The Presidential Election: Who Voted For Who

The 2020 general election had the highest voter turnout our country has seen since the turn of the 20th century. We saw Florida go red while states like Arizona and Georgia went blue. Trump is claiming that Biden has won because of voter fraud. Republicans are currently leading in the Senate and although they are looking to still be a minority in the House they’ve won seats previously held by democrats. So, what’s going on? How did this happen? Let’s start with some basic demographic information. Looking through a few different polls, which are in no way perfect but can usually give us a decent estimate, we can see certain trends.

Trump maintained the senior vote but older populations had a small shift towards democrats, some have proposed that this is because older populations are more at risk with the corona virus. Biden got the majority of the youth vote and there appears to have been no major shifts in younger populations. 

If you have a college degree you were slightly more likely to vote for Biden but if you had a high school diploma or less you were almost just as likely to vote for Trump as you were Biden. 

When looking at gender without separating by race or class, men were almost just as likely to vote for either candidate but there is a very small preference for Trump. Women were more likely to vote for Biden. Compared to Clinton, Biden did better with men and about the same with women. 

The majority of white voters voted for Trump but he lost some ground with college educated whites. Every other race/ethnicity were more likely to vote for Biden (coming from statistics that includes an “other” category under race instead of separating out American Natives and Pacific Islanders/Hawaiian Natives). Latino voters did make about an 8% shift towards Trump since the 2016 election.

Trump lost ground with low income voters but gained some voters in the upper income populations. With that, if the pandemic did not cause you financial hardships you were more likely to vote for Trump. 

If you are LGBT you were more likely to vote for Biden.

When asked what they thought the life of the next generation would be like Biden supporters were split pretty evenly with it being either better or worse while Trump supporters were more likely to think it’d be about the same.

When asked who they voted for in 2016 Biden supporters were more likely to have either not voted or voted third party than Trump voters.

Trump supporters are more likely to think that the economy is doing good while Biden supporters tend to believe that it’s doing very poorly. 

Trump supporters are less likely to see racism as a big problem and about 7% claimed that it wasn’t a problem at all. 

Trump voters were less confident than Biden supporters about the states counting votes correctly.

Trump voters were more likely to have voted for him because they liked him as a candidate while Biden supporters were more likely to vote for Biden because they didn’t like Trump.

Trump supporters were more likely to vote for him because of the positions he takes while Biden voters show a preference for personal qualities. 

Biden voters viewed racial inequality, the corona virus, and health care to be some of the most important issues when deciding how they voted while Trump supporters cared more about the economy and crime and safety. 

When asked about the most important qualities when deciding on their votes Biden voters said the ability to unite the country and had good judgement while Trump supporters were more likely to support someone they saw to be a strong leader. They were split pretty evenly on believing that their candidate cares about them. 

Geographically, Biden did better with people living in cities and suburbs while Trump appealed to people from small towns or rural areas.

There’s a lot going on here, how did all of this affect the final results? Let’s break it down a bit. Trump won Florida by 3.3% (rounded to about 370,000 votes). A lot of people seemed to look to the Cuban-American population for this and some saying that this shows his growing appeal to the Latino community. Personally, I didn’t understand why people thought this was a sign of a big trend because Florida Cubans have almost exclusively voted majority republican since the Bay of Pigs Invasion. This puts them at odds with a lot of the other Latino communities in the country. This leads us into what I believe was one of the more important aspects of this election, the Latino vote and how we view it.

People seem to like looking at Latinos as a single group but Latin America is made up of 33 different countries. Cubans were given free political asylum and therefore have no reason to directly relate to immigrants from Honduras or Mexico being targeted by ICE. Many Latino communities are known for socially conservative views (I know a few people have had the running theory that if the republican party ever dropped their strict immigration policies they’d gain a solid base there). Qanon and George Soros conspiracy theories have been targeted towards Spanish speakers. Are they white or at least white passing? Do they have ties to any indigenous tribes? What is their financial situation? A lot of Latinos are against the Black Lives Matter movement for a variety of reasons (some because they feel it overshadows their communities issues, some because of straight racism, really anything). There’s a lot of different factors that go into it and the Hispanics/Latinos are the largest minority in the country (making up ~18.5% of the total US population). It’s going to be hard to figure out the exact reasons as to why this demographic is shifting unless we break it down into sub-groups. 

