The 2020 US Elections—Some Solid Ground in a Shifting Landscape

ANTALL JÓZSEF RESEARCH CENTRE

THE 2020 US ELECTIONS—SOME SOLID GROUND IN A SHIFTING LANDSCAPE

ZSOLT PÁLMAI

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ANTALL JÓZSEF RESEARCH CENTRE

AJRC-Analyses Series of the Antall József Knowledge Centre

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© Zsolt Pálmai, 2020 © Antall József Knowledge Centre, 2020 ISSN 2416-1705

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THE 2020 US ELECTIONS—SOME SOLID GROUND IN A SHIFTING LANDSCAPE ZSOLT PÁLMAI

US presidential elections tend to invite superlatives, especially in the realm of punditry, but also in more detailed analyses. Campaign operations keep getting larger and more expensive, population growth and change are leading to an ever more diverse electorate turning up to vote in ever greater numbers, and each election inspires commentators to wonder if they had ever seen one that was more negative or “nastier” (the answer is quite confidently yes, in 1800).1 Accordingly, one can reasonably expect to read about how the 2020 race may be the most unpredictable in recent history, with a sitting President who has already won once in pollster-defying upset, a trade war with China only whose effects offer all sides plenty of narrative fodder, and, most recently, an epidemic that already has people comparing its eventual transformative power to that of the September 11 attacks, and that is yet to show signs of slowing down in the United States. Yet for all the turbulence that has characterized politics and public life in the US since the election of Donald Trump, there have been a number of consistent tendencies that allow observers to make educated guesses regarding voter behaviour on 4 November. This paper will deal with these in an attempt to identify the factors and areas that at this point are the most likely to decide who gets to sit behind the Resolute Desk next January.

In this inquiry, as in American politics-watching in general, it is of paramount importance to observe the unique mechanism whereby presidents are elected. Indeed, one of the most important lessons of the 2016 election is that people tend to forget that it is not the popular vote but the share of Electoral College votes that determines the winner: Hillary Clinton may have won the former by a convincing margin (2.1%, amounting to nearly 3 million votes), but narrow upset victories in the former Democratic “blue wall” states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania pushed Donald Trump well past the necessary 270 electoral votes.2 Consequently, the present analysis aims to give appropriate weight to key individual states’ characteristics and concerns, while also acknowledging the narrative-setting effect of general nationwide attitudes.

THE ELECTORATE First, a look at some notable developments in who exactly will be electing the next President, and what this tells us about the two major candidates’ chances. Perhaps the most talked-about statistic in this regard has been that 2020 will be the first time that Hispanic voters will outnumber African-Americans as the largest minority voting bloc at 13.3 percent versus 12.5 respectively. Historically, both groups have leaned towards Elaine Karmack: Has a presidential election ever been as negative as this one?. The Brookings Institution. 18 October 2016. <https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2016/10/18/the-most-negative-campaign/> Accessed: 13 April 2020.

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2016 Presidential Election. 270 to Win. <https://www.270towin.com/2016_Election/> Accessed: 13 April 2020.

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the Democratic party by a comfortable margin (at the 2018 midterms 69 percent of Hispanics and 90 percent of Blacks cast their votes for a Democratic House candidate).3 However, the roughly 30-percent support for the GOP among Hispanics should not be ignored, and could prove a deciding factor in the tossup state of Florida.

There has also been a lot of talk of younger generations, and for good reason: for the first time, eligible Generation Z voters (born after 1996) will outnumber the silent generation (born between 1928 and 1945) 10-to-9 percent and, together with Millennials (people born between 1981 and 1996), they will make up 37% of the electorate.4 The youngest of the two groups is notable for being markedly more racially diverse (only 53% are projected to be non-Hispanic white), more educated, and more likely to live in cities than their predecessors—all traits more commonly associated with a preference for the Democratic Party. Indeed, both Millennials’ and Gen Z-ers’ values align more with those espoused by Democrats, and yet these groups, now larger than ever, have traditionally posed a challenge when it came time to convert sympathy and ideological alignment to votes, as their turnout rates tend to fall well below that of other age groups: the 2016 election, for example, saw 71 percent of people over 65 (a group Trump carried 53-to-44 in 2016), and 67 percent of 45–64 year-olds, show up to cast their votes, compared with just 46 percent of 18–29 year-olds.5 How well these generations can be mobilized will be another crucial development to watch and, as highlighted below, Joe Biden became the presumptive Democratic nominee with a notable enthusiasm gap compared to his opponent, while Donald Trump has already spent more than a year dedicating much of his Facebook ad targeting to the generally whiter and more conservative 65+ demographic.6 All in all, the demographics shifts transpiring in the United States generally favour Democratic candidates, as the ever-larger group of younger, better-educated, and nonwhite city-dwellers continue to associate more closely with that party. But as mentioned above—and seen twice in the last five elections (2016 and 2000)—regional attitudes can overrule nationwide tendencies due to the Electoral College system, and there remain numerous factors that can help Republicans compensate for this disadvantage.

