What the 2020 Election says about American Democracy (in the words of The New York Times: “The election is over; the nation’s rifts remain.”)

Joe Biden’s election as our 46^th president says an enormous amount of where we are as a democracy in the post-Trump era. Here are some of my main takeaways:

We are still a very divided nation (sub-text the Blue Wave never materialized).  The results of the elections of 2012, 2016 and 2020 are presented in the table below. The Democratic share of the popular vote for these elections averaged 49.9%, while the Republican share averaged 47.0. We live in a fifty-fifty country.

Electoral college.  Although it was clear on election night that Biden had beaten Trump in terms of the popular vote, it was still possible that Trump might win on the basis of electoral votes. As in 2016, the election outcome depended on a small number of votes in key states –the same states as in 2016, “the Blue Wall.”

• Wisconsin. In 2016 Trump beat Clinton by 23,000 votes; in 2020 Biden beat Trump by about 20,000 votes.
• Michigan. In 2016 Trump beat Clinton by about 10,500 votes; in 2020 Biden is beating Trump by 146,000 votes.
• Pennsylvania.  In 2016 Trump beat Clinton by 44,000 votes; in 2020 Biden is currently leading Trump by 45,000 votes.

Because of the electoral college, the fate of the nation rested on a knife edge in both 2016 and 2020. This an idiotic and patently undemocratic institution and has no justification for being the way we decide who will lead us in the 21^st century.

The News media is responsible for deciding who won.  Pardon my ignorance, but this was the first time I realized that the “media” is responsible for telling us who won, at least on a real time basis. Sometime a month from now, the state electoral apparatus will count every vote and certify all the winners. But no one wants to wait until December, so we need closure as soon as possible.  And we’ve given that authority to the news media, primarily the Associated Press, but also key newspapers and television networks. They have handled this responsibility with sober and painstaking care.  And so, in the 11^th hour Saturday morning, the key media outlets announced that there was no way President Trump could make up his deficit in Pennsylvania and thus Joseph Robinette Biden (yes, that is his middle name) was now the President-Elect.

The democratic structures held so far. President Trump has yet to concede, has pushed baseless theories of vote fraud and is pursuing a strategy of litigation at every possible turn. This is who he is. However, most observers believe that these lawsuits are frivolous and have little chance of winning. Moreover, the prevailing opinion is that there is no way for the 2020 election results to be overturned by the Supreme Court. So far, his followers have left the streets to the joyous Biden supporters.  The possibility of a state legislature deciding on its own to certify a slate of electors that does not reflect the people’s vote has receded, despite being suggested by Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and Donald Trump Jr.

Today, the election is in the sunlight. All of those ideas of subverting the popular will were conceived in the darkness. The process of vote-counting, despite the specious assertions of vote fraud, has been careful, painstaking, and the result of the patriotic work of volunteers from all sides. Its inherent honesty is obvious to anyone who looks without bias.

Donald Trump will leave the White House on January 20, 2021. He may do so ungraciously, but the clear will of the people has been expressed in this election, and that will is that the time of Donald Trump, our “long national nightmare,” in the words of President Ford about a different nightmare, is over.

Polling remains a problem.  The average of the national polls on the day before the election saw Biden ahead by 8.4%; on November 3, he won by about three percent. According to the website fivethirtyeight there were 32 different polls that were included in this average. Except for the Republican-leaning Rasmussen Report, all predicted a Biden victory of at least 5%. At the state level, Trump outperformed the polls by 7% in Ohio, 6% in Wisconsin, 6% in Iowa, 6% in Texas, 5% in Florida, and 4.5% in North Carolina. In addition, for the Senate, polls had the Democrats Gideon beating Collins in the Maine, Cunningham beating Tillis in North Carolina, Greenfield beating Ernst in Iowa, Peters easily beating James in Michigan (the result was a 1.5% victory by James), and the result tied in South Carolina (Lindsey Graham won by 10%).  None of these, with the exception of Michigan, came about.  What’s going on here? What happened to the Blue Wave? Why was polling so wrong again?

We don’t really know although Nate Cohen writing in the New York Times offers several intriguing hypotheses:

• The President hurt the polls.  It’s possible that Trump’s denigration of the polls led to more skepticism and thus a lower response rate from his supporters (this is the 2020 version of the shy Trump voter), although this doesn’t explain the Senate and House results.
• The Resistance hurt the polls.  It’s possible that progressives, who surged into the streets, became, in the flush of their being part of a visible movement, more likely to respond to surveys.
• The turnout hurt the polls.  The President may have turned out a larger number of his supporters than pollsters expected. I believe this to be the principle reason.
• The pandemic hurt the polls.  Democrats were more likely to shelter at home than Republicans and thus more likely to respond to surveys.
• The Hispanic shift to Trump hurt the polls.  Why the polls didn’t catch this is still a mystery.

Perhaps, as Margaret Sullivan writes in The Washington Post, “we should never again put as much stock in public opinion polls, and those who interpret them, as we’ve grown accustomed to doing. Polling seems to be irrevocably broken, or at least our understanding of how seriously to take it is.”

