Evan Vucci/AP Photo
Supporters listen as President Trump speaks at a campaign rally for Georgia’s Republican Senate candidates, at Valdosta Regional Airport, December 5, 2020, in Valdosta, Georgia.
The presidential campaign of 2020 ended in a race war between the Democratic and Republican Parties, focused on America’s history of white supremacy, the demand for racial justice, and fear of who will now lead the country at such a moment. This was a war of choice for Donald Trump and the Republican Party, and they lost. Joe Biden won by more than six million votes nationally and by the same majority as Trump achieved in the Electoral College in 2016. As president of the United States, Biden will have an outsized role in defining Trump’s corrupt and racist presidency and the issues the country must address.
The role of race in the election was a choice for Democrats, too. It was a moral choice. After the murder of George Floyd and the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor and pervasive protest marches, Democratic leaders joined the marches and House Democrats passed the Justice in Policing Act. Joe Biden chose an African American woman as his vice president and devoted a major part of the Democratic Convention to the fight for racial justice. He closed the campaign with an ad where Biden said, “Black Lives Matter,” and promised he would address the country’s racial inequities. And after winning, he said one of his highest priorities was addressing “systemic racism.”
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Campaigns are fights to define the choice in the election. Biden wanted voters to choose a leader who would get COVID under control, protect the Affordable Care Act, unite the country, and address America’s racial divide, but Trump focused relentlessly on race.
Trump attacked the Black Lives Matter protests, called out peaceful protesters as looters, defended the police no matter how extreme their abuses, and invited white nationalists and Trump supporters to liberate Democratic-run cities and states, and defend the election from being stolen in Black-run cities.
Those attacks grew more politically damaging to Democrats when peaceful protests were accompanied by looting, overnight violence, and occasional attacks on police, even when Biden forcefully condemned violence of any kind. There are, of course, varied explanations for the rise in violent crime in the major cities, but Trump does not do nuance. According to Trump, Democrats winning this election means liberals and Blacks in charge of the cities, and the breakdown of law and order.
Virtually every Republican campaign ad depicted Black rioters and decried Democrats who will “defund the police” and who are now strongly opposed by the police unions. Trump held multiple rallies a day in the final week in the battleground states, where he attacked the liberals, elites, professors, and scientists who looked down on them, and liberal Democrats who were indulging the violent Blacks who are threatening to invade your suburbs and communities. The Trump campaign focused on Blacks, rarely mentioning immigrants—his main focus in 2016 and 2018.
Trump’s escalating attacks on the first African American president, Barack Obama, as a socialist and dire warnings about his multiracial coalition winning control of America again, and Obama campaigning to consolidate young Blacks, may have mobilized more white working-class and rural voters than Black ones.
TRUMP’S ESCALATED RACE WAR changed the electorate. I watched the midterms and the long lines in the early vote and expected every group would dramatically raise their vote come November 3. I thought pro-Trump and anti-Trump voters would contribute about equally to the biggest turnout election since William Jennings Bryan. But to my surprise, Trump’s race war dramatically increased the turnout of the white working class and Trump supporters—while just barely pushing up the turnout of Blacks and Biden voters.
Trump’s race war failed, but produced a lot of collateral damage. The Democrats have their greatest support in virtually every segment of the electorate that is growing—the young, millennials, Blacks and Latinos, unmarried women, the college-educated, suburban and metropolitan areas—yet Trump stopped history in the battleground states where he campaigned so aggressively.
It was reasonable for progressives to believe the historic turnout would turn out well. The surge of college-educated and suburban voters in the 2018 midterms allowed Democrats to win by ten million votes in an election that broke turnout records. But Trump’s race war flipped who surged. He pushed up the proportion of whites without a four-year college degree from 40 to 62 percent in Iowa, 40 to 53 percent in Minnesota, 54 to 58 percent in Wisconsin, 40 to 55 percent in Ohio, 49 to 54 percent in Michigan, and 48 to 53 percent in Pennsylvania, the states where I can compare 2018 and 2020. That flip put Iowa and Ohio out of reach for Biden and allowed Republican Senate incumbents to win easily in Iowa and Maine.
It also had a devastating effect on down-ballot races. Except in Maine, there was little ticket-splitting. These newly mobilized white working-class and rural Trump voters marked their ballot for Donald Trump, but also for every Republican at every level.
Trump’ race-laden campaign in the battleground states must have flipped a switch in the heads of seniors, who stopped focusing on the death toll with COVID and began focusing on the fears Trump raised. That produced the biggest change from pre-election polling. In the Edison exit polls, Biden lost seniors in Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Nevada by over five points. He lost the seniors in Ohio, Iowa, and North Carolina by double that.