THE CANDIDATES Take any issue that divides public opinion in the United States, and one is likely to find that that division is very much manifested along party lines. For all practical purposes, the 3 Jens Manuel Krogstad et al.: Key takeaways about Latino voters in the 2018 midterm elections. Pew Research Center. 9 November 2018. <https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/11/09/how-latinos-voted-in-2018midterms/> Accessed: 13 April 2020.

4 Anthony Cilluffo—Richard Fry: An early look at the 2020 electorate. Pew Research Center. 30 January 2019. <https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/essay/an-early-look-at-the-2020-electorate/> Accessed: 13 April 2020.

Thom File: Voting in America: A Look at the 2016 Presidential Election. United States Census Bureau. 10 May 2017. <https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2017/05/voting_in_america.html> Accessed: 14 April 2020.

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6 Sara Fischer: Trump's 2020 plan: Target seniors on Facebook. Axios. 16 April 2019. <https://www.axios.com/ trump-2020-plan-target-seniors-on-facebook-1555346862-b3bc5987-9e98-4837-9e55-aa479909ceb8.html> Accessed: 14 April 2020.

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candidates are the standard-bearers of their respective parties, and the attitudes towards them with regard to any particular issue (e.g. how strong/effective they are at managing crime, immigration, national security, the economy, etc.), as well as their general approval ratings, tend to be viewed during an elections as valuable indicators of their strengths and weaknesses among different sections of the electorate.

Party lines are not just thick but quite evenly drawn: 30 percent of Americans identify “outright” as Democrats, 28 percent as Republicans. These also represent rather steady figures, undermining the theory that Donald Trump’s high approval among Republicans (discussed below) is the result of an erosion of general support for the party, leaving him with high overall support but only among a smaller group. Factoring in independents with some degree of lean towards one party or another, the split widens somewhat: overall, 47 percent of voters lean Democratic, and 42 Republican. “True” independents, therefore, appear to make up only a tenth of the electorate.7 It is a well-known fact that, historically, Donald Trump has not been a popular President.

Save for the odd bump, one would be hard-pressed to find past polling that put his approval at 50% or higher (it tends to hover in the low-to-mid-40s), and his disapproval rating is consistently and considerably higher (in the upper-40s and lower-50s). However, he is immensely popular with his own party. As the impeachment episode has shown, even when confronted with substantial evidence of wrongdoing, Republican voters remain extremely loyal to Trump, leading to situations such as the final stretch of the aforementioned process where people identifying with his party opposed his impeachment by a roughly 90-percent margin.8 Meanwhile, his overall job approval by Republicans also regularly matches this figure, giving him a seemingly unbreakable foundation to build his outreach efforts on.9 This is perhaps the greatest political achievement of Trumpism so far: over the past four years, he has effectively used his position (with considerable help from the conservative media) to unite the party behind him and go from a fringe candidate with fringe views to a galvanizing presence in a political community that had previously struggled with internal friction, giving rise to undercurrents such as the Tea Party Movement.

It should come as no surprise that the aforementioned outreach efforts by Trump have a considerably more realistic chance at working on independent voters than on Democrats.

A recent case in point was when Trump rode a temporary wave of popularity in the wake of his taking a more active role in managing the coronavirus crisis, the improvement in polling numbers was largely due to independents, who contributed an eight-point bump according

Jeffrey M. Jones: U.S. Party Preferences Steady During Trump Era. Gallup. 7 January 2020. <https://news. gallup.com/poll/274694/party-preferences-steady-during-trump-era.aspx> Accessed: 14 April 2020.

