How Biden won: The voters and demographic shifts key to unseating Trump

What the president-elect’s path to victory reveals about Democratic voters

Donald Trump received more than 71 million votes in the 2020 presidential election.

Joe Biden, the president-elect, set to be inaugurated in January as the nation’s 46th president, received more than 76 million.

But in total, nearly 80 million people voted against the incumbent, despite earning a record number of votes for a losing candidate. That figure does not include the more than 80 million eligible voters who didn’t vote in this year’s presidential election at all.

But by any measure, voter turnout is on pace to break a century-old record despite sweeping voter suppression efforts, including the president’s own attempts to undermine mail-in ballots and the integrity of the election for months before the polls had even opened.

The president-elect won with a relatively straight-forward campaign: a repudiation of the sitting president and his administration, and a chance to stop the crises he created.

Election day polling found that a majority of voters – roughly two-thirds – were motivated by their opinion of the president when they cast their ballot, according to the Associated Press VoteCast survey. With that energy, the president-elect became only the third candidate since World War II to unseat a president after a single term.

While it’s unclear whether any other Democratic candidate could have done the same against a volatile Republican like Trump, in the midst of an unprecedented coronavirus emergency, the president-elect’s path to victory reveals a changing electorate and the kind of shifts among Democratic voters that will be critical for the party to follow in the elections to come.

The blue wall

Trump stunned election analysts when he broke down the so-called "blue wall” of the midwest, sweeping rust belt swing states Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in 2016. Those victories were key to winning necessary electoral college votes to secure the presidency, despite Trump losing the popular vote by 3 million votes.

The state and the region endured transformative losses from coal, steel and auto manufacturing industry collapse, and Trump’s promise to revive the midwest mobilised thousands of voters. Despite his failures, the states provided him an enormous base of support.

It was clear then that Mr Biden’s path to a decisive win was through a restoration of that blue wall, or at least beginning to put the bricks back in place.

The results from the 2020 race show that the states are still very much battlegrounds, with Biden eking out wins by roughly 2.5 percentage points in Michigan and less than 1 per cent in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Trump saw even stronger support across 42 counties in Wisconsin than he received in 2016, and he received more than 365,000 more votes in Michigan in 2020 than he received four years ago. But gains in more rural and industrial areas in those states were outpaced by Biden’s support in midwest cities as well as populous suburban areas, part of a trend nationwide.

But the key to a rust belt victory was in Pennsylvania, which Trump won by nearly 50,000 votes in 2016, taking with it 20 crucial electoral college votes.

Biden climbed ahead of Barack Obama’s numbers in Erie County, which Trump flipped by 1.5 points in 2016. In 2020, Biden won it back by 1,500 votes. Across the state, Biden managed to chip away at Trump’s previous margins of victory, enough for the state to flip.

But the blue wall’s delicate restoration hangs in the balance – across those three key states, Biden flipped only seven counties, and Democrats will aim to build on those razor-thin margins in midterm elections to follow.

Young voters

A boom in civic engagement and political activity among young people over the last several years, from the Bernie Sanders campaign through the Sunrise Movement and efforts to combat the climate crisis, has swollen into a massively influential voting bloc.

Gen Z and millennial voters signed up in record numbers to work polls on election day and at early voting sites, and Turnout overall among younger people had spiked by 10 per cent from 2016; 50-52 per cent of voting-eligible young people within that age group cast ballots in the 2020 election, compared to 42-44 per cent in 2016, according to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.

The 2020 elections are likely to be the last in which the majority of voters are baby boomers. Millennial voters and similar-in-age groups will represent a larger share of the voting population by 2024.

But in 2020, nearly a quarter of the electorate is 65 and older, the highest since 1970, according to Pew Research. By next year, those and voters from older generations will account for fewer than 40 per cent of eligible voters, the group found.

More than five million young people between ages 18 and 29 cast their ballots in 2020 elections, including nearly 3 million young people in 14 key states that could effectively determine the fates of the presidency and US Senate.

Early voting was key – more than 7 million young people between ages 18 and 29 cast ballots during early voting periods up to a week before election day, according to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.

The centre found that young voters in Florida requested more than 815,000 ballots, whether by mail or in-person during early voting, within the first week of early voting. That turnout is nearly triple the number of ballots from a similar point in 2016 elections.

Within that same time, young voters in Texas cast more than 750,000 early votes. At a similar point in 2016, that figure was at just 106,000.

The ‘Latino vote’

While the president-elect received roughly twice as much Latino voter support than Trump, both candidates benefited from Latino voter turnout across the US, underscoring that Latino Americans are by no means a monolith, and a diverse Latino electorate reflects a broad ideological spectrum.

Latino community organisations and voting rights groups have aggressively organised and advocated for Latino voters over the last several years. Across the US, Latino organisers have held in-person canvassing events, rallies, phone-banking sessions and voter registration drives reaching millions of people from underrepresented communities.

CASA in Action’s voter empowerment campaign engaged 1.2 million so-called low-propensity voters in just Pennsylvania and Virginia. At least 300,000 new Latino voters were added to the voter rolls between 2016 and 2020 presidential elections in Pennsylvania alone. Biden won roughly 80 per cent of the Latino vote in the state, according to the UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Initiative (UCLA LPPI).

Arizona was the first stop on Biden’s home-stretch campaign outside of his rust belt homebase. The state flipped for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time since 1996; before that election, in which Bill Clinton won, the last Democrat to win the state was Harry Truman in 1948.

Latinos make up more than 23 per cent of eligible voters in the state that shares a border with Mexico, and a third of residents in heavily scrutinised Maricopa County – which holds roughly 60 per cent of Arizona’s total vote – are Latino.

In Maricopa, Biden won 75 per cent of the vote in precincts in areas with large Latino populations.