And critically, Trump’s attack on Blacks was an attack on liberal Democratic governance for “defunding the police.” That focused campaign pushed down the vote for Democratic Senate, House, and legislative candidates about two points below the vote for Biden, particularly in suburban areas, where Biden was winning some voters on the handling of COVID and ending Trump’s divisiveness.
BUT TRUMP’S RACIALIZING OF THE ELECTION was only part of the story on why Democrats underperformed. They were not pulled down by “fear of socialism,” my research showed. They were pulled down by the lack of any economic relief and any economic offer to counter Trump’s racist imagery and push to open the economy. Democrats were pulled down by their offering no competing narrative to Trump’s drumbeat on “law and order” on what was at stake in November. Democrats were not heard decrying the health care costs that are killing people, or battling for lower insurance and drug costs, or battling corporations and their big tax breaks—as they were in the midterms. Biden ended up with no advantage on who would be better for the middle class.
You may not have noticed that Trump cynically shifted from attacking Mexican Americans and Latinos to attacking Blacks. He actively courted Latinos, especially in Florida, and it worked. Fear of immigrants was far and away the top reason to vote for Trump in 2016 and 2018, but only one in five in 2020 said they voted for Trump because of the “border wall” and “being tough on immigration.” That gave many Latinos the space to consider Trump, because he was talking about their own experience, wanted to open up the economy, or based on his macho style, or opposition to Castro and Chávez. That hurt Democrats in Florida and Texas, and made Nevada closer.
And one has to ask: Why did Trump’s race war joined passionately by the Democrats not produce historic turnout in the Black communities where Democrats’ organizational efforts could not have been stronger? Trump might have won 20 percent of Black men, but that is unimportant compared to Blacks not increasing their turnout in Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta and other cities. What went wrong?
I wrote a year ago in RIP GOP that “giving in to identity politics” could mean progressives having to “wait longer to capture the U.S. Senate.” I did not foresee George Floyd and the reckoning with racial inequalities that Democrats were right to address. And I did not see a President Trump who views those racial divisions as just a new way to mobilize the white working class. Democrats had to finish and win the race war Trump started. It was the right thing to do, and America will be dramatically better for it.
But my research showed Black voters responded much more strongly to messages that promised broad political and economic changes, as well as racial justice. As I observed:
Every message test I conducted during the 2016 and 2018 campaigns … found the same kind of sophistication and clarity in the New America of African Americans and Hispanics, single women, millennials, and college women. It got more engaged and more determined to vote for Democrats when they called out the corrupt political deals that put government to work for big corporations and big donors, rather than calling out the “barriers to inclusion” and promising “ladders of opportunity.”
Blacks and Latinos were the voters “most frustrated and hurt by the political status quo that further enriches the top 1 percent and weakens unions.” Not disrupting the status quo where politics is rigged against working people means you have to live with a minimum wage that keeps you in poverty and a government that cuts education spending and investments in infrastructure and does nothing to make health care and prescription drugs affordable.
In short, while Democrats championed Black lives as a racial issue, they fell far short in addressing how much Black Americans wanted to shake up a rigged political system to do more for working people and bring changes that can help their families, that they can feel in their pocketbook. That, more than anything else, explains the disappointing level of Black turnout.
Democrats will need to fight for such policies in the coming months, but they decided Trump’s racist campaign had to be defeated and they had to win a mandate to address racial justice. That suited Trump adviser Steve Bannon, but Democrats decided to pay that price. Trump’s race war left Democrats short of full control of the national government and Trump not fully repudiated.
But there is more than a silver lining. Consider how profoundly damaged the campaign left the Republican Party and how profoundly different America will look in the coming years.
Republicans now fear, correctly, that this is now Donald Trump’s party, lock, stock, and barrel. They fear, correctly, that only when Donald Trump is on the ballot fighting for a white America will the alienated white working-class and rural voters be mobilized to stop history.
THINK OF THE QUESTIONS that history will soon answer.
Will Trump’s voters turn out in the Georgia runoffs, state elections in 2021, and the midterms when Trump is not on the ballot? Remember, in 2018, Trump campaigned for Republicans—including sending troops to the Mexican border—demanded they stop immigrant caravans protecting terrorists, and held a raft of closing rallies where he demanded the government build the wall, and even declared that the midterms were a referendum on him. Yet it all did little to deter the Democrats’ blue wave in the 2018 midterms or stop Democrats winning governors’ races in Kentucky and Louisiana in 2019.