Divided government.  It looks as if, while losing the Presidency, Republicans gained some seats in the House, retained control of the Senate, and held on to their lead in control of state legislatures. The vote seems less a transfer of power to the Democrats than a repudiation of Donald Trump. Americans seem to like divided government, but with a divided electorate and a Senate in Republican hands, it will be difficult for Biden to move ahead on some important issues, especially reforming Obamacare, getting a political compromise on immigration policy, and even getting his choices for cabinet posts approved by the Senate. If Americans prefer gridlock, they have it for the next two years at least.

Participation.  More Americans voted in this election than ever before. Partly because many Americans despised Trump; partly because many Americans loved Trump; and partly because of the coronavirus. The share of Americans who voted early or by mail, according to The Washington Post,  was 73% or 102 million American voters. These coronavirus measures should be implemented permanently as a solution to the problem of low turnout that has been characteristic of American democracy. States should seek to reform laws so that people can vote more easily.

The end of Trumpism?

The next four years are difficult to predict, although it is a good bet that Donald Trump and his energized followers will not go away. By election day, 2024, he will be 78, not too old to run by today’s standards (Joe Biden is 77 years old).  He has shown outstanding vigor. He will be the titular head of the Republican Party, and because of his popularity is probably the favorite for the 2024 nomination.  On the other hand, he faces a host of financial and legal problems that may either disqualify him or divide his attention. Between now and the 2024 election, it is clear that he will continue to dominate Republican politics, until these personal problems consume him, if they do.

Symbolic of this election, perhaps, is this press conference that Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani held November 7 to discuss Trump’s legal moves to challenge the election tabulations. Planned for The Four Seasons hotel in Philadelphia, a scheduling error (or confusion) led to it being held at the Four Seasons Total Landscaping, which is  comfortably nestled in an industrial park between a crematorium and a sex shop, a very different location and a little downscale from what the Republicans wanted. Giuliani’s quest to overturn the election includes this solicitation of his twitter followers to help him find voting irregularities in Pennsylvania. He tweeted “Tweet me your guess, while I go prove it in court.” The Trump Presidency which began with his descending on a gold escalator in Trump Towers ends with his lawyer seeking “guesses” in an industrial park in Philadelphia.

The Future of Republicanism without Trump?

Eight years ago, In 2012, Thomas B. Edsall reported on the “autopsy” the Republican Party commissioned after its defeat,  He wrote, “On Monday [March 18, 2013] a Republican task force released a remarkably hard-headed diagnosis of the party’s many liabilities: its ideological rigidity, its preference for the rich over workers, its alienation of minorities, its reactionary social policies and its institutionalized repression of dissent and innovation.”  The “Autopsy” argues that the Republican Party needs to:

• Address the perception that the GOP does not care about people, which is doing great harm to the Party and its candidates on the federal level, especially in presidential years.
• Rebrand itself; the GOP should stand for the Growth and Opportunity Party
• Abandon its anti-immigration rhetoric
• Blow the whistle at corporate malfeasance
• Mute anti-gay rhetoric
• Get control of outside financiers such as PACs
• Court the Hispanic vote
• Court female voters and female candidates
• Foster what has been referred to as an “environment of intellectual curiosity” and a “culture of data and learning,”
• Acknowledge the trend of more absentee and mail-in voters and use new tactics to win more of these voters
• Strengthen its digital capacity and its social media presence

Then Trump happened, and the Party abandoned efforts to reinvent itself in ways that would appeal to the changing electorate, and set its cap firmly on that part of America that saw change as dangerous, and the evolution of America into a majority-minority, socially liberal, cosmopolitan culture as something to be resisted.

The issues which the “Autopsy” highlighted are more trenchant today, particularly the demographic issues. The first chart below describes the way in which America’s ethnic makeup will evolve between now and 2060. “Whites” will decline from 60% of the population to 44% while Hispanics will grow from 19% to 28%. America will become a minority-majority country by 2050. On the other hand, depending on immigration policy, we are slowly becoming older.  Between 2020 and 2060, people between the ages 18 and 64 will decline from 61% of the population to 57%, while seniors will increase from 17% to 24%.  Finally, and perhaps most important, (see second chart) people living in rural areas will decline from 14% of population to10.5%. The demographics suggest Republican voters are shrinking as a proportion of the population.

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Conclusions. 

• America is divided almost 50-50 between a progressive, young, diverse urban and suburban culture that votes for Democrats and a more rural, more conservative, white culture that votes for Republicans. The uncertainty with determining the winner of the electoral college when the popular vote was so decisive points out to me that a modern society should no longer pin its fate on such an archaic institution.
• For the second presidential election in a row, polling was so far off in its description of the electorate that it can be called broken.
• The democratic institutions held, and commentary about how Trump could resist the will of the people was much too pessimistic. His current resistance to acknowledging defeat may cause the incoming Biden Administration some indigestion, but his delaying won’t change the outcome.
• Trump may continue to dominate our politics (and especially our consciousness) for the next four years; he may indeed run again for president in 2024, or he may become so entangled in legal and financial problems that he will be unable to run again.
• The arc of demographic change may make the Republican Party increasingly a minority one, unless they take to heart some of the lessons pointed out in the 2012 Autopsy.