It’s no mystery: Millions of people voted specifically against Trump
by Timothy P. Carney, Senior Columnist | | December 03, 2020 01:26 PM
Everyone’s got their puzzles to solve these days. The key to unlock these mysteries is a simple one: President Trump is extremely disliked, and millions of voters were voting primarily against him.
Trump and his die-hard supporters cannot fathom how Republican congressional candidates could have outperformed the president at the polls.
Set aside the preposterous explanations offered by Trumpworld here, including a massive voter fraud conspiracy involving Republican officials, South American dictators, and breakable algorithms. Set aside for now the revealing tone of Trump’s tweet. (A leader might suffer while those he led bear the rewards?! Unthinkable!)
The fact is ticket-splitting is perfectly normal behavior. It used to be much more normal. People often vote for their preferred candidate despite, or regardless of, party. Why millions would ticket-split in a very particular way is supposedly the mystery.
Thomas Edsall at the New York Times puzzles over his own mystery. “Honestly, This Was a Weird Election,” is his headline, with his subheading puzzling that “Biden soared among crucial suburban voters. Democrats? Not so much.”
Edsall explains, “In battleground congressional and statehouse districts, the same pattern appeared over and over again this year. At the top of the ticket, Joe Biden won, often handily. Further down the ticket, in contests for seats in the House and state legislatures, Democratic candidates repeatedly lost.”
This was odd because so many analysts thought the suburbs were on a straight-line march into the Democratic camp. Upper-middle-class, college-educated white suburbanites have been trending Democratic for decades. Trump accelerated that in 2016. In 2018, Democrats got most of their House pickups in exactly these wealthy, educated, white suburban districts.
What Edsall finds “weird” is that those same congressional districts tended to vote Republican this time around.
What is weird to Edsall and impossible to Trump has the same explanation (and Edsall, unlike Trump, understands it): Millions of voters find Trump uniquely awful, and they vote explicitly against him and not for a particular party or candidate.
The corollary to this story is that in 2016, Trump drew perhaps the only politician in the world as off-putting as he himself was: Hillary Clinton.
Consider this little detail told by exit polls: In both 2016 and 2020, about 82 million voters had a negative opinion of Trump. In 2016, 12 million of those (15%) nevertheless voted for Trump, while this time around, only about 4 million (5%) of Trump disapprovers voted for him. That’s about 8 million people who stomached Trump when Clinton was the alternative but happily voted for a kind of normal Uncle Joe who possessed human decency and only average corruption.
After the 2018 election, I noted that while Trump picked up millions of detached, independent, and Democratic voters among the white working class (enough to deliver him a victory and have some coattails down-ballot), he did not make these working-class voters into Republicans. He made them into Trump voters.
That partially explained the 2018 outcomes: Trump wasn’t delivering working-class votes to Republicans running for Congress or governor or state legislature, but he was delivering upper-middle-class votes to Democrats running for those same offices.
I suspected at the time that Trump had fully made the upper-middle-class vote firmly Democratic. 2020 shows me that’s not true. The simplest explanation might be this: In 2018, many independents and white-collar Republicans voted Democratic for Congress and governor because it was the closest they could get to voting against Trump; in 2020, they were able to actually vote against Trump, and so that freed them up to vote Republican down-ballot.
Edsall makes the same argument: “In 2018, Democratic gains in congressional and legislative races were clearly the result of animosity to Trump that found expression in voting against Republicans not named Trump — because Trump was not on the ballot. With Trump on the ballot this year, however, these same voters discovered that they could voice their disapproval of him by voting against his re-election, while returning to their more conservative instincts by voting Republican in the rest of the races.”
There’s plenty of evidence that many Republican voters voted against Clinton in 2016 and then against Trump in 2020. The explanation for this is simple: Hillary was awful, and so is Trump.
Both Can Be True
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