US elections 2020

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      US voter demographics: election 2020 ended up looking a lot like 2016

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      More than 150 million American voters turned out for Tuesday’s election, marking the highest turnout in over a century. But as the country – and the world – await a complete result, what do we know about who voted for each of the candidates?
      While knowledge at this stage is limited – polling data can be unreliable and national exit polls do not take into account geographic differences within demographics – experts say that some broader trends among those who voted for Joe Biden and Donald Trump are apparent.
      So far, the picture appears to be strikingly similar to what it was in 2016, said the political science professor Charles H Stewart, founding director of MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab.“There were slight changes, but the changes in the electorate, at least the ones who showed up to vote on election day, are much less dramatic than we were being led to believe by the pre-election polls,” Stewart said.
      Pollsters had predicted this election would see the widest gender gap since women won the vote 100 years ago, but that does not appear to have transpired.
      Stewart noticed a slight widening of the gender gap – with women voting 56-43 for Biden, while the two candidates were almost tied among men.
      But one of the biggest divides that did come to pass was between older voters and those aged under 30, who became even “less enamoured of President Trump than before”.
      “The other age groups, 30-44, 45-64, 65 and over, it’s a pretty close divide between Biden and Trump. So it’s really young people who are overwhelmingly anti-Trump and that’s really noticeable.”
      He said Trump also lost some appeal among low-income voters, who were more attracted to Biden, but the president gained among voters with family incomes over $100,000 a year.
      “That right now appears to be the biggest demographic shift I’m seeing. And you can tie that to [Trump’s] tax cuts [for the wealthy] and lower regulations.”
      He added: “For as much as we talk about the culture wars and all of those sorts of things, it looks like the big thing was good old-fashioned pocketbook economics.”
      While evidence is lacking in exactly who voted, he said the increase in turnout probably came from young people and the Latino community, who he said “historically have been significantly underrepresented in the electorate.”
      Tens of millions of dollars were spent by Democratic and Republican campaign groups over the past couple of years to register voters and help increase turnout, especially among Latino communities. Grassroots Latino activism in states such as Arizona and Georgia, which are historically Republican, appear to have boosted Biden significantly.
      Contrary to what some polls predicted, Stewart said, exit polls do not show a “dramatic exodus from Trump” among older people. While in 2016, they showed 52% of voters aged 65 and older voted for Trump, in 2020 he said that figure was 51%.
      In terms of race breakdowns, Louis DeSipio, political science professor at the University of California, Irvine, said nationally Trump was estimated to have won about 57% of white votes – with huge state-to-state variations linked to factors such as education and age – and that African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans voted strongly for Biden.
      The most dramatic shift, he said, was probably in south Florida, where Trump is understood to have gained support among Cuban Americans and Venezuelan Americans who he said were “moving back into the Republican camp”.
      He added: “They had been steadily moving towards the Democrats really since 1996 or so, so that’s an interesting story and will need some attention.”
      An area where he believes Trump did not do so well among white voters is Arizona, where the Associated Press (AP) has called a Biden win.
      But he said Trump continued to have support among evangelical Christians and he was interested to see how Trump did among members of the military and veterans, when data emerges.
      Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (Circle) at Tufts University, said the more education young people had, the stronger preference they had for Biden.
      Using data from AP VoteCast, based on interviews with more than 110,000 likely voters, she said: “If they were 18-29 but were college graduates or post graduate studies, they were preferring Biden by more than two to one.”
      “Really in the youth electorate, the only groups that we know that preferred Donald Trump nationally is really white male.”
      Among young voters, the data showed that the group that preferred Trump most were either rural or lived in small towns and had not been to college, with 46% supporting Biden, versus 51% Trump. But, Kawashima-Ginsberg said, “every other group at least had an edge towards Joe Biden. Even the small-town rural college graduates preferred Biden by eight points, 52% to 44%.”
      The other biggest difference among youth voters, she said, was among white people and people of colour. Among white youth, she said there was a 19-point split by gender.
      Among first-time voters specifically, she said those aged up to 29 preferred Biden, with 53% supporting the Democrat, compared with 43% for Trump. But first-time voters aged 30-44 overwhelmingly supported Trump, who got 67% of their vote.
      But, she said, attempts to define demographic groups among voters can be vulnerable to generalisations and historical assumptions – particularly for people of colour.
      “We use political science models that are quite old to try to figure out who the voters are. But with diverse populations that are really rich in both heritages and what their belief systems are, it’s really hard to use well as a predictive model, and exit polls are always subject to that.” More

