Despite Donald Trump’s efforts to reprise Richard Nixon’s 1968 law-and-order message, Joe Biden defeated him by rolling up big margins in the suburbs of cities like Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta. It’s true that Biden overwhelmingly carried those cities, but analyses by Harry Enten of CNN and Nate Cohn at the New York Times show that his net gain of urban votes was lower than Hillary Clinton’s in 2016. The suburbs elected Biden. But before Democrats celebrate, there are areas of concern for them as well as Republicans when it comes to the lawns and leafy streets surrounding American cities.
First, despite the Trump campaign’s hapless effort to proclaim that scary big city machines stole the election, a dive into urban returns shows why that can’t possibly be so. In Georgia, black turnout increased relative to 2016, but less so than other groups, and the black share of the electorate fell from 27.6 percent to 27.0 percent. This was much lower than the 30 percent who showed up for Obama’s 2012 campaign. Precinct-level data show Biden improved on Hillary Clinton’s performance by 7 percent in high-income areas, by 6 percent where college-graduates are a majority, and by 5 percent in Obama-Trump polling places. Biden actually did worse than Clinton in only two kinds of precincts: ones that are at least 80 percent black or majority Latino.
This pattern held true in the Northern cities, too. In Detroit, Biden actually got 1,000 fewer votes than Clinton, while Trump added five thousand. Only in Milwaukee did the Democrats walk away with a bigger net-vote advantage than in 2016, but it was only an improvement of 3,000 and Trump actually saw the higher percentage improvement.
The suburbs were where Democrats cleaned up and won important states. The 80,000-vote net gain Biden pulled out of the Philly burbs easily eclipsed Trump’s 45,000 margin of victory in Pennsylvania in 2016. In the Detroit suburbs and non-urban parts of Wayne County (where Detroit is located), Biden netted 120,000 more votes than Clinton, which dwarfed Trump’s 10,000 statewide victory in 2016. In the suburban parts of Milwaukee and surrounding counties, Biden’s vote total was 25 percent above Hillary’s while Trump’s only added 12 percent to his 2016 performance. That alone was sufficient to erase Trump’s previous 23,000-vote statewide margin of victory. And, as Nate Cohn’s notes, in Georgia “Mr. Biden ran well ahead of Hillary Clinton in well-educated, wealthy and increasingly diverse precincts around Atlanta, while making relatively few gains elsewhere in the state.”
The good news for the Democrats is that these numbers were good enough to help Biden win 306 electoral votes and the election, while defending Gary Peters’s U.S. Senate seat in Michigan and forcing the two Senate contests in Georgia into January runoffs. The bad news is that suburban ticket splitting had real consequences for Democrats. They were unable to pick up a U.S. House seat in the Philly suburbs they were targeting, and a plurality of voters supported Georgia’s Republican Senate candidates even as Trump lost the state. Suburban voters turned on Trump but unlike 2018 they warmed up to Republicans down ballot. Freshman Democrats from the Des Moines and Oklahoma City suburbs lost their first reelection bid. Races in the New Jersey and Los Angeles suburbs are too close to call.
This gives hope to the GOP because their suburban troubles may dissipate without Trump on the ballot. It won’t take much Democratic slippage to flip the House in 2022. Yet, if their suburban slide continues, they’ll be even more reliant on pulling Trump-like numbers out of rural areas and, as my previous examination of the Pennsylvania results indicated, it’s not at all clear they can accomplish this. Their performance in the 2018 gubernatorial election, in which incumbent Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf was reelected, suggested that Trump’s rural margins are particular to him, and not the Republican Party as a whole. Trump leading a 2024 ticket would be a mixed blessing for Republicans.
The Democrats’ main problem is that that their urban/suburban coalition is fundamentally unstable. Typically, suburbanites choose to live outside of cities for carefully considered reasons—lower crime, better education–and they resist spending their tax dollars on urban priorities. Historically, the Republicans have had tremendous success in exploiting this wedge, and it’s not hard to foresee them making inroads in the suburbs again using messaging that’s less blunderbuss than Trump’s cries that low-income housing projects will be built next door and your life is in danger. What’s driving the cities and suburbs together is growing demographic and cultural similarities, but common economic interests are lacking.
