How Biden Won ... White Men
The latest election data from Pew Research shows that Biden's biggest gains were among white men.
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If someone sent you this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up here.
A couple of quick housekeeping notes. It doesn’t look like my schedule will allow me to hold a Zoom chat this week, so I will likely have to put off things until next Friday. Also, I’ve started writing a weekly column for MSNBC and should have a few things up there over the next few days. I’ll be sure to send those along to you — and offer some additional comments — when they go live.
Lastly, you may have noticed that I’ve been sending most of the newsletters these days are sent to all subscribers — paid and unpaid. The reason for this is simple. I’m a writer, and I want as many people as possible to read my work. It’s tough to put things behind a paywall, though increasingly, I may have to do that. There will be some features like subscriber chats, subscriber threads, and podcasts that will remain behind the firewall, but I’d like to continue to send as much as possible to all subscribers. But, of course, the only way to do that consistently is if you switch from being a free to a paid subscriber (for those of you who are already paid subscribers … we’re good). So if you haven’t signed up yet, please do. Your support is essential for keeping the lights on ! Now on the news.
2020 Revisited
Pew Research has taken a deep dive into the 2020 election, and the results offer fascinating — and counter-intuitive — insights into why Joe Biden won the presidency.
Some of what Pew discovered in its polling jibed with what we’d already known (or at least suspected) about 2020. For example, the Pew surveys bolster the point that Biden’s victory came in the suburbs. According to Pew:
In 2020, Biden improved upon Clinton’s vote share with suburban voters: 45% supported Clinton in 2016 vs. 54% for Biden in 2020. This shift was also seen among White voters: Trump narrowly won White suburban voters by 4 points in 2020 (51%-47%); he carried this group by 16 points in 2016 (54%-38%).
A nine-point shift is significant, but even more so is the movement among white suburbanites - Biden improved with this group by 12 points over Hillary Clinton.
One of the assumptions from the post-election coverage was that Biden made up that ground by winning over women voters. The Pew data, however, tells a different story.
In 2020, men were almost evenly divided between Trump and Biden, unlike in 2016 when Trump won men by 11 points. Trump won a slightly larger share of women’s votes in 2020 than in 2016 (44% vs. 39%), while Biden’s share among women was nearly identical to Clinton’s (55% vs. 54%).
I would suspect that most of Trump’s gains came among non-suburban women voters because, among suburban women, Biden’s numbers matched Hillary Clinton’s from 2016.
What is even more striking is Biden’s success among men.
In 2020, men were almost evenly divided between Trump and Biden, unlike in 2016 when Trump won men by 11 points.
Even more surprising is that Biden gained ground among non-college-educated white men.
While (Trump) still won this group by a little more than two-to one (66% to Biden’s 31%), that 35 percentage point gap is notably smaller than the 50-point gap in the 2016 election, when 73% of White men without a college degree supported Trump, compared with 23% who supported Clinton.
Interestingly, things moved in the opposite direction among Hispanic voters: Trump improved from his 2016 performance and did best with those who did not have a college degree.
In 2020, Biden won college-educated Hispanic voters 69% to 30%. At the same time, Biden’s advantage over Trump among Hispanic voters who did not have a college degree was far narrower (55% to 41%).
Among Black voters, Biden matched Hillary Clinton’s performance in winning 92 percent of the vote — though there was a substantial gender divide with Biden winning Black women by 90 percent, but only 75 percent of Black men. Interestingly, Pew’s 2018 post-election polls showed no divide between these two groups, which would suggest that Trump’s stronger performance among Black men is about him and doesn’t necessarily represent a larger political shift to the GOP.
Overall, these numbers throw a monkey wrench in what we assumed happened in 23020. It was not white suburban women who were decisive for Biden, but rather white men. This data also suggests (though doesn’t prove) that misogyny may have played an outsized role in the 2016 outcome.
Good News for Democrats
The Pew data has one other piece of good news for Democrats. They’re doing best among younger voters. In 2020, Trump won the 50-64 cohort by 6 points and the over 65 demographic by 4 (that’s 5 points lower than in 2016).
But among those aged 30-49, Biden won by 12, and in the 18-29 age bracket, he beat Trump by 24 (though that was 6 points better than Trump did in 2016). Among those under age 30 who voted in 2020 but not in either of the two previous elections, Biden led 59% to 33%. In fact, the only age demographic that Trump decisively won was the so-called Silent Generation, those aged 75-92. That’s not exactly a growth stock for the GOP.
Beyond the age gap, the other divides between the two parties — along racial, geographic, and religious lines — are growing even wider. A full eighty-five percent of Trump’s voters were White, while for Biden, it was only 61 percent. Close to two-thirds of Trump’s supporters live in rural communities. Biden scored a similar percentage among city-dwellers. The president dominates with atheist or religiously unaffiliated Americans, while Trump is winning 84% of white evangelicals. Perhaps least surprising of all, both party candidates won more than 90 percent of their party’s votes. So while there is reason to believe that some Republicans may have abandoned the party because of Trump, those who remained are still firmly in his camp.
All this leads to an obvious question: how should the 2020 election results affect the decision-making of the two parties? Republicans clearly need to figure out ways to make inroads among Hispanic and younger voters. However, there is little indication that they are making much effort to do that. While they saw some slippage among their base of white working-class voters, they still have a chokehold over that demographic, and their older, rural, and evangelical base remains firmly in its corner. Unfortunately, all the more reason for the party to double down on the policies and politics that they’ve long utilized - and that’s what we’ve seen so far during Biden’s presidency.
Democrats are also maintaining support with their political base. But figuring out how to solidify the party’s growing support with suburban voters is going to be crucial. Those voters will likely play an outsized role in 2022 when congressional Democrats seek to hold on to their thin majority by winning the suburban districts they took in 2018 and held on to in 2020. That could mean a significant focus between now and then on crime, health care, and the economy - all the while playing up Trump’s continued prominent role in the Republican Party. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Trump’s presence on the ticket — and his presidency, in general — helped to drive the suburban vote toward Biden. As has been the case for much of the past several decades, it is suburbia where the next presidential election will be decided.
Above all, one thing is increasingly clear about 2020 - the election results were different from what happened in 2016, but not decisively so. America remains a narrowly divided nation, and neither party has figured out how to create a dominant electoral coalition. All of that means that American politics over the next few years will likely look a lot like that which came before.
Musical Interlude
Since today’s newsletter is about white men, I figured I’d post some Bruce Springsteen.
Here’s Jason Isbell singing about a “White Man’s World.”
And here’s James Brown singing “It’s a Man’s World.”
Doesn't this bode well for the Democrats in 2022?