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      'Republicans built the base': how Joe Biden lost Florida's Latino voters

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      [embedded content]
      As the coronavirus raged across Florida this summer, and the Democratic party was concentrating on locking in the support of the state’s hordes of senior voters, Donald Trump’s campaign was focused in an entirely different direction.
      In the streets of Miami’s Little Havana and Doral neighborhoods, the Puerto Rican communities of Orlando and Kissimmee, and Cuban-American areas of Tampa, activists from Latinos for Trump and other Republican groups were knocking on doors and talking to families and business owners. They delivered a simple message: “Joe Biden is a radical socialist. Donald Trump is your friend.”
      And for some of Miami’s Cubans and Venezuelans in particular, familiar with communism and authoritarian rule in their homelands, despite “red baiting” not being a new tactic, it was “kryptonite”, Trump activists claimed.
      Whatever their motivations, on Tuesday, across the state but mostly in Miami-Dade county, home to 2 million Latinos, voters turned out in droves to hand the president victory by a margin significantly larger than his 2016 success. More

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      'What a spectacle!': US adversaries revel in post-election chaos

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      Rivals and enemies of the United States have come together to revel in the messiest US election in a generation, mocking the delay in vote processing and Donald Trump’s claims of electoral fraud in barely veiled criticisms of Washington’s political activism abroad.“What a spectacle!” crowed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “One says this is the most fraudulent election in US history. Who says that? The president who is currently in office.”With a large dose of schadenfreude, Washington’s fiercest critics declared deep concern about the US elections and the state of the country’s democracy.Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman on Thursday panned the “obvious shortcomings of the American electoral system”, calling the framework “archaic”.“It’s a show, you can’t call it anything but that,” Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of Russia’s Duma, said earlier this week. “They say it should be seen as a standard for democracy. I don’t think it’s the standard.”In China, state media savaged the delayed results, with one daily writing that the process looked a “bit like a developing country”.Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, could not resist baiting the US over what he called its “surprising electoral process”, and seemed so amused that at one point he broke into song with a rendition of the theme tune to the Miss Venezuela beauty pageant: “On a night as beautiful as this, either of them could win,” he crooned, before adding with a chuckle: “The United States. I don’t stick my nose in.” In two recent local elections, he noted, all the votes had been counted by 11pm.As a parliamentary campaign kicked off in Venezuela this week, Maduro claimed there were important lessons the US could learn from its elections rather than lecturing the world about democracy. Venezuela was a showcase of “civilised and peaceful” voting using “proven and transparent technology” and biometric voting machines that provided same day results, he said.Trump has spent the last two years unsuccessfully trying to topple the Venezuelan president and in a Wednesday night broadcast Maduro delighted in the electoral confusion gripping his northern neighbour.“The state department puts out statements that say: ‘In this country we don’t recognise the election. In that country we don’t like the election. In the other country we don’t like this or that,’” Maduro said, adding that the US would be better off focusing on its own problems.As Trump demanded states stop counting mail-in ballots, the US embassy in Abidjan issued a poorly timed statement urging Côte d’Ivoire’s leaders to “show commitment to the democratic process and the rule of law”. “We also need a Côte d’Ivoire statement on US elections,” quipped one BBC editor on Twitter.For many, it was a chance to give the US a taste of its own medicine. “Neither free nor fair,” wrote Margarita Simonyan, the head of Russian state-backed RT, parroting the language of a UN or Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) statement.And the OSCE itself did weigh in, with mission leader Michael Georg Link attacking Trump for making “baseless allegations of systematic deficiencies” and “[harming] public trust in democratic institutions”.The irony was not lost on many at home. A cartoon by the Russian critic Sergei Elkin made the rounds on Thursday, featuring an elderly babushka lugging buckets of water past a man in a rundown village somewhere in Russia. “They still haven’t finished counting in Pennsylvania and in Michigan,” the man says. A stray dog walks along an unpaved street behind him. More

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      US Senate and House election results: Politics Weekly Extra podcast

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      As nail-biting as the US presidential election has been, Jonathan Freedland and Lauren Gambino have been following the battle for control of Congress. They discuss the latest in both races.

