Figure : 2020 Biden Margin By 2016 Clinton Margin In The States
: Dave Leips Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections
Evidence of this growing consistency can be seen very clearly in Figure 1, which displays a scatterplot of the relationship between the Democratic presidential margin in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The data in this scatterplot show that there was an incredibly close relationship between the results of these two elections at the state level. In fact, this was the closest relationship between the results of two consecutive presidential elections since at least the end of World War II. Moreover, the same pattern is evident at the county and congressional district level. The 2020 results were almost identical to the 2016 results with just a small and fairly consistent swing toward Biden.
It is clear that there are far fewer swing voters today than only 20 or 30 years ago. However, swing voters have not disappeared, and they can still play a crucial role in elections. In 2016, for example, although there werent many swing voters, there were about three times as many Obama-Trump voters as Romney-Clinton voters. That was probably enough to swing Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania to Trump and hand him a victory in the Electoral College.
Uncertainty Over Trump Accepting An Electoral Loss In 2020
During the campaign, Trump indicated in , interviews and speeches that he might refuse to recognize the outcome of the election if he were defeated Trump falsely suggested that the election would be rigged against him. In July 2020, Trump declined to state whether he would accept the results, telling Fox News anchor Chris Wallace that “I have to see. No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no.”Trump proposed delaying the presidential election due to COVID-19, until Americans could vote “properly, securely and safely”.
Trump repeatedly claimed that “the only way” he could lose would be if the election was “rigged” and repeatedly refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power after the election. Trump also attacked mail-in voting throughout the campaign, falsely claiming that the practice contained high rates of fraud. At one point, Trump said: “We’ll see what happens…Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation.” Trump’s statements have been described as a threat “to upend the constitutional order”. In September 2020, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, a Trump appointee, testified under oath that the FBI has “not seen, historically, any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it’s by mail or otherwise.”
How Do Republicans Feel About Trump
Polling is one indication of Trumps sway over the GOP. By the end of his presidency, he had an approval rating of just 38.6%, and an October 2021 Pew Research poll found that only 44% of Republicans want Trump to run again in 2024.
But his supporters are die-hards, and some happen to be party elites and major GOP donors. Despite Trumps 2020 electoral loss and two impeachments, his rallies are still highly attended by enthusiastic participants. And, following Trumps criticism of the Commission on Presidential Debates as biased against him during the 2020 election, the Republican National Committee signaled its plan to require its candidates to withdraw from presidential debates.
As Perry says, He has a solid 30% or so of the American people behind him seemingly no matter what.
For now, Trump is also maintaining strong fiscal support. At the start of 2022, his team announced that its various political committees had amassed $122 million in funding. In local, state, and federal elections, the candidate who spends more money on their campaign tends to win the election. So even though Trump has yet to officially announce his 2024 candidacy, entering with millions in cash would provide him with an advantage, covering major campaign expenses such as staff salaries, wide-reaching ads, and frequent travel to campaign in key areas.
You May Like: How Much Votes Does Donald Trump Have
Recommended Reading: What Does Trump Say About Immigration
Consideration Of Special Counsel And Martial Law
An attempt by Trump to invoke martial law to invalidate the results of the election would be illegal and unconstitutional. In late December 2020, legal scholars Claire O. Finkelstein and Richard Painter wrote that while it was very unlikely that Trump would actually “attempt to spark a military coup,” Acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen should be prepared to direct federal law enforcement “to arrest anyone, including if necessary the president, who … conspired to carry out this illegal plan.” Likening a hypothetical invocation of martial law to overturn the election to the 1861 firing on Fort Sumter, Finkelstein and Painter wrote that any such plan would constitute seditious conspiracy and possibly other crimes, and that any military officers or enlisted personnel ordered to assist in such a plan would be required, under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, to disregard such an illegal order.
Elizabeth Neumann, an adviser at Defending Democracy Together and a former assistant secretary of Homeland Security under Trump, stated that “In the conspiratorial conservative base supporting Trump, there are calls for using the Insurrection Act to declare martial law. When they hear that the president is actually considering this, there are violent extremist groups that look at this as a dog whistle, an excuse to go out and create … violence.”
Table : Average Voter Placement Of Self And Candidates On 1
: American National Election Studies
Why did swing voters tilt toward Biden in 2020? One of the keys to understanding voting shifts between 2016 and 2020 appears to be the changing perceptions of the candidates ideological positions. Table 3 displays the mean self-placement of voters on the 1-7 liberal-conservative scale and voters mean placements of the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates on the scale in 2016 and 2020. The data in this table show that over this four-year period, there was little change in the mean location of voters a shift from 4.2 to 4.1 on the 7-point scale. There was a modest shift in the mean placement of the Democratic presidential candidate. Joe Biden was perceived as slightly more moderate than Hillary Clinton with a mean placement of 2.8 vs. 2.6. However, there was a large shift in the perception of Donald Trumps location from a mean placement of 5.0 in 2016 to a mean placement of 5.6 in 2020.
