From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject The First Question for Democrats to Answer about the Election: What Happened?
Date November 9, 2020 8:10 AM
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[Democrats are already trying to make sense of why Joe Biden
appears to have outperformed fellow Party candidates further down the
ballot.] [[link removed]]

THE FIRST QUESTION FOR DEMOCRATS TO ANSWER ABOUT THE ELECTION: WHAT
HAPPENED?  
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John Cassidy
November 7, 2020
The New Yorker
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_ Democrats are already trying to make sense of why Joe Biden appears
to have outperformed fellow Party candidates further down the ballot.
_

, Brynn Anderson / AP

 

Just four days after the election, Democratic politicians and
activists are still coming to terms with a result that bitterly
disappointed many of them, despite Joe Biden’s victory
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the Presidential race. In a heated private conference call on
Thursday, centrist and progressive members of the House Democratic
caucus jostled over who or what was to blame for the
Party’s unexpectedly weak showing in congressional races
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(With a number of contests still to be called, the G.O.P. has already
made a net gain of five seats
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At the local level, there is also a lot of sparring over why the
Party failed
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its bid to gain control of legislatures in a number of big states,
including Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

The first step in any political inquest is to figure out exactly what
happened. The Democrats’ struggles in local and statewide races will
take more time to unpack, but there are data already available about
the race at the top of the ticket that can offer some insight into
what happened in 2020. Even here, however, there isn’t much
agreement. The nationwide exit poll
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Edison Research carries out for a consortium of media companies
indicated that Trump got fifty-seven per cent of the white vote, the
same number that he got in 2016, but also did better than expected
among minority voters, particularly Hispanics. Some Democratic
activists have questioned the poll findings, however. “Are these
exit polls real?” Ezra Levin, the co-founder of Indivisible, a
grassroots progressive organization, asked
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Twitter. When I messaged Levin and asked for his interpretation of the
election results, he replied, “We just don’t have enough info yet
to really say what happened. I have no idea if most of the quick takes
out there right now are right or wrong, but nobody really does yet.”

FULL ELECTION RESULTS
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_Follow the latest results from the 2020 race
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Levin isn’t the only person querying the exit poll, which was
conducted outside of polling centers across the country (and by
telephone in an effort to reach people who voted early or by mail).
Partly because of the challenge in obtaining representative samples,
and for other reasons, some academic experts on voting trends are also
highly skeptical of the network exit poll. “I think all of their
estimates are pretty suspect,” Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the
Center for American Progress, told me on Friday. Citing an example,
Teixeira pointed out that, although other estimates have suggested
that at least seventy per cent of the 2020 electorate was white, the
exit poll came up with a figure of sixty-five per cent. “Not on this
planet, not in this election,” Teixeira said.

A longtime student of psephology, Teixeira is a co-author of the
influential book “The Emerging Democratic Majority
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from 2002. More recently, he and some co-authors have produced
a series of detailed studies
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the U.S. electorate, which are called “States of Change,” and
which utilize data from a number of different sources, including the
Census Bureau, the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, and
actual election returns down to the county level. Rather than relying
on the exit poll to analyze what went down in this election, Teixeira
said that he preferred to look at the findings of a different survey,
the A.P. VoteCast
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which questioned more than a hundred thousand voters in all fifty
states during the week leading up to November 3rd. To see how 2020
compared to 2016, Teixeira then compared the A.P. VoteCast findings to
the analyses of the 2016 election by the “States of Change”
project. Although this comparison isn’t an apples-to-apples one, it
does provide an alternative way of looking at the election results and
identifying their key features. “It’s not great, but it’s
probably the best we have at the moment,” Teixeira said.

In some ways, this exercise produces similar results to a simple
comparison of the exit polls from 2016 and 2020. Both methods confirm
that Trump’s voters are overwhelmingly white and predominantly male.
The two methods also indicate that, relative to Hillary Clinton’s
performance four years ago, Biden made up substantial ground among
seniors and white voters without a bachelor’s degree—two groups
that Trump carried by large margins in 2016. The two methods also show
Trump getting roughly a third of the Latino vote nationwide. However,
Teixeira’s methodology produces quantitatively different results,
and it fails to confirm the widely publicized exit-poll finding that
Trump attracted a lot more Black voters this year than he did four
years ago. “I am very unpersuaded that the Democrats’ margin among
Black voters went down a lot,” Teixeira said. “I think it was
probably relatively stable.”

Another big difference between Teixeira’s analysis and the media
narrative taking hold in the past few days is the emphasis that he
places on Biden’s ability to limit his losses among whites without a
college degree, a group central to Trump’s base. For decades, this
group made up the majority of the electorate, and, this year, it still
accounted for more than two-fifths of it, Teixeira and his colleagues
reckon. In 2016, Trump beat Clinton by a whopping thirty-two
percentage points in this demographic, according to estimates
contained in the latest “States of Change” report. This year,
Trump’s margin over Biden in this group was twenty-five points, the
A.P. VoteCast found. To be sure, that was another big victory for
Trump. But it represented a seven-point shift to the Democratic
candidate relative to 2016, and Teixeira argues that this was a key
factor—perhaps the key factor—that laid the groundwork for
Biden’s victory in the Electoral College. “The theory that Biden
would win, to a great extent, because he could reduce the white,
non-college deficit turned out to be true,” Teixeira said. “He
just didn’t win by as much as people wanted. Plus, people have
trouble getting their minds around the fact that to go from minus
thirty-two to minus twenty-five is just as good as going from plus
seven to plus fourteen. And if the former group is bigger, it is
actually better.”