The Republicans’ main problem, and perhaps the country’s main problem, is that these demographic and cultural changes are making the GOP reliant on rolling up huge margins in rural, white communities. The way Trump has done this is to get whites to vote with racial consciousness. This has been a boon to racists and white nationalists who have seen their once marginal views mainstreamed in the Trump Era. If the Republicans can’t reverse their suburban losses, they’ll feel compelled to continue along Trump’s well-trodden path in search of ever-greater margins with white voters–and their numbers are declining.
In July 2013, I predicted the Republicans would feel pressure to take this approach:
It appears that most Republicans are dropping the idea that they need to do better with Latinos and adopting the idea that they need to do even better with white voters…The most obvious way is to pursue an us vs. them approach that alternatively praises whites as the true, patriotic Americans, and that demonizes non-whites as a drain on the nation’s resources. This is basically the exact strategy pursued by McCain and especially Romney. It’s what Palin was all about, and it’s what that 47% speech was all about…
The problem is that these attacks have already been made, and they failed in even near-optimal circumstances. Accusing the Democrats of socialism, which is a race-neutral way of accusing the party of being beholden to the racial underclasses, has been proven insufficient. The only hope for a racial-polarization strategy is to get the races to segregate their votes much more thoroughly, and that requires that more and more whites come to conclude that the Democratic Party is the party for blacks, Asians, and Latinos.
That is, indeed, how the party is perceived in the Deep South, but it would be criminal to expand those racial attitudes to the country at large.
The Republicans are coalescing around a strategy that will, by necessity, be more overtly racist than anything we’ve seen since segregation was outlawed.
I revisited these ideas in November 2016 in my post-election autopsy, Avoiding the Southification of the North, in which I warned “if the Democrats let this become a racial fight between their multicultural base and the white rural counties of the North, that’s a recipe for the political Southification of the entire country. That’s what the GOP has been doing in a gradual way for 36 years, and it’s the basis for Trump’s coalition and for his reelection in 2020.”
Trump came up short in 2020, barely, because a lot of formerly Republican suburbanites, in the North and also in Sun Belt, were not comfortable with his overtly racist politics or his incompetance. They chose Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for a breath of normalcy, but these GOP suburbanites were less dependable in other races and should not be seen as reliable Democrats in future elections.
If the Democrats want to create a stable majority, they’ll have to become less reliant on the affluent professionals that ring our cities, and that means winning back some white working class voters. As a moderate, older, Irish Catholic politician Biden was the Democratic nominee best able to pick up some of these votes and he did that a little bit here and there such as northeastern Pennsylvania. But in many rural counties his numbers were worse than Hillary’s. With Trump doing better with Latinos and black men, Biden needed every professional suburbanite vote he could get. Luckily for him, he got them.
If the Republicans want to avoid being a white nationalist party, they have to find a way to win those affluent professionals back and keep making gains with urban voters. Susan Collins was the only Republican Senate candidate to run well ahead of Trump, putting together a broader coalition that was a little less dependent on working-class white men especially in rural areas. The problem for the other 49 GOP senators is that their base is essentially Trump’s base—white, narrow, and not growing.
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I’ve heard more and more people say that Biden simply didn’t engage with hispanic populations until very late in campaign eveywhere.
Add to that Dems doing so little in person campaigning, you see why the voter registration numbers were a blowout in favor of the GOP.
You say Trump came up short barely. But we cant even agree on that. There are good arguments the election wasn’t particularly close.
93,000 votes over 3 states and it’s four more years of MAGA.
We were talking about 77,000 votes over 4 states three years ago.
Considering the extra 20 million votes, the margins in 2020 were closer relative to 2016.
Or, IMHO, had Trump taken COVID seriously, actually closed borders on January 31st, worn a mask and called for social distancing in February, the COVID case count would have been orders of magnitude better than they are, and he would have cruised to a 300+ EC re-election. Almost guaranteed.
Trump did take COVID seriously; his approach was to make mitigation a partisan issue. That is a terrible strategy for governance, but there is some cunning there. By absolving responsibility (he even said this!) for COVID, he couldn’t be blamed for failure. And looking at case counts in Europe, some degree of failure was inevitable.
To be fair, Biden may have reasonably assumed that Latinos would be more put off by Trump’s open racism, than by the vague feeling that Biden just didn’t kiss their asses enough. Families torn asunder, kids in cages, ICE running wild, demonizing Mexicans, a useless expensive wall? Yeah, that sucks and all, but Biden didn’t reach out and hold my hand quite enough.
