What can we learn from the 2020 elections?
As we look towards the 2024 presidential election, the previous election contains valuable lessons
The 2024 presidential cycle is beginning to take shape as Republican contenders vie for position in the “invisible primary.” The Republican primary will be contested. Third-party candidates are considering their options. Democrats are beginning to fall in line behind Joe Biden’s re-election bid, some reluctantly and some eagerly.
This means that it’s a good time to review the 2020 presidential election. The lessons of the 2020 election are relevant, and we are only now beginning to reach the point where hindsight is clear. Democrats made a good choice when they nominated Joe Biden.
This piece was posted first on my Substack.
Biden was a strategically sound choice
Democrats won the presidency because they chose the right kind of candidate. The 2020 Electoral College victory by Democrats was nearly as narrow — and nearly as easily avoided — as their Electoral College loss in 2016. As with every close Electoral College contest, the 2020 contest came down to a few key battleground states.
Biden won his narrowest margins in three crucial states of Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia, with Wisconsin being pivotal. The next most important key battleground states were Michigan and Pennsylvania,1 which were in turn the crucial states of the 2016 election, with Pennsylvania being pivotal.2
In 2020, Republican candidates for the House of Representatives won more votes than their Democratic opponents in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In Michigan, House Democrats won more votes by a margin of 1.3%; Biden won the state by a margin of 2.8%. In key battleground states, as much as 5–10% of the electorate was ready to cast split-ticket votes.3
Nationally, House Democrats won 3.7 million more votes than House Republicans, a margin of victory that drops to less than 1 million if we only include contests with candidates from both major parties.4 Biden won 7 million more votes than Trump. The 2020 environment was better for generic Democrats than the 2016 environment, but it was still an environment in which a generic Democrat could easily lose Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Biden’s strong performance wasn’t simply because of Trump’s unpopularity. Biden’s performance in 2020 was dramatically better than Hillary Clinton’s performance in 2016. There aren’t many good reasons to believe Trump was a weaker candidate in 2020, either; in fact, Trump incrementally increased his share of the vote from 46.1% to 46.8%.5
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were both weak candidates. This was visible in polling as early as 2015. The same was true for Biden being a strong candidate; this was visible in polls stretching back to 2019. There were very good reasons to believe that Joe Biden would outperform alternative Democratic candidates, possibly by as much as 3–4 points, with perhaps 1–2 points of that advantage spilling downballot as “coattails.”
Democratic-leaning media, however, was neither enthusiastic about Joe Biden during the primary process, nor were they interested in alternative electable candidates. Instead, pundits enthusiastically favored candidates based on a combination of key ideological markers or minority identity.6 This generally meant candidates who had done worse in elections in their home states, did not poll as well nationally, and staked out less popular positions on key issues.
The intense focus of media attention onto less electable candidates arguably happened on both sides in 2016. It seems to be happening again for Republicans in the 2024 cycle as most media sources fixate on former president Donald Trump. Perhaps electable candidates are more boring.
There is no silent Democratic majority
Many Democrats have, for the last several decades, insisted that the Democratic Party is very popular with non-voters, and invested considerable political resources in trying to make it easier for non-voters to become voters and increase voter turnout. Republicans made the mistake of believing Democrats who said this, and invested considerable political resources in trying to make it generally harder to vote and drive down turnout.
Both parties were proven wrong in the 2020 election. The 2020 election was notable in that it saw a large surge of first-time voters. The non-voters who turned out for the first time in 2020 split roughly equally between both parties. Biden’s gains were not correlated to changes in turnout at the state level.
Targeted voter suppression can have a partisan effect, but simply making it harder for everyone to vote doesn’t help Republicans.
Demographics is not destiny
Many pundits have claimed that when it comes to America’s two major parties, demographics is destiny, and that this will ensure that Republicans never win a popular majority again. This idea has gained traction on both sides of the aisle. Critical race theory became a major point of political contention 2018–2020, but staking out a position in favor of the CRT movement did not help Democrats.
In 2016, the fact that Hillary Clinton performed worse among minority voters than Barack Obama did could have been brushed off as an anomaly. This trend continued in 2018, 2020, and 2022. In 2020, Donald Trump made large visible gains among Tejano voters, Cuban-American voters, and African-American voters.7 Asian-American voters also showed signs of trending towards Republicans.8
With immigration at the center of Donald Trump’s platform, many Democratic-leaning pundits seemed to assume that Hispanic9 voters were unified bloc of single-issue voters who would align with Democrats due to immigration and language policy issues. As a group, non-citizen Hispanic residents may not have liked Trump’s immigration policies, but almost no non-citizens vote.
Older Hispanic families from Colorado to California have ancestors who stayed in place when the border shifted during the Mexican-American War. Other Hispanic citizens commonly have roots in Puerto Rico and Cuba. Hispanic non-citizens are most often from Mexico or Central America. Each of these communities is politically distinct.
Recap
Candidate quality matters. Joe Biden was a strong contender for reasons that were obvious in polling back in 2019. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were weaker candidates for reasons that were obvious in polling back in 2015.
Swing voters decide elections. It’s become very fashionable in political science to emphasize that most voters are reliably partisan most of the time and that split-ticket voting is very rare.
Demographics is not destiny. The Republican Party is not in the process of being swept away by demographic changes. They are contending for votes from racial minorities, and Democrats cannot take those votes for granted.
There is no silent Democratic majority. Non-voters coming off the sidelines have not sided with Democrats over Republicans, and they came off the sidelines in huge numbers in 2020. Increasing the level of participation by eligible voters should not be a partisan issue.
1 Nevada was close, but in the mathematical context, mostly irrelevant due to its small number of electoral votes.
2 Arguably, Wisconsin was also crucial in 2016, but it’s included in this analysis anyway.
3 In North Carolina, for example, Democrat Roy Cooper won the race for governor by a decisive 4.5% margin, while Republican Steve Troxler won the race for agricultural commissioner by a decisive 7.7% margin.
4 Democrats skipped seven races. Republicans skipped eleven races voluntarily, and failed to qualify by making the top two in seven races in California. Since these were generally very safely partisan seats, the most reasonable “adjusted” margin would be roughly in the middle of those two figures, or about 2.3 million votes.
5 This is one of a large range of indicators suggesting that Trump, while deeply unpopular in 2020, had become slightly less unpopular during his unexpected presidency.
6 The full picture is that bias in volume of coverage generally correlated with geography (national news media are disproportionately located in New York City), while the bias in tone of coverage also correlated with identity markers. For example, Bill de Blasio received extra coverage as the mayor of New York City, but as was typical for straight white male candidates, this coverage was largely negative.
7 One of the great ironies of 2020 is linked to Trump’s gains among African-American voters. Trump made significant gains in Detroit and Atlanta … and then turned around and claimed that the vote had been rigged against him in Detroit and Atlanta.
8 Proposition 16 seems to have helped Trump in particular and Republicans in general in parts of California with significant Asian-American populations, which is one of the few states where Clinton’s 2016 performance could be said to be stronger than Biden’s 2020 performance. Biden also lost ground in Hawaii. Like Hispanic voters, Asian-American voters are not a very homogeneous bloc, but affirmative action in college admissions has become a focal issue shared by most Asian-Americans.
9 I could say “Latinx,” but surveys tend to indicate that Americans with roots in Spanish-speaking countries prefer “Hispanic” as a demonym. Democrats probably should not have been so quick to embrace “Latinx” as a term.