Turning to college-educated whites, Teixeira’s method suggests that
Biden didn’t actually make up much ground in this demographic,
despite all the attention that has been paid to suburban voters. By
contrast, the Edison exit poll indicated that Biden turned Clinton’s
three-point deficit among these voters from 2016 into a tie with
Trump, at forty-nine per cent. Teixeira’s figures do suggest that
the white college demographic was important in some key states, such
as Michigan, where Biden improved Clinton’s margin by fourteen
points. On a nationwide basis, however, the exit poll and Teixeira’s
analysis both indicate that the shift in this white college
demographic was smaller than the shift in the white non-college one.
“The biggest swing in the Democrats’ direction was not among white
college voters, it was among white non-college voters,” Teixeira
said.

The fact that Biden outperformed Clinton among older Americans, who
are particularly vulnerable to _covid_-19, appears to be another key
element in his victory. This is evident in the exit-poll data, which
indicate that the former Vice-President reduced Trump’s 2016 margin
of seven points to three points among voters aged sixty-five and over,
who make up more than a fifth of the electorate. It’s even more
stark in Teixeira’s comparison. His “States of Change” data
suggest that Trump carried the senior demographic by fifteen points in
2016—a much bigger margin than the exit poll suggested. For 2020,
the A.P. VoteCast survey agrees with the Edison exit poll that Trump
led Biden by three points among seniors. So, going by Teixeira’s
methodology, there was a hefty shift of twelve points relative to
2016. That jibes with some of the polling done during the campaign,
which I wrote about as far back as June
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But for Democrats it raises questions about 2024. Assuming that the
pandemic is long gone by then, it would seem reasonable to suppose
that some of the senior vote might shift back to a Republican
Presidential candidate. Which means that Biden, or whoever the
Democratic candidate is, would need to make the margin up elsewhere.

The gains that Trump posted among Hispanic voters are another pressing
concern for the Democrats. According to the Edison exit poll,
thirty-two per cent of Latinos voted for Trump nationwide, compared to
twenty-eight per cent in 2016. The A.P. VoteCast survey estimate of
the Trump vote among Latinos is even higher—thirty-five per cent. If
you compare this figure to the “States of Change” estimates, you
find that Trump reduced his deficit in the Latino demographic from
thirty-seven points in 2016 to twenty-eight points this year. With
Latinos now making about a seventh of the electorate, the largest
minority group, this is a big shift. And, according to Teixeira’s
analysis, it wasn’t confined to Cubans in Florida, or even to the
whole of Florida and parts of Texas. It was evident in places like
Arizona and Nevada, too. According to the “States of Change”
estimates for the 2016 election, Clinton’s winning margin among
Hispanics in these two states was thirty-three points and twenty-two
points, respectively. This year, according to the findings of A.P.
VoteCast, Biden’s margins were twenty one points and ten points. In
other words, there were double-digit shifts to Trump in both states.

Finally, back to Black voters, who make up about twelve per cent of
the electorate. According to the exit poll, Trump raised his share of
the Black vote from eight per cent in 2016 to twelve per cent this
year—and to eighteen per cent among Black men. Not surprisingly,
given Trump’s racial incitements and the derogatory comments that he
has repeatedly made about Black politicians and journalists, these
findings have received a lot of attention—but Teixeira’s analysis
contradicts them. Based on “States of Change” data, he and his
co-authors estimate the Black vote for Trump in 2016 to have been nine
per cent, and the A.P. VoteCast puts the figure for 2020 year at eight
per cent.

If these two figures are accurate, there is no “Trump bump” in the
Black vote to explain. In both of the last two elections, he received
the support of fewer than one in ten African-Americans. But Teixeira
would readily admit that this is only a provisional finding, as are
the others he relayed to me. He said that he is looking forward to
getting access to more definitive data in a month or two, including
some based on voter files and precinct-level voting figures. “More
data is needed, as always,” he said. The Democratic Party doesn’t
have time to wait. Its inquest has already begun.

_JOHN CASSIDY has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995.
In 2012, he began writing a daily column about politics and economics
on newyorker.com. He has covered two Presidential elections, and has
written extensively about the Trump Administration. He is also a
regular contributor to The New Yorker’s political podcast,
“Politics and More
[[link removed]].” He has written
many articles for the magazine, on topics ranging from Alan Greenspan
and Ben Bernanke to the intelligence failures before the Iraqi War and
the economics of John Maynard Keynes. He is the author of two books:
“How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities
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“Dot.Con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era
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Before joining The New Yorker, he worked for the Sunday Times of
London and the Post. He graduated from Oxford University in 1984 and
from the Columbia School of Journalism in 1986. He grew up in Leeds,
West Yorkshire._

_Become a NEW YORKER subscriber for $1 a week. Plus, get a free
tote. Cancel anytime. Subscribe now
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