My First Post-Election Reactions

Caffeine-fueled reactions

There was a point Tuesday night when a reader of this newsletter tweeted this:

Katie Loveland @KatieMLoveland

@MichaelRWear This is really different than your pre election predictions. Thoughts as to why?

It was a good laugh, and at that point of the night, my reaction was two-fold: 1) it’s really early in the night for this! :) 2) maybe I got this way wrong!

Here’s the main regret I have from my prediction post: I should have emphasized over and over the fact that results from critical states were likely to be delayed, due in large part, to choices made by Republican lawmakers. I had a resources section that spelled this out, but I should have been more explicit about it.

But now, on Friday, it looks like Biden won this thing. While Biden fell short of the 320 electoral votes I had predicted, Biden’s theory of the race has proven true. Biden ran to win this in the Rust Belt, and he did, winning MI, WI and PA.

In my pre-election prediction post, I gave you signs to look for to tell whether Biden was having a good night (obviously, if he didn’t hit these metrics, he would not be on his way to a blowout victory) and while exit polls are likely to adjust, Biden fell short on two of the four metrics I offered. Meanwhile, on the signs Trump was doing better than expected, all the boxes were checked: getting 43%+ among women, which he did; white evangelicals accounting for 26%+ of the electorate, which they did; high election day turnout, check; over 10% of the Black vote, check; over 30% of the Hispanic vote, check.

In other words, I feel pretty good about my sense about how things would fold this week.

Where else was I wrong? Well, at this point it looks like Biden did not perform as well among Catholics in some key states as I thought he would, but I anticipate exits updating as votes are counted in a state like Pennsylvania. Biden did win Catholics nationally by four points. I also thought, based in large part on polling, that Wisconsin would be an easier win for Biden. I expected Ohio to be a 3-4 point loss for Biden instead of an 8 point loss. Other than that, the final results are pretty close to what I had set out.

Perhaps my most confident prediction was this: Biden would win at least 20% of the white evangelical vote, and that if he did, he’d win. He did. He won. I’ll have much more to say about this in the coming days…

But if my prediction was not far off, my hopes were not met. While Biden has a relatively strong electoral college win and a significant lead in the popular vote, the results do fall short of a clear, irrefutable repudiation of Donald Trump. I do not think this election result itself will directly stoke major reform in the Republican Party. If Trump is to be repudiated, it will be by how Biden governs. And in an odd way, the results actually strengthen Biden’s case that his brand of politics is needed. He outperformed other Democrats across the country. If he has won easily, claims that anyone could have won, that Biden was merely carried by a progressive blue wave, would be much more rampant. Instead, considering the election results, Biden’s ability (which proved necessary) to win moderate voters, offers a mandate of its own. It’s a mandate to stop “performing” politics, and actually “do” politics.

What I want to do with the rest of the post is just set out some speculation about what we should learn from these results before I’ve been able to do a deep, deep dive in all of the available data. I’ll provide additional thoughts once I’ve been able to do that, including anything that might contradict what I offer below.

1. The election results prove that that Trump’s 2016 victory was not a fluke. “What Happened” was a great deal more than Russian interference and James Comey. Democrats must be surgical in acknowledging the sincere, rational reasons why voters supported Trump, and assessing what they can reasonably do to address those concerns.

2. Centrist House Democrats are upset at progressives for costing the party seats. They should be. But it would have been much worse if Biden wasn’t at the top of the ticket. The Democratic Party will no longer be able to rely on Trump to make up for a brand that is just as toxic in certain regions of the country, and this must be a leading issue of concern.

3. Trump’s gains among Black and Hispanic voters need to be attended to, but the focus on this is a mix of overly optimistic readings from Republicans and a kind of assumptive entitlement among some Democrats. We’re talking about Trump winning an extra four percent among these groups, according to current exit polling. Not good. Must be addressed. But let’s just slow down on acting like the GOP assembled the Rainbow coalition here.

4. Part of addressing Trump’s gain among Hispanics has to be contending with faith, particularly the fact that many Hispanic voters are more socially conservative than many of the Democrats running to represent them. Democrats can try to get away with simply trying to distract these voters from their disagreement by focusing on other issues and how awful the other side is, but that will only work with so many for so long.

5. For many voters, the primary way government has impacted their lives has been school closings and other COVID measures, which also happens to be one of the few issues on which the Opinion pages of papers like the NYT have been truly divided, and journalists like Alec Macgillis have raised social and racial justice concerns. I will be digging deeper into the data over the next week, but I would not be surprised if this influenced especially those in mid-size cities, who feel like their lives are being dictated by the needs of large cities. I’ll let you know what I find.

That’s all for now, but there’s much more to come. I’m working on at least one major essay, and have much to say about this fascinating election. Now that we have a winner, it’s time to take an even closer look at the data.

Talk soon,

Michael