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      The Democrats were hoping for the “blue wave” to crash over the Senate, but that didn’t happen. As it stands, Biden is edging ever closer to the White House but we still don’t know for sure. Democrats are still in control of the lower chamber, and the Republicans still have the upper chamber. There wasn’t a wave, but there were some interesting tidal changes over the last few days and to navigate us through some of these, Jonathan Freedland is joined by senior political reporter for Guardian US Lauren Gambino. Let us know what you think of the podcast. Send your feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      in Elections

      ‘Stop the vote’ and ‘count the votes’, say protesting Trump supporters – video

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      Count the votes or stop the count? Two conflicting Republican protests have emerged across the US, with some Trump voters demanding that election officials stop counting ballots in states such as Pennsylvania, where Trump holds a narrow lead, and previously Michigan, where Biden was out in front, but keep counting them in Arizona, where the current president is behind. So far, Trump has helped fuel both sides of the protests, filing lawsuits in some states to stop the vote count, and lawsuits in others that cast doubt on whether all votes have been properly counted
      US election live – follow all the latest updates
      Trump v Biden – full results so far More

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      The Guardian view on Trump’s tactics: calculated brazenness | Editorial

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      Rarely have a few thousand votes in a handful of places mattered so much to so many. America – and the world – spent much of Thursday hanging once again on every twist of the long vote-counting battle between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the remaining battlegrounds. When it finally comes, the verdict will nevertheless be decisive. One of these two utterly different political leaders will become the United States president until 2025. History will be shaped by both the result and the aftermath.
      This election has highlighted deep weaknesses in the American democratic system, all of which are amplified by Mr Trump’s determination to test things to destruction in real time. Fortunately, the armed intimidation of voters and election officials by militias supporting Mr Trump did not happen on any scale. But other outrages did. The most egregious of these remains the scandal of systemic voter suppression by Republicans against minority ethnic voters across most of the US. This scandal has now been joined by Mr Trump’s brazen readiness to use his lawyers, often on the basis of lies, to try to stop the counting of votes.
      Underlying this is the electoral college system itself, which may yet deny the presidency – for what would be the third time in 20 years – to the candidate for whom most Americans voted. This anachronism may have been what America’s 18th-century white founders intended, when they tried to empower the states against the popular majority. But in an era of equal rights, it is an extraordinary hangover. The electoral college is not a check or a balance. It is an abuse that is ripe for the scrapheap.
      In most respects, the 2020 US election has proved less of a watershed. In the American system, voting at state level is often almost as important as the presidential contest. State elections, which choose members of the US Congress as well as of state legislatures, shape much of what a president can do at home. They provide a homeland context for the president’s actions on the world stage too. They define how far the presidential writ will run. Here the verdict this week was almost the opposite of decisive. In some ways it seems like a vote in favour of gridlock.
      Tuesday confirmed America is a country divided down the middle. These divides are at their most glaring in the Trump-Biden battle. This week, though, voters clearly drew back from handing all the power to one side of the divide. Republicans seem likely to keep control of the Senate, despite some losses. Similarly, Democrats survived setbacks to keep their grip in the House of Representatives. Many on both sides will interpret this as a mandate to fight every issue every inch of the way, with no concessions. A minority may see it as an ultimatum from the voters for the two sides to compromise and cut deals. This seems deeply unlikely.
      The calculated shamelessness of Mr Trump’s disregard for facts and propriety in his response to the election suggests the coming days and weeks will also be vicious, bitter and explosive. Even if Mr Biden eventually enters the White House as president in January, he will be immediately confronted with entrenched opposition. There is a newly strengthened conservative majority on the supreme court. Now there will also be a Senate that will claim a mandate to obstruct. Meanwhile, after a strong performance at state level, this week’s results ensure that Republicans will have the upper hand in the always dirty business of redrawing the states’ electoral maps for the coming decade. More

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      Trump should have lost in a landslide. The fact that he didn’t speaks volumes | Nathan Robinson