Trump was perceived as far more conservative in 2020 than in 2016. In 2016, Trump was viewed as the least conservative Republican presidential candidate since Gerald Ford in 1976. In 2020, however, he was viewed as the most conservative Republican candidate in the history of this question in the ANES survey going back to 1972. This shift was significant in that it placed Trump farther from the average voter than Joe Biden, while in 2016 Trump was considerably closer to the average voter than Hillary Clinton was.
Don’t Miss: Was Melania Trump A Call Girl
Black Women Overwhelmingly Voted For The Democratic Nominee In Both Elections As Did Other Voters Of Color But Trump Captured The Majority Of Both White Women And White Men
Following a Trump presidency that saw an increase in anti-immigration rhetoric and policy, experts paid close attention to Biden’s performance among Hispanic voters, which he appeared to be lacking in the final months leading up to the election.
While Clinton received votes from an estimated 63% of male Latino voters, Biden actually lost ground and won only 59% in 2020, which all but eliminated his chance of flipping the major battleground states of Florida and Texas. Trump also gained an additional percentage point of support from male Latino voters in 2020, further cementing his gains among the demographic.
A Closer Look At 2020 Swing Voters
Who are these swing voters? Swing voters differed in several ways from voters who supported the same partys presidential candidate in both 2016 and 2020. They were somewhat less interested in and attentive to the campaign, so efforts at persuading them would have been challenging. Only 13% of swing voters were strong party identifiers while 29% were pure independents. In contrast, 56% of consistent voters were strong party identifiers while only 5% were pure independents. However, the most important difference between consistent and swing voters in 2020 was their location on a left-right issues scale. This scale measures voters combined preferences on a wide range of policy issues including cultural issues, social welfare issues, racial justice issues, gun control, immigration, and climate change. Preferences on these issues were highly correlated with each other and with liberal-conservative identification, indicating that they were all measuring a single underlying left-right dimension.
Also Check: How To Send President Trump An Email
The 2020 Election By The Numbers
Its almost over. Yesterday Electoral College electors convened virtually or in person in state capitals across the country to cast their votes. The result was what everyone expected, the election of Joe Biden as president of the United States. With the election now essentially settledRepublican lawmakers may make one last doomed attempt to reverse the results when Congress meets on January 6 to confirm the Electoral College voteheres one last review of how the vote went.
The Electoral College
In 2016, seven electors declined to vote for the candidate they were pledged to. That was the highest number of faithless electors ever, with the exception of the election of 1872. That year sixty-three electors broke their pledge. They had a good reason to do so, however. They were pledged to Democratic candidate Horace Greeleyhe of Go West fame. Greeley died three weeks after losing to Ulysses S. Grant and before the Electoral College met. His pledged electors were understandably reluctant to vote for a dead man. Three electors, however, did cast their votes for Greeley.
Justice Department Pressured And Efforts Made To Replace Acting Attorney General
The day after Attorney General William Barr said he intended to resign, Trump began to pressure his planned replacement, Jeffrey Rosen, to help him fight the election results. In particular, Trump asked Rosen to file legal briefs supporting lawsuits against the election results to announce Justice Department investigations of alleged serious election fraud and to appoint special prosecutors to investigate Trump’s unfounded allegations of voter fraud and accusations against Dominion Voting Systems. Rosen refused, as did his deputy, Richard Donoghue, as the Justice Department had already determined and announced that there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud. However, Trump continued to pressure them.
Despite these disagreements, Rosen became acting U.S. Attorney General on December 24 as originally planned. Trump continued to pressure Rosen, asking him to go to the Supreme Court directly to invalidate the election results, but Rosen along with his predecessor Barr and former acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall said such a case would have no basis and refused to file it.
During the closing weeks of the Trump presidency, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows sent multiple emails to Rosen, asking him to investigate conspiracy theories, including that satellites had been used from Italy to remotely switch votes from Trump to Biden. Rosen did not open the investigation.
Recommended Reading: What Are The Chances Of Donald Trump Being Reelected
Trump Got 10 Million More Votes This Election Where Did They Come From
Whether horrified or galvanized by Donald Trumps rhetoric, the presidential election saw a motivated and divided America. Voters who wanted to Make America Great Again came out in droves to the polls, hoping to beat Joe Bidens message of unity. And while they were ultimately unsuccessful, we can learn a lot from looking at who showed up to vote.
