Category: Elections (Page 7 of 17)
These are posts on elections from the blog Base and Superstructure. Topics include international elections, American elections, and local Iowa elections. There’s a particular focus on describing and explaining leftist electoral results.
The Democrats thought they’d do really well in 2020. Many expected a blue wave. In the end, they didn’t do too badly. After all, they won the largest prize – the White House. But they fell well short of lofty expectations. They didn’t get anywhere near the vaunted blue wave.
What happened?
After the 2016 election, I wrote a post on the status of white women in Trump’s coalition. Trump landed a surprise win over Hillary Clinton, and many people singled out white women as the key driver. In that previous post, I looked at the evidence and concluded that this is false. White women were not the key driver of Trump’s win.
White women have been moving toward the GOP for decades. They even moved slightly away from the GOP in 2016. And so, white women were not the decisive factor in Trump’s victory. It was white men who led Trump to victory. Insofar as, e.g., racial justice movements, singled out white women, it was likely because white women made a more attractive target than white men for moral appeals. Not because white women were key to Trump’s base.
With that as our starting point, let’s return to the issue of white women and Trump. How did 2020 go? Did white women vote for Trump again? Did movement in the votes of white women propel Biden to victory?
After an election, people get right down to the business of trying to influence the new administration (or they don’t). One way to do that is to claim to represent some group of voters who ‘delivered’ the election to the winner. And Joe Biden will be no exception to this trend.
Indeed, the think pieces started rolling in as soon as the networks called it for Biden. Bernie Sanders claimed progressives delivered the win, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez agreed, arguing further that moderate Democrats largely failed. Moderates in turn blamed progressives for their own failures. Many commentators argued Democrats should ‘thank a black woman,’ while some praised Stacey Abrams in particular. And so on.
What should we make of all this? Which voters won the election for Biden?
OK, so the elections are done and Trump’s on the way out! But let’s step back a moment to evaluate. I made some election predictions last week. How did they go?
For readers: how did your election predictions work out?