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      In the lead-up to the 2020 election, Democrats were extremely confident in Joe Biden’s prospects. With his comfortable lead in national polls, there was talk of a Biden landslide, a giant “blue wave” that could turn Texas blue. Even though the polls had been off in the 2016 election, media commentators reassured audiences that Biden’s lead was different – far stronger and more stable – than Hillary Clinton’s had been.
      As of this writing, it does look as if Biden will squeak his way into the White House. But only just. And no “blue wave” materialized. Far from turning Texas blue, Biden appears to have severely underperformed relative to Hillary Clinton in some heavily Hispanic areas. Democrats have not retaken the US Senate and failed to knock out a single Republican in the House of Representatives. Millions more people voted for Trump than in 2016, and it became disturbingly clear that even if Trump himself is booted from office, “Trumpism” is alive and well.
      There was no need for it to be this way. Donald Trump has badly mishandled the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. The economy is in recession. The Republican war on the Affordable Care Act seems more heartless than ever as millions lose their insurance.
      Trump did not run a good campaign. He botched the first debate. He squandered his campaign cash. His messaging against Joe Biden was unfocused and often incoherent, simultaneously trying to paint him as a radical Antifa-sympathizing socialist and a corrupt corporate establishment figure. At a time when the economy was voters’ No 1 issue, Trump was focused on the emails of Biden’s ne’er-do-well son, Hunter. A campaign that presented voters with a clear and compelling alternative should have easily defeated Trump.
      But Biden didn’t offer a clear and compelling alternative. He was a weak candidate from the start, so much so that even some of his allies were worried what would happen if he won the primary. Biden, like Hillary Clinton before him, represented the corporate wing of the Democratic party; he loudly defended the private health insurance industry and the fracking industry from attacks by the left. He ran away from proposals favored by the Democratic base like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. He didn’t show much interest in courting core constituencies like Latino voters (reportedly, the Biden campaign did not consider them part of its “path to victory”, which helps explain the losses in Texas and Florida). Biden didn’t even put much energy into the campaign; at crucial moments when Trump’s team were knocking on a million doors a week, Biden’s was reportedly knocking on zero. His ground game in important swing states like Michigan was “invisible”.
      To many on the left, then, Biden’s lackluster performance is no surprise. Yes, Trump could have been resoundingly defeated. But 2016 proved once and for all that the Democratic establishment simply doesn’t have a message that can effectively counter Trump. The party leadership ignored the lessons that should have been learned four years ago. Instead, Democratic strategy is the very definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
      We know how Democrats can win again. Thomas Frank, in his vital book, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, explains that Democrats need to get back to being a party that offers something meaningful to working people. We know that voting Republican is no indication that voters actually want the agenda the Republican party will pursue in office. Fox News polling indicates voters want universal healthcare, abortion rights and a pathway to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants. Florida voters, even as they selected Donald Trump, also opted to increase the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour. The Democrats do not need to propose insipid half-measures when the data indicates that the public are fully on board with a progressive agenda.
      This is why many of us on the left were pushing so hard for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. We believed that he had a winning formula for combating Trumpism, that the conventional wisdom that centrism is “pragmatic” was totally upside down. Bernie knew how to speak to Trump’s own voters, he could go to a Fox town hall and have the attendees cheering for single-payer healthcare, or win over a crowd at Liberty University. We believed that in a general election, he would be able to move the kinds of discontented anti-establishment voters who put Trump in office, and would have dominated in the rust belt states where Biden is just barely squeaking by.
      That theory is untested; we never got a chance to compare what a left candidate could do against Trump with what Clinton and Biden managed. But the disappointing Democratic performances in both 2016 and 2020 should tell us that something is deeply, troublingly wrong with the party. A reality TV clown who supports policies most Americans hate (eg tax cuts for the rich) should not be coming anywhere near winning a presidential election. Yet he is. Why?
      Blaming the voters simply will not do. This is a failure of leadership. Those responsible for it need to be held accountable. Unfortunately, it looks like some in the party will learn the wrong lessons. Even though dozens of democratic socialists won their elections this year while centrists struggled, there is a contingent among Democrats whose solution to any problem is the same: become more like Republicans.
      Already, there is talk that they need to embrace tax cuts and run away from the “socialism” label. In other words, double down on what they were already doing. Those who think that is the lesson may simply be “unteachable” – a word George Orwell used to describe the old British cavalry generals who still insisted on using horses long after the invention of automatic weapons, and could not be persuaded that a horse is not useful against a machine gun. Today’s Democratic leaders are like those generals. If 2016 couldn’t persuade them that they were wrong, this won’t either. Nothing ever will.
      It is time for a whole new approach, not a double dose of the existing one. We need to take the right lessons from this election, the ones that didn’t take in 2016. First, don’t trust polls, and don’t get complacent or assume the tides of history will carry you to victory. Second, Trumpism will not “self-destruct”: you can’t simply run against Trump, you need a powerful alternative vision that actually gives people what they say they want and fights for something worth believing in.
      Nathan Robinson is the editor of Current Affairs and a Guardian US columnist. His latest book is American Monstrosity: Donald Trump—How We Got Him and How We Stop Him More