This election had more voters than ever before: Two-thirds of eligible Americans turned out to vote in 2020, with nearly 160 million voters casting ballots 22 million more than in 2016, and the highest proportion of Americans exercising their right to vote since 1900. At the time of publication, Biden has received over 79.3 million votes, while Trump has gotten nearly 73.5 million. While a motivated Democratic Party expected to see a huge surge in votes, what was perhaps most surprising was the additional 10.1 million people who voted for Trump this year than in 2016. After Trump completely mishandled a national pandemic, spewed daily nonsense on Twitter, and literally caged children, who exactly were these 10 million new voters choosing Trump to continue leading the country?
Unfortunately, we have a lot of good candidates who their message gets overshadowed by millions of dollars of the Republican message that just literally doesnt even use their own words, Rep. Tony Cardenas of California, who is running to lead the DCCC, told NPR. And those are the kinds of tactics that were having to combat.
Voting Methods In The 2020 Presidential Election
The 2020 election brought a huge change in howAmericans cast their ballots. As some states looked to adapt to challenges in administering elections amid the COVID-19 pandemic, large numbers of voters were offered expanded access to absentee and vote-by-mail options in the 2020 election. As a result, a record number of voters said they cast their ballots this way . And smaller shares of voters said they either voted in person on Election Day or in person before Election Day .
A majority of absentee voters said they had previously voted this way before the 2020 election . Still, a sizable share said the November election was the first time they had cast an absentee or mail ballot.
Sizable shares of voters across racial and ethnic subgroups cast absentee or mail-in ballots in the 2020 election though there are some differences in voting methods when comparing across groups. White voters were most likely to say they voted in person on Election Day . Comparably smaller shares of Black and Hispanic voters said the same.
Black voters were more likely than White or Hispanic voters to say they cast their ballot in person before Election Day .
Voters ages 65 and older stand out in their voting behavior: 55% say they voted absentee or by mail in the 2020 election 13 percentage points higher than the share of adults under 65 who cast a ballot by mail.
Recommended Reading: How Can I Message Donald Trump
Attempt To Seize Voting Machines In Michigan
Starting in November , the Trump campaign attempted to get local law enforcement agencies to seize voting machines for the Trump operation to review. In one Michigan county, Trump advisors including Rudy Giuliani phoned the county prosecutor on or about November 20, . They asked him to obtain the county’s voting machines and turn them over to the Trump team. He refused, but a judge later ordered the machines to be made available to Trump representatives. They later produced a “forensic report” claiming evidence of fraud election experts have said the conclusion was false and the report “critically flawed”.
Chart: How Us Latinos Voted In The 2020 Presidential Election
Theres a lot more to see when you look beyond Florida.
Talk about the Latino vote surged after incumbent President Donald Trump picked up Floridas 29 electoral votes early on Tuesday evening. Indeed, the Cuban-American vote in Florida was decisive, breaking 56-41 for the Republican incumbent compared to an even 49-49 split among non-Cuban voters. But the Latino vote in Florida is a singular one.
Nationwide, Democrat Joe Biden got 66 percent support in national exit polls, on par with Hillary Clintons 65 percent in 2016. It was nevertheless a mixed bag: he performed 6 points better in California, for example, but 4 points worse in Nevada, where Latino men voted for Trump in particularly high numbers.
In the chart below, we look at how Latinos voted overall for Trump and Biden, how Latino support changed for the Democratic and Republican candidates from the last general elections, and a breakdown of the vote by gender in five states with substantial Latino voting blocs.
Don’t Miss: What Good Things Has Trump Done
Effects Of The 2020 Census
The election has been the early subject of attention by analysts and commentators, as it will be the first U.S. presidential election to occur after the reapportionment of votes in the United States Electoral College, which will follow the 2020 United States census. This realignment of electoral college votes will remain consistent through the 2028 election. Reapportionment will be conducted again after the 2030 United States census.
The House of Representatives will have redistributed the seats among the 50 states based on the results of the 2020 census, and the states will conduct a redistricting cycle in 2021 and 2022, where congressional and state legislative districts will be redrawn. In most states, the governor and the state legislature conduct the redistricting . The party that wins a presidential election often experiences a coattail effect, which helps other candidates of that party win elections. In 2020, although its nominee Joe Biden won the presidential election, the Democratic Party did not flip any state legislature chambers and in fact lost both New Hampshire legislative chambers and the Montana governorship. This allowed the Republican Party to have redistricting control of seats in New Hampshire, which had the potential to lead to gerrymandering that will stay in effect until the 2030 census, similar to the REDMAP project after the 2010 census.