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Zsolt Pálmai: An Impeachment Postscript. Antall József Knowledge Centre. March 2020. <https://ajtk.hu/en/ research/research-blog/an-impeachment-postscript> Accessed: 14 April 2020.

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9 Philip Bump: A popular theory for Trump’s popularity among Republicans appears to be wrong. The Washington Post. 8 January 2020. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/01/08/popular-theory-trumpspopularity-among-republicans-appears-be-wrong/> Accessed: 14 April 2020.

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to Gallup10, and 13 points according to Navigator.11 Whether these numbers have had any staying power is, for now, beside the point, which is that independents are generally more inclined to reassessing their views regarding the President. By contrast, even as a section of Democratic voters also gave Trump some additional credit in the aforementioned polls, as a general trend their opposition to him is nearly as monolithic as the support he has seen from Republicans, with the ratio of those who approve of his job performance to at least some degree having steadily remained below 10 percent.12 As already mentioned above, the presumptive Democratic nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, is entering the race with a non-negligible deficit in how eager his followers are to go out to vote in November compared to Trump supporters. According to a recent poll, in part as a result of the coronavirus crisis there has been an understandable general decrease in voter enthusiasm, which manifested itself more among Democrats, leaving Biden with a claim to 20 percent less enthusiasm among his supporters than the President—although it should be noted that the poll in question happened to have been conducted on the eve of Bernie Sander suspending his campaign and making Biden the presumptive candidate.13 There is good reason to expect this to change as the candidate—along with Barack Obama and other high-profile endorsers and surrogates—is finally allowed to embrace his status as his party’s standard-bearer. Hillary Clinton faced a similar hurdle in late March 2016 (she was at 54 percent), with Sanders still in the race and Trump registering similar levels of support (65 percent).14 Despite this enthusiasm gap, Biden so far appears to have been justified in positioning himself as the candidate who can defeat Donald Trump—as evidenced, among others, by the lengths to which the President has gone to disadvantage his opponent, using the powers of his office to try to pressure the Ukrainian government into announcing an anti-corruption investigation involving the Biden family.15 The former Vice President consistently comes out on top in one-on-one matchups in polls: nationally, one would be hard-pressed to find a survey from the past year that does not show the Democratic candidate in the lead, although, while these advantages tend to be larger than the margin of error, they are also very rarely exceed 10 points—and again, such a broad focus is more useful for gauging the national mood than predicting the Electoral College result, and quality state-level polling is scarce at this point.16 Jeffrey M. Jones: President Trump's Job Approval Rating Up to 49%. Gallup. 24 March 2020. <https://news. gallup.com/poll/298313/president-trump-job-approval-rating.aspx> Accessed: 15 April 2020.

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Survey. Navigator Research. March 20-23. <https://navigatorresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/ Navigator-Daily-Tracker-Topline-F03.23.20.pdf> Accessed: 15 April 2020.

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12 Presidential Approval Ratings—Donald Trump. Gallup. <https://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidentialapproval-ratings-donald-trump.aspx> Accessed: 15 April 2020.

SSRS Survey. CNN. 9 April 2020. <http://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2020/images/04/09/rel4c.-.2020.pdf> Accessed: 15 April 2020.

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Lydia Saad: Trump and Clinton Supporters Lead in Enthusiasm. Gallup. 28 March 2016. <https://news.gallup. com/poll/190343/trump-clinton-supporters-lead-enthusiasm.aspx> Accessed: 16 April 2020.

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Zsolt Pálmai: An Impeachment Postscript. Antall József Knowledge Centre. March 2020. <https://ajtk.hu/en/ research/research-blog/an-impeachment-postscript> Accessed: 14 April 2020.

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General Election: Trump vs. Biden. RealClearPolitics. <https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/ president/us/general_election_trump_vs_biden-6247.html#polls> Accessed: 16 April 2020.