Switching over to different swing states, Georgia and Arizona have gone blue for the first time since Bill Clinton was running. Most of this was due to voter turnout and community organizing. In Georgia the election was shifted by a major turnout in first-time black voters. The state has had a long history of voter suppression and with the recent protests and the passing of civil rights icon John Lewis, voting seemed more important than ever before. Stacy Abrams, activist, lawyer, politician, and Yale graduate, who founded Fair Fight Action in 2018 (an organization meant to address voter suppression) played the biggest part in it. She believed that Democrats had a better chance at winning by appealing to disengaged voters than trying to persuade politically active moderates. She and her organization helped register over 800,000 new voters. In an interview with POLITICO she states “When you’re trying to not only harness demographic changes but leverage low-propensity voters, you cannot simply hope that they’ll hear the message. You have to treat them as persuasion voters. Only the message is not trying to persuade them to share Democratic values. Your message is to persuade them that voting can actually yield change.”

In Arizona the story is similar. The Latino community (who make up ~29% of the state’s population, mostly Mexicans) turned out in higher numbers. It’s the home state of John McCain, who had passed in recent years and was repeatedly insulted by Trump, which many people consider a reason that suburban communities leaned towards Biden. Navajo nation and the Hopi showed up in record numbers. Some say that this is a one time blue wave because of McCain republicans only voting blue because they dislike Trump but we’ve been surprised so many times in this election only time will tell. 

Though moderate republicans who were dissatisfied with Trump were the main group of people Biden was pandering to but it doesn’t seem to have done much besides a possibility that it caused a small shift in Arizona. Republicans still overwhelmingly like Trump. On average, 87% of republicans said they approved of Trump during his four years as president. There’s already a plan for a Trump 2024 campaign that allegedly may start to hold events the day of Biden’s inauguration. Like everything else, there’s several reasons for this. One of them being that Trump’s base has a large amount of single issue voters. There’s a large group of people in this country who will vote for anyone who says they’ll put up abortion restrictions or stop gun control laws form being put into place. A lot of people like that he’s reversed some of Obama’s policies, that he ‘puts America first’, and believe that he’s genuinely trying to get things done. Whether you see it as a good or a bad thing, Trump is a leader that the vast majority of republicans want.

Moving onto the elephant in the room, let’s talk about voter fraud. We’ll start with some common talking points and concerns. Why did Biden’s vote pour in all at once later in the night? It’s because in person votes are counted first and Trump spent months telling his supporters how unreliable he believed mail in voting is (which is a claim that has not been backed up by any form of proof). People knew it would happen and many people started calling it the “Red Mirage”, immediate numbers are almost always misleading and it was even worse this year with the amount of people voting by mail. The case has been observed in courtrooms throughout dozens of states and the department of justice led as investigation on it and there’s simply no proof that there was any form of widespread voter fraud in this election. Bill Barr, Trump’s attorney general, has come out and publicly stated the same. Trump claimed that the presidential election results were changed by mass fraud while bragging about democrats losing seats in the House and continuing to be the minority in the Senate. The presidential, house, and senate votes are all cast on the same ballot, if the presidential results were fake so was everything else. 

There were cases of voter fraud this year. In Pennsylvania a man requested a ballot for his dead mother so that he could vote for Trump twice. He was charged with forgery and interference with an election in October. He tried and he got caught because the system we have for voter fraud works. If Trump was just asking for recounts this would be a normal situation but nearly 40% of this country believes that there was enough voter fraud to influence the results of this election with absolutely no proof. Some things in politics aren’t opinions, some things are just factually wrong and claiming that there was some widespread conspiracy of voter fraud in the 2020 general elections is one of those things. 

I hope you enjoyed this article, I meant to get it out last month but it ended up being delayed quite a bit. Anna Dabrowski wrote an article back on November 7th and I highly recommend you check it out if this interested you at all.

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