Then again, watching minorities vote for a racist is no worse than watching women vote for a rapist.
I think that is unreasonable especially when you have a plethora of experienced people telling you it’s a mistake. Kids in cages very bad. ICE raiding people living their lives. Also very bad. Wall stupid. That’s not really a dispute but from talking to my extended family in the valley (of which only 2 of 40 voted for Trump) I’ll lay it out in some detail.
I’m not getting deported. I am not an immigrant. In my family’s case we were here when Texas became a state. A lot of the people in the Valley are Mexicans here for a few generarions and the new immigrants are mostly central American. We look similar but are otherwise fairly different.
What has effected things is the pandemic and the economic damage. You can’t afford to worry about racism if your livelihood is in the shitter. A racist that gets you work is better than a non-racist who doesn’t. Biden isn’t that, but because Trump got his message out early and often in a lot of these communities he got defined early especially to first time voters and so its no shock they went hard Trump if they believed lockdown v. economy was a legit issue.
There are other less savory things going on. I won’t deny things like misogyny, social consrvstism and latino racial/racist hierarchies had effects. But they mostly boil down to Biden not talking much about issues that are most salient to this group until after Trump had defined the terrain. Like it or not, even if you agree that Trump was a racist bully to immigrants that’s not the central animating issue for these people and frankly I don’t think that us necessarily incorrect.
I think a lot of takes on this election are going to be not representative of the longer term trends. We shall see, but having an election with such a uniquely polarizing figure as Trump, in the middle of a pandemic, as well as racial unrest, is not a situation that’s likely to repeat itself for the next few cycles. The broad point about the suburbs and rural areas is true, but beyond that most of what we see doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
There are enough facets about the 2020 election to make me very cautious about reading too much into post-mortems at the moment. Pandemic really messed up any sort of ground game. So, GOP as was characteristic, threw caution to the wind, whereas the Democratic Party really didn’t do much in the way of door knocking etc. til way late in the game. The latter seemed sensible under the circumstances, but may have cost some marginal down-ballot seats. 2022 and 2024 will be different scenarios just based on control of the pandemic alone. That said, I see Trump more as a symptom than as a cause. There were conditions within the GOP coalition that made a Trump-like character possible just a half decade ago. Those conditions have merely festered. It is not clear as of this writing that Trump will be just another forgotten has-been by 2022 or 2024. Nor is it clear that any of his would be successors have the charisma to keep a coalition of what had been the fringe together. I’ll look to belwethers like Virginia’s 2021 election before I read too much into what happened this year.
The point you make that seems so obvious, I’m not sure how anyone could disagree is that Democrats can’t overwhelmingly lose rural regions. We need a message that resonates with at least a significant minority. Enough voters so that it doesn’t become (or remain) socially outrageous to vote blue. Since 2000 or so, we’ve been in this red-blue bind, which is challenging because it’s more hardened on the red side than the blue and that places Democrats at a huge disadvantage.
It’s part of a deep-seated historical trend. We live in a nation deeply rooted in a horrendously racist past. We’re no longer as outwardly racist today, not even close. But the substructure remains in place. When people resist that racist substructure, our caste system that results in black folks being far more likely than whites to see cops as threatening. That dynamic forces Democrats to choose to fight for an important part of their own constituency or ignore them. Either choice undermines our coalition. It wasn’t catastrophic this time only because Trump was so historically and monumentally unsuited to the office and even then our margin was razor slim.
We need a message that cuts across racial lines. Right now, the only potential medicine I can fathom is your suggestion, Martin, to make antitrust enforcement and reform a central part of the Democratic message. Bringing life back to mainstreet USA is a message that would resonate far and wide without forcing triangulation or crossing our own base. In fact, it’s a message our base could support too. If Democrats are clearly for the little guy, that’s a potentially winning message from coast to coast.
Let me get this out, up front, so my comment isn’t taken for what it isn’t. I’m a straight white male, I’m to Sanders/Warrens extreme left, y’all are basically conservatives to my own personal philosophy, and I doubt there’s an issue where anyone who reads or posts here is to my left. Just to be clear. I say all this because the topic seems to be, “how the fuck do we stop bleeding white rural votes, “LatinX” votes, black votes, male votes, and really, votes in general. And the answer isn’t super simple, but there are some really easy jumping-of points I believe in. The “demographic changes” we’re waiting for don’t just magically happen because we say so. It has to be earned. So…
Stop calling everyone racist, even if they are. While it may be true that they are racist, there’s a lot more people who are less racist and think you are lumping them in with the racists, simply because they’re conservative and identify with the particular racist as an in-group member. Explain WHY something can be offensive, and move on.