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Perhaps most notable among the groups that constitute Biden’s base is African-American voters, who, in addition to being a reliable Democratic voting bloc, were instrumental in giving the former Vice President his first primary win in South Carolina on 29 February, after stumbles in the earlier—and whiter—states of Iowa and New Hampshire. Youngerthan-30 Black Democrats may have come out in larger numbers for Bernie Sanders, but there is no reason to expect that Donald Trump would in any way be an unusually popular alternative for African-Americans in the general election.17 Biden, compared to his main former rival, is also especially well-positioned to ensuring that this indeed ends up being the case, and not just due to his close association with Barack Obama: despite his relative weakness with the younger Black crowd, African-Americans Democrats overall identify considerably more with a more moderate/centrist candidate according to a Pew survey, which found that, among them, moderates constitute as much as 43 of Black voters, with only 29 percent identifying as liberals, and 25 percent as conservatives.18 Biden’s loss to Sanders in Nevada, however, revealed a relative weakness among Hispanic voters, a more liberal (a 38-37-22 split, according to the abovementioned research) Democratic constituency, and also a markedly less Democratic-aligned group overall, which, in light of the aforementioned larger division in party affiliation among that minority bloc, should be cause for concern in the Biden camp, especially in the battleground state of Florida— but more on that in the final section of this piece.

Also key to Biden’s general election strategy is blue-collar workers, for two main reasons: they represent a key bloc in many of the former “blue wall” states that Democrats aim to win back after 2016, and he is seen to be popular with them. Even before the first vote was cast in the most recent primary, the Biden campaign mounted a sustained effort to bring enough working-class deserters back into the Democratic fold after the Rust Belt states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania narrowly swung Republican in 2016, and are looking competitive once again. In fact, Sanders’s single greatest upset victory in the 2016 primary came in Wisconsin with a brand of anti-trade economic populism that featured remarkable overlaps with Trump’s platform,19 yet this past March Biden comfortably won the state primary with notable support from noncollege graduates (56 to 35 percent among those who had never attended college, and 50 to 45 among those who had but received no degrees).20 It should be noted, however, that the best that Biden can hope for with non-college-educated whites is damage control, as Trump holds a roughly two-to-one edge among them according to recent 17 Kenya Evelyn: What Super Tuesday revealed about black voters: they're not a monolith. The Guardian. 5 March 2020. <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/05/super-tuesday-black-voters-analysis-recap> Accessed: 16 April 2020.

Hannah Gilberstadt—Andrew Daniller: Liberals make up the largest share of Democratic voters, but their growth has slowed in recent years. Pew Research Center. 17 January 2020. <https://www.pewresearch.org/ fact-tank/2020/01/17/liberals-make-up-largest-share-of-democratic-voters/> Accessed: 17 April 2020.

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David Davenport: Trump And Sanders In Agreement? The Strange Politics Of Free Trade. Forbes. 1 April 2016. <https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddavenport/2016/04/01/trump-and-sanders-in-agreement-the-strangepolitics-of-free-trade/#5e15c37d6eef> Accessed: 17 April 2020.

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Michigan Polls: Who Different Groups Supported. The New York Times. <https://www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2020/03/10/us/elections/exit-polls-michigan-primary.html> Accessed: 17 April 2020.

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polling.21 As is the case with the incumbent, independent voters constitute an important target group for the Biden campaign, too, and there have been signs suggesting that the former VP also has reason to hope that he will be able to make inroads into that bloc.

Independents represented just 12 percent of the turnout at the 2018 midterm elections, but they put a heavy finger on the scale, preferring Democrats by 12 points nationally (49-37).

Their preference was also the same across all ages, genders, and education levels.22 While these early signs provide cause for optimism for Democrats, it should be born in mind that Biden has only just started campaigning as the general election candidate. This has both advantages and disadvantages, and makes it harder to forecast the dominant narratives that will take shape around his campaign. On the one hand, it means that his team still has plenty of room to define his candidacy (with, among others, a running mate, a slogan, signature issues, etc.) and make the case for him as a presidential alternative.

This is certainly more true for him than for Donald Trump, who practically never stopped campaigning in the last four years: he has held several dozens of stadium-sized rallies since his inauguration and outside of the 2018 midterm campaign season, and since the coronavirus situation forced a ban on large-scale events he has regularly used his routine televised White House briefings on the matter as quasi-campaign appearances. This head start in election-focused messaging has made him more of a known commodity in the race, which works to his advantage when it comes to anticipating potential lines of attack—he has already had his character and presidency in a myriad of ways and endured it all with his base of support intact. On the other hand, Joe Biden has only ever been tested as a Vice Presidential candidate, and will be target of a sustained negative campaign from the formidable Republican-friendly media, as well as from a progressive left that has built its messaging on its opposition to centrist/mainstream/establishment Democrats such as him.

KEY ISSUES Polls suggest that the most important issues on voters’ minds for the coming race are the following (the parentheses contain the percentage of respondents who deemed a particular item very or extremely important): the economy (84), education (83), and healthcare (81), and terrorism and national security (80). A look at independents’ “extremely important” preferences, however, reshuffles that order somewhat, with healthcare (36) coming in first, followed by the education (33) and national security (33), and the economy at 29 percent.23 With the present coronavirus crises and its effects on the economy and public health, it is a safe bet that that those two issues will likely define much of the conversation on the two candidates’ aptitude for the challenges involved in the coming months.

A major piece of conventional wisdom for most of the period leading up to this part of the race has been that a strong economy is a strong sign that the incumbent party will retain Nate Cohn: Why Biden’s Polling Lead vs. Trump Isn’t as Solid as It Looks. The New York Times. 13 April 2020. <https:/www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/upshot/polling-2020-biden-trump.html> Accessed: 16 April 2020.

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22 How We Voted in the 2018 Midterms. The Wall Street Journal. 6 November 2018. <https://www.wsj.com/ graphics/election-2018-votecast-poll/> Accessed: 17 April 2020.

The Wall Street Journal. 6 November 2018.

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the presidency. For all the above mentioned Democratic-friendly factors, his scandals, and limited appeal beyond his base, Trump was for the longest time thought to be wellpositioned to retain the White House thanks to good-looking numbers such as real GDP (an estimated 2.1 trillion for 2019, still the highest in the world, and a 2.3-percent growth from 2018)24, the unemployment rate (3.5 at the beginning of the year, a historical low25) and real hourly earnings (2019 marked a return to a high of $23.24 not seen since 197326). Although somewhat bucking that conventional wisdom is strong evidence that the direction and rate of change (e.g. in manufacturing activity) is a more reliable indicator of future election success than the present state of the economy in a vacuum.27 And that brings us to the coronavirus, as the constant improvement of the above indicators was interrupted with the introduction of social distancing measures.

Trump’s presidency will likely hinge on when people’s sense of the economy (and public health conditions) will begin to bounce back after the present crisis. So far, we have seen a milder version of the “rally-round-the-flag” effect boost the President’s approval rating up somewhat, only for it to fall back to its usual level soon thereafter (approval down from 49 to 43, disapproval back up from 45 to 54).28 The current pessimism among the electorate is understandable, as some degree of recession seems inevitable. Goldman Sachs (GS) revised its economic forecast last month, predicting a 24-percent GDP decline for the second quarter of the year, which would be a historical record. Unemployment, too, is rising, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics registering a 0.9-percent uptick in just one month nationally29, a trend which the GS forecast sees continuing until the unemployment rate is back up at as much as 9 percent (and that is only counting jobless people actively seeking employment). However, the forecast also predicts that, following April, the adverse effects on the GDP could gradually fade, and in light of the abovementioned findings regarding the relationship between voters’ behaviour and perception of the economy, the fact that the economic ramifications of the virus might be “front-loaded” could be good news for Trump, as voters could end up rewarding any relative improvement in November, even if the state of the economy is not back up to pre-

Gross Domestic Product, Fourth Quarter and Year 2019 (Third Estimate); Corporate Profits, Fourth Quarter and Year 2019. Bureau of Economic Analysis. 26 March 2020. <https://www.bea.gov/news/2020/gross-domesticproduct-fourth-quarter-and-year-2019-third-estimate-corporate-profits> Accessed: 17 April 2020.

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25 Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey. Bureau of Labor Statistics. <https://data.bls.gov/ timeseries/LNS14000000> Accessed: 17 April 2020.

Felix Richter: 50 years of US wages, in one chart. World Economic Forum. 12 April 2019. <https://www.weforum. org/agenda/2019/04/50-years-of-us-wages-in-one-chart/> Accessed: 17 April 2020.

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27 Nate Silver: Which Economic Indicators Best Predict Presidential Elections?. FiveThirtyEight. 18 November 2011. <https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/which-economic-indicators-best-predict-presidential-elections/> Accessed: 17 April 2020.

28 Trump Job Approval. Gallup. <https://news.gallup.com/poll/203207/trump-job-approval-weekly.aspx> Accessed: 18 April 2020.

Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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epidemic levels by then30. In fact, the Trump appears to have a surplus of goodwill thanks to the earlier performance of the economy, as voters remain generally more trusting of him than Biden when it comes to managing the economy (50-46 according to a recent poll).31 The epidemic is also expected to intensify the debate around the state of American healthcare. Recently, the issue has come up more on the Democratic side, thanks to the primary elections that highlighted a split between aspiring nominees who supported the progressive “Medicare for All” single-payer system (most notably Sanders), and those who would prefer a more moderate update to the Affordable Care Act (which is what Biden proposes). In the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats made healthcare a central part of their platform—so much so, that the issue represented roughly half of their advertising spending32—and won back the House of Representatives, as well as a number of governorships. Meanwhile, Trump’s signature stance on the issue has been to repeal and replace Obamacare, resulting in repeated, and so far unsuccessful, efforts to do so, except for the “individual mandate” part of the law (essentially a tax penalty for those who do not purchase health insurance), which was repealed in the 2017 Republican tax bill. The ACA remains popular, maintains 55-percent overall favourability (with 37 percent opposing it), including 53 percent among independents.33 While the progressive wing of the Democratic Party can boast numerous Medicare for all converts in the party camp, Biden’s brand of moderate healthcare policy looks more potent in a general election: according to recent research, a government-administered public option (Biden’s proposed upgrade to the ACA) simply plays better with a wider swath of voters: it is more popular with the general populace (44 to 26 in a matchup with MfA), Democrats (51-39), independents (45-24), and Republicans (32-11), and with wide gaps between those who only prefer a public option and those who only prefer MfA (26-7 in general, but 30-7 among independents, and 27-2 among Republicans).34 This last detail is notable because it suggests that non-Democrats are more receptive to Biden’s more centrist approach to healthcare reform than they would have been to the progressive alternative. Indeed, the previously-mentioned poll on who voters trust more on a range of issues also reveals that Biden is seen as better-prepared to manage not just healthcare in general (57-39) but also the coronavirus situation (52-43).35

Carmen Reinicke: Goldman Sachs now says US GDP will shrink 24% next quarter amid the coronavirus pandemic - which would be 2.5 times bigger than any decline in history. 20 March 2020. Markets Insider. <https:// markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/us-gdp-drop-record-2q-amid-coronavirus-recession-goldmansachs-2020-3-1029018308> Accessed: 17 April 2020.

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CNN. 9 April 2020.

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Dylan Scott: Half of 2018’s Democratic campaign ads are about health care. Vox. 24 September 2018. <https:// www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/9/24/17897962/health-care-campaign-ads-democrats-2018-midtermelections-voxcare> Accessed: 17 April 2020.

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Ashley Kirzinger et al.: KFF Health Tracking Poll – February 2020: Health Care in the 2020 Election. Kaiser Family Foundation. 21 February 2020. <https://www.kff.org/health-reform/poll-finding/kff-health-tracking-pollfebruary-2020/?utm_campaign=KFF-2020-polling-surveys&mod=article_inline> Accessed: 18 April 2020.

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Kirzinger et. al.

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CNN. 9 April 2020.

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KEY RACES As already mentioned towards the beginning of this piece, such general numbers should always be viewed alongside state-level trends due to the peculiarities of the Electoral College system. There is compelling evidence that the system currently favours the Republican Party, due to the fact that Democratic voters tend to be somewhat compressed into more populous, urban areas, making their sheer number less relevant thanks to the “winner-take-all” system whereby Electoral votes are allocated in all but two states, and giving inordinate relative weight to smaller, less populous states which tend to lean Republican. As a result, since 1988, the GOP had a much higher chance of walking away with the Presidency in case of an “inversion”, when a candidate loses the popular vote but still wins the Electoral College (49.5 percent of the vote is projected to give the Republican nominee a win 46 percent of the time, compared to 21 for the Democrat, and the gap only widens as a 50-50 split in votes is approached, at which point the Republican has a 65-percent chance of winning).36 It is the result of this state of affairs that in 2016 Hillary Clinton could win about 3 million more votes than Donald Trump, but lose the election due to just roughly 77 thousand votes combined in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania (plus a narrow loss in the swing state of Florida), leaving her opponent with 306 Electoral College votes, compared to her 232.

Those states are once again in play in 2020, with Arizona and North Carolina as the remaining two likely battlegrounds based on the most trusted forecasts37. Florida and its 29 Electors are by far the single biggest prize among them, and winning it would put Biden within just one other swing state victory of sealing the race (he needs to pick up 38 additional Electoral Votes to Clinton’s final tally to win). Fortunately for Trump, who won the state by just 1.2 percentage points in 2016, Florida’s previously-mentioned Hispanic bloc leans more Republican than Hispanic-Americans in general thanks to its large share of Cuban-Americans who have been more closely aligned with the GOP thanks to the Party’s firmer stance against the Castro regime, insulating the party somewhat from that demographic’s larger general Democratic slant.38 Biden appears competitive in the state, as his general strength among older voters (he leads Trump by 9 points among those older than 65)39 combines with the highest share of seniors in any state40 to give him a slight edge in the majority of polls,41 but the 2018 midterms bode ill for the challenger, as it solidified the state’s rightward lean with Republicans winning narrowly in the gubernatorial and Congressional races.

Michael Geruso et al.: Inversions in US Presidential Elections: 1836-2016. SSRN. 16 September 2019. <https:// papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3450568> Accessed: 18 April 2020.

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37 2020 President: Consensus Electoral Map. 270toWin. 3 April 2020. <https://www.270towin.com/maps/ consensus-2020-electoral-map-forecast> Accessed: 14 April 2020.

Rafael Bernal: GOP makes inroads with Hispanics in Florida. The Hill. 23 November 2018. <https://thehill. com/latino/417943-gop-makes-inroads-with-hispanics-in-florida> Accessed: 18 April 2020.

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Cohn. 13 April 2020.

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CITIZEN, VOTING-AGE POPULATION BY AGE. United States Census Bureau. <https://data.census. gov/cedsci/table?g=0100000US.04000.001&y=2018&tid=ACSDT1Y2018.B29001&t=Age%20 and%20Sex&text=senior%20citizen&vintage=2018&hidePreview=false&layer=VT_2018_040_00_PY_ D1&cid=B29001_001E> Accessed: 19 April 2020.

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Latest Polls—Florida. FiveThirtyEight. <https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/florida/> Accessed: 18 April 2020.

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Despite Florida’s outstanding weight among swing states, much of the conversation about 2016 and indeed 2020 has focused on the northern states that turned red in a historic upset and ended up becoming the key to Trump’s victory four years ago, thanks mainly to their high share of white, non-college-educated voters, who proved receptive to the Republican nominee’s populist message on manufacturing and foreign trade, as well as his raciallycharged rhetoric on immigration42 (even the most racially diverse of these states is 75-percent white)43. Were Democrats to flip these former safely blue states back, the “blue wall” would be restored and, barring a 2016-style upset elsewhere, they could forget about all the other battlegrounds and still win back the White House.

For reasons discussed above, Biden was well-positioned in the 2020 Democratic field to appeal to Obama-Trump defectors, but a study published last year suggests that they still hold a generally positive view of the President, with 66 percent of them approving of his performance last year. That said, the same figure in 2016 was 85 percent, indicating that, again, there is a general tendency favoring the Democrats, but whether they can convert it to votes on election day (and, in this case, speed it up to a sufficient degree) remains to be seen.44 In any case, the 2018 midterms offer cause for hope, as they saw all three states in question elect Democratic senators and governors, with the Senate candidates picking up 14, 12, and 9 percent of 2016 Trump voters respectively.45 However, none of these candidates were facing Trump directly (and turnout was considerably lower than in a general election), who, based on his still-considerable approval rating among the key group of white blue-collar voters, can hope to consolidate support among them by reprising his 2016 immigration stances. Of the three states, Michigan appears to be the most difficult for Trump to hold on to based on the available polling (which mostly show very close races), but