Republican leaders are now loyal to Trump, but will he be loyal to them? Does Trump have the attention span to become their savior again in four years? Will Trump be distracted by his indebtedness, criminal prosecutions, and sexual assault allegations? Will he be distracted by his campaign of revenge that he can now pursue without constraint? Will the new Justice Department make his life miserable? Is supporting the Republican Party profitable for Trump?
Democrats may be divided, but what do we think Trump’s Republican Party stands for? Trump’s political formula was very simple: He backs any policy that helps him win; any policy that helps him to grow his white working-class support. Thus, count on him to oppose entitlement reforms and cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. He opposes every trade agreement, except ones he negotiates, and wants a trade war with China. He badgers CEOs who outsource jobs and will withdraw all American troops from foreign engagements. And he wants the federal government to set drug prices. Will this keep his voters loyal to his party?
Or do his voters drift out of politics again because there is no leader or party for them?
You can count on Trump and his party to oppose immigration, address “the demographic problem,” and fight the idea of white Christians losing power. That was the guiding motivation of the true believers in the Trump administration, as Anne Applebaum points out in The Atlantic. They include Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General William Barr, as well as White House senior aide Stephen Miller, who see America is at a “biblical moment” approaching the “Rapture,” when the “militant secularists” and their allies among the “progressives” will rule the day and the white majority will lose power.
But can this party only be politically successful when they burn a Mexican immigrant or Black American at the stake? Can it only compete when it turns its campaigns into race wars? And how deeply will that brand and tar the Republican Party in an America that is changing by the minute and welcomes America’s diversity?
Consider how profoundly damaged the campaign left the Republican Party and how profoundly different America will look in the coming years.
Trump’s base of Tea Partiers, evangelicals, and observant Catholics in the Republican Party will welcome this new vigilance against the loss of white power, but it may not be so well received as Republicans fight for control of the diverse Southern and Sun Belt states with large metropolitan and suburban populations, starting with North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Arizona.
Trump’s race war in 2020 did not slow the steady trend toward the Democrats in North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona, with Biden winning Georgia and Arizona.
What will be the brand of Trump’s Republican Party that now requires suppressing the votes of Blacks, young people, and Latinos? They come out of the 2020 election associated with one drop box per county, long lines, a broken U.S. Postal Service, and refusal to certify elections. It is a self-consciously anti-democratic, anti-Black party, determined to stop majority rule.
The 2020 Trump playbook left the party losing badly with voters under 30, millennials, unmarried women, voters of color, and college-educated and suburban voters, yet they will not be able to stop the electorate each year being younger, more unmarried, more college-educated, more metropolitan, and less white. Voters under 30 significantly increased their turnout and maintained their 17 percent share of the electorate, despite the historic turnout. Millennials and Gen Z also grew their vote share to 30 percent, and together gave Biden landslide support. They will grow their vote share sharply in 2024 to exceed the vote of the “baby boom,” and as the “silent generation” passes on.
They welcome the new America Trump hates.
Trump’s total race war grew the white working-class electorate in 2020, but Republicans didn’t take into account how economically populist they are. Over 60 percent of this battleground electorate wants to raise taxes on those worth more than $35 million, including two-thirds of white working-class women and over half of the men. Republicans may pay a price—as Trump did when he failed to deliver affordable health care—if they try to stop all of Biden’s efforts to raise taxes on the richest and corporations to get them to contribute their fair share. Future Democrats can compete for these voters.
Despite Trump’s racist campaign, most 2020 voters know America must face its racial past. Black Lives Matter is still viewed positively in this battleground electorate, and a big plurality believe racial discrimination is the main reason Black Americans are not getting ahead. Biden has every reason to believe he has a mandate to act on COVID, unite the country, build back better, act boldly on climate change, as well as address the country’s deep racial inequities.
The 2020 election will be forever remembered for the pandemic, the battle for racial justice, and an election that Trump turned into a race war. It was a campaign that made it very hard for Biden to make major gains beyond white working-class women. It was an election where Biden did not identify fully with the Latino community in all its diversity.
But 2020 is almost certainly sui generis. A Biden administration, and Democrats in the midterms and in the race for the White House in 2024, will raise a broad range of issues the country is desperate to address, without Republicans able to shift the agenda to “law and order.” The country still believes the rich have rigged politics so government works for them, not the middle class. The “forgotten Americans” are still waiting for a country that works for them, not the elites.