Though Trump ultimately won Texas, he did so by a much smaller margin than in 2016, giving election analysts pause to consider that Biden might have a stronger chance in the Lone Star State.

Biden received a higher share of Latino support in Texas than Clinton in 2016, UCLA LPPI found. In Dallas County, he received roughly 78 per cent in an area with roughly 300,000 Latino voters, and 75 per cent of the vote in El Paso County areas with roughly 345,000 voters.

Florida, meanwhile, was flooded with disinformation campaigns targeting Latino voters and a Trump campaign effort promoting red-scare visions linking Biden to communist regimes in a bid to attract support from Republican-leaning Cuban American voters.

Though she lost the state in 2016, Clinton carried Miami-Dade County by roughly 30 points that year. Biden’s margin was only 8 per cent more than Trump’s.

That surge in Republican votes ousted two Democratic incumbents in Congress, crippling the Democrats’ majority in the House.

Progressives

Minnesota likely had the highest voter turnout in the US in 2020, with roughly 3.2 million votes cast among the state’s 4.1 million eligible voters. Minneapolis voters broke the city’s 2016 record of 219,000 ballots cast with an estimated 237,000 in 2020.

Minneapolis voters overwhelmingly re-elected Congresswoman Ilhan Omar following her 2018 mid-term election to the US House of Representatives, among several elections that introduced the “squad” of progressive lawmakers to the Capitol. In Michigan, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib also handily defeated her Republican challenger.

And in Wisconsin, Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Mark Pocan and Congresswoman Gwen Moore led Biden-focused campaigns to oust Trump.

Their campaigns – in battleground states critical to Biden’s win – endured constant attacks from Trump and his surrogates, demonising the “radical” left and invoking racist attacks against the two only Muslim women in Congress.

Not only did Trump lose those states, the Democratic candidates cruised to their re-elections, and several other progressive Democrats won congressional races across the US. In Missouri, first-time candidate Cori Bush – a progressive Democrat endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for a seat in the House – was elected as the first Black woman to represent the state in Congress, in a safely Democratic-voting district that includes St Louis.

Democrats have cast blame against the party’s burgeoning progressive left in races where they didn’t even compete, with fears that the GOP’s red-scare tactics could sink vulnerable Democrats in 2020 and in mid-term elections to follow.

Meanwhile, progressive ballot measures – even in states Biden lost – saw overwhelming support in 2020. In Florida, for example, voters passed a $15 minimum wage, receiving 61 per cent of the vote, more than either candidate received in the presidential race.

Voting rights

Stacey Abrams has rightly been credited for bringing visibility to voting rights issues that have disenfranchised Black voters in the south, continuing the decades-long work of Black organisers and voting rights advocates.

Black voters and voters of colour, who make up the overwhelming majority of Americans in the south’s urban centres, though they are largely held hostage by GOP-dominated legislatures from partisan gerrymandering, voter suppression and the legacies of racism and vestiges of Jim Crow.

Abrams, a former Democratic leader in the state’s House of Representatives, founded the organisation Fair Fight Action in 2018, the year she lost the state’s gubernatorial election to Republican Brian Kemp.

That race was marred by allegations of widespread voter suppression, with more than 700,000 registered voters purged from the state’s voter rolls, with thousands removed simply because they had not voted in a previous election. Nearly 70 per cent of those voters were Black.

Kemp, then the state’s Secretary of State, was responsible for managing those voter rolls. Abrams lost the election by roughly 55,000 votes among the 4 million cast.

Georgia’s fate – in a close election that will likely trigger a recount – has made the state a battleground once again despite its GOP dominance, even in the event of a potential Biden loss.

Its 2020 voting patterns mirror similarly polarised habits across the US – mostly white rural areas voted for Trump, and record-breaking turnouts in urban areas and adjoining suburbs with large Black populations pushed Biden to victory.

Roughly 90 per cent of Black voters in Georgia supported Biden, according to exit polls from The Washington Post.

Biden’s support in other counties exceeded votes for Clinton in 2016 – Trump maintained his levels of support from that year but it was not enough to keep up with the groundswell for Biden.

Automatic voter registration for Georgia’s eligible voters was enacted in 2016, another voting rights victory that contributed to the spike in turnout.

In 2016, 22 per cent of Georgia’s eligible voters were not registered to vote. That diminished to just 2 per cent by 2020. Turnout in the presidential election reached 67 per cent, breaking the record from Barack Obama’s first campaign in 2008.

Civil rights groups have argued that those legislative and institutional victories for voting rights could change the map if they are replicated throughout the south.

In Mississippi, for example, the state does not have early voting, and state-mandated voter ID laws disproportionately affect lower-income and minority voters, in a state regarded as the most difficult state in which to vote in the US.

People of colour make up more than 44 per cent of the state’s population, though the state has never elected a Black official for statewide office. Among the state’s registered Democratic voters, more than three-quarters are Black; roughly 65 per cent of the state’s Republicans are white.

Congressional Democrats and president-elect Biden are likely to fight to restore the Voting Right Act, but local- and state-level disenfranchisement will be a perennial battle.

Florida’s election marked the first in the state following a measure that restored voting rights to people with felony convictions – on the condition that they pay outstanding court costs, fines and fees.

After voters supported a ballot measure that restored their voting rights, a Republican-dominated state legislature imposed a requirement that they pay those fees before casting their ballots, effectively continuing to suppress thousands of votes.

A multi-million dollar effort from former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, NBA star LeBron James and other high-profile donors offered to pay remaining fines and fees that disenfranchised thousands of people.

ProPublica found that 13,000 people would become newly eligible to vote from those efforts, enough to make a dent in some key areas as the race emerged as a toss-up between the candidates.