Stop talking about banning guns, banning AR-15s, banning semi-automatic guns, etc. It. Is. Never. Going. To. Happen. Just stop talking about it. It’s just a symptom of our society/culture being mentally ill, and it’s almost purely economic. Rural white people have guns, enjoy guns as hobbies, rely on guns for personal protection in their homes, go hunting, etc, and are not out gunning people down at schools all day every day. Stop. Talking. About. Banning. Guns.
Stop using white as a soft racial slur, ESPECIALLY if you are white. Yes, I KNOW that it’s not being used that way, but when “popular” lefties on Twitter/Instagram/Facebook use white as a general descriptor for some out-of-touch soft-racist, IT IS GOING TO FUCKING ALIENTATE WHITE PEOPLE. No full stop, BECAUSE STOP USING IT AS A SOFT SLUR. No, I don’t personally feel profiled and I’m a straight white male, but I’M ON THE FUCKING TEAM ALREADY. If you want more rural white people, STOP USING WHITE AS A SOFT SLUR. STOP IT.
Stop with the “Defund Police” talking points. It sounds like you want to abolish the police, and for most people it sounds fucking batshit crazy. If you want to broach the subject, say something that makes it clear that police need more resources to help communities and not just more weaponry and immunity protections for when they clearly act negligently or worse when hurting someone. Anyone who is still using the word “defund” at this point is costing the Democratic Party votes. Count on it.
Stop lumping all minority group members into a “of course they’ll vote Democratic because Republicans are racist”. This is pretty much taking a group of people, generalizing them based on some external trait like skin color or heritage, and making statements about individuals based on that generalization. While I won’t say it’s racist, it is TAKING A GROUP OF PEOPLE FOR GRANTED. When you do that long enough, some of those people are going to tell you to fuck off because just because they’re Black/Latino/Rural/White/LGBQT/WHATEVER doesn’t mean they automatically will vote for a certain party. So, as I read in a comment yesterday and have seen elsewhere, stop taking this bloc of people for granted because Republicans are racist and they have to vote with us…and ADDRESS THEIR INDIVIDUAL ISSUES instead of them as a race/gender identity/heritage/group.
Economics. This is where if we stop doing the above, we can bring some back into the fold. But, the economic policies have to be VERY CLEAR so that we’re talking about helping EVERYONE. If whatever the policy/narrative is can be spun into how it’s only going to help “urban” people, then RURAL PEOPLE DON’T WANT IT. If the whole anti-trust issue really is a winner here, then make sure IT IS EXPLAINED AS AN INITIATIVE TO HELP RURAL PEOPLE and EVERYONE. Look, if you want to win back rural people, then ADDRESS THEM, and you can throw in at the end how it helps everyone too.
If you’re still reading my rant, thanks. Hopefully it is understood that while I’m not a rural conservative voter, I can at least see WHY they think we hate them, and why they don’t trust us. And why the people who are “supposed” to vote with us, may occasionally tell us to go fuck ourselves and do their own thing, even if WE see it as counterproductive.
You’re basically asking people to give up on issues that affect them (guns, racism, police violence).
It’s reminiscent of the exhortations to give up on gay rights after 2004.
And with regards to the economic side of things, there are a lot of moderate/swing democrats who demand that members of the left stop talking about socialism, or broad-scale social policies like the green new deal.
It’s a big tent, and people are going to have to make compromises.
No, I’m not asking anyone anything, because in the political world, I’m nobody. Nobody gives a shit about what I think.
I’m telling liberals here exactly what I think about particular issues.
We don’t have to “give up” on race. But calling the entire Republican Party racist means that every Republican voter hears us calling them racist. You think they fancy joining our team after that? Instead, explain why something is offensive, and move on.
We don’t have to give up on police violence, but saying we should “defund” the police sounds like we’re saying abolish to a lot of people, and that makes the Democratic Party policy sound fucking insane. Say something to the extent that police need MORE resources related to community outreach and de-escalation, and MORE resources from the community like social workers, etc.
And guns are a lost cause. There’s more guns than breathing people. And 99.9% of them have never and will never be used to hurt another person. If you want to try to do some sort of “increased background check”, then call it that. If you’re talking about banning semi-automatic guns, AR-15s, etc, then you’re never going to pick up those rural voters that we need to not continue losing everywhere outside the city and immediate suburbs. And, perhaps, start picking up state legislators which we need.
And yes, about economic issues. Let’s stop using phrases that basically mean SOCIALISM! to rural whites who’ve been trained to equate the two, and instead start talking about individual policies we need to do to make the economy better for rural whites AND everyone else.
I’m not saying abandon the base. But if the base really is the base, then we need to start talking to people who aren’t already voting with us. Which I believe is one of the Democratic Party’s issues – speaking with rural voters about why they should vote with us, rather than just naming various Capitalized Policies that they already equate with SOCIALISM!.
I should, I agree with this point:
Although, I would say it’s racist. Not in the virulent Trump form of it, of course.
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Both GA Senate elections were a positive sign, especially the special election (Loeffler’s seat). There were 7 other “democratic” candidates besides Warnock, which would have put him very close to the 50% needed to avoid a runoff. Not sure what “Democratic” voters were thinking there, but a one-on-one runoff. Loeffler still probably squeaks by (there were about 130k more “Republican” votes than “Democratic” in the 11/3 election), but maybe not. People just need to show up.
It’s remarkable to me how little the political media probes at the fact that Obama did better with white-working class voters than Hillary or Biden.
2008 41 percent
2012 36 percent
2016 28 percent
2020 (haven’t found the WWC figure but whites w/no college were 32 percent)
How did he get 41 percent?
Rolling back the Bush tax cuts was a clear message with the opponent built in. Fix the economy Bush destroyed. Nostalgia for the Clinton economy. The economy was terrible and it was easy to blame Bush for making it suck.
Democrats have to find a way to deliver simple, nonideological economic messages they can act on. “Save small business.” You literally cannot attack Democrats for being socialist for that — business is in the damn name. “Save jobs across America.” Or hopefully the 2020-only edition, “Save lives, save jobs” or “We don’t have to choose between lives and jobs.”
Sometimes the party seems to get caught up in arguing which ideology is correct when the message has to be higher-level than that. If you don’t want to run on “defund the police” try a “911 for everyone” or something broader. Clear, broad goals that don’t squash more specific ones (Biden can’t defund the police anyway). This component of the Dean-era 50 state strategy often seems to get lost.
Biden ran the race he wanted to in order to win, and given Trump is an existential threat I don’t blame him. But Trump won 88% of white voters who had the economy as their first issue and 83% of all voters who had the economy as their first issue. While I question that as a first issue in this cycle it’s a valid concern and if Trump gets remembered as an economic genius or something we are fucked.
You can’t make this calculus without considering Trump.
Trump is a distorting factor that will be hard to replicate in future elections (unless he runs again in 2024).
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The Democrats always have difficulty holding together their coalition. This is one of our disadvantages. Republicans can always use race to unify. Another big disadvantage is that Democrats want an active government, a much heavier lift than the Republican “The government is the problem, low taxes” approach. Solving problems is hard and messy and politically damaging. Doing nothing but obstruct is easy and politically profitable.
It is, and always will be, harder to be a Democrat than to be a Republican. We have to accept all that and work harder. But I think 2016 and 2020 have produced a new disadvantage. We won in 2020 with an unprecedented turnout that will be difficult to replicate. If the Republicans can turn out 72 million voters for Trump, an incompetent and a fraud, what can they turn out for a smarter wannabe autocrat? I am very afraid Republicans can replicate those results because Republicans will lie with impunity and Democrats are tethered to a shared reality, a common understanding of what is truth.
Where did the Republicans find 72 million voters? How did they convince them to vote for Trump? I do not really know because I was not targeted by a firehose of disinformation through my social media feed. Cambridge Analytics would identify me as a certain Biden voter and ignore me. What did Latinos in Miami Dade think the election was about? What lies could be fed to shaky Biden voters to get them to stay home? What misinformation could make a certain Trump voter actually register and vote? Parscale called his system a “deathstar” and it appears to me that he is right. The Russian disinformation campaign without the Russians and improved information technology?
Is that how the Republicans did it? What can Democrats do about it?