins in most battleground states would be so close on the margins; It had been my assumption that either Biden or Trump would enjoy a comfortable win in whichever battleground state they took.
Wisconsin I had believed would stay with Trump, in defiance of the rest of the blue wall which went for Biden. Wisconsin, for whichever reason, I believed to be slightly more Republican-leaning than that of Michigan. I am not sure is that is unfounded assumption as I do not remember my reasoning behind it, other than the fact that Michigan has a higher rate of unionization, in which a Democratic voting bloc might be stronger. Nevertheless, Wisconsin reverted back to blue this election, on a margin a little over twenty thousand votes. North Carolina rests firmly in president Trump’s column. I believed would be a narrow Biden win, as president Barack Obama had won the state in 2008, and the increasing urbanization around Durham and Raleigh due to an increase of high-tech jobs entering the state I had assumed would alter the political demographics of the state toward the Biden campaign’s advantage. While this might not be true this year, only time will tell whether or not this will play a factor in coming elections. Georgia I was spectacularly caught off-guard. Georgia had been reliably Republican for decades, and yet it is looking as if Georgia will narrowly fall into Biden’s column this election. It seems like one of the pivotal factors here in Georgia is that suburban voters, who delivered Trump and the Republicans the presidency in 2016, then took their House majority away in 2018, repudiated the president within the state. It is no secret that Donald Trump’s personality traits weighed down his aspirations for a second term, and it has been well over two years that both he and the advisors around him, knew that. Yet, no man can change Donald Trump but himself, and that surely cost him Georgia. Florida is the most interesting of my incorrect predictions this election. I predicted that Florida would go narrowly to Biden, as Florida is a swingy state in the first place, and has voted for the winner in every election since president Clinton’s second term. The Sunshine State not only went to Donald Trump, but he increased his margins in the state from 2016. This can be attributed to his increased support from Hispanic, especially Cuban, voters.
Wildly enough in fact, the only group Donald Trump has performed worse than 2016 with was with white, non-college educated white men. And if that doesn’t prove we are living in a simulation, I am not sure what does. His support has improved noticeably with Hispanic voters, and his numbers have increased marginally with African-American voters. These changes far from suggest a mandate for Trump’s policies, but may suggest that the Republican party has tapped into an ethos in the American population that has not yet fully materialized. If in the future there is a world in which the American political parties are not so drastically split between racial and ethnic lines, I would be ecstatic.
Overall, what does this election tell us? I think from looking at the results is that the American people want a break. After four rhetorically-tumultuous and civically-challenging years, they want a government that takes a break, looks around, and tries to work with those on the over side of the aisle. A Biden presidency with a Republican Senate and a weak-Democratic House will not get any sweeping legislation across the finish line that Democrats campaigned on during the election. And perhaps that is a good thing. We have had both Democratic and Republican presidents that entered office with self-declared mandates, using up all their political capital in their first few years to get one or two legislative accomplishments before losing the Congress to their opposition. The Executive loses the Congress to the opposition because the American people don’t like to be pulled from left to right, and as a very suspicious people, we certainly don’t like political overreach. Biden’s mandate, along with Senate Republicans, seems to be bipartisanship. It seems to be a mandate in the form of looking the other party in the eye and realizing they are not only human beings, but fellow Americans that can respectfully disagree. Now there is only one thing left to learn: can our elected officials rise up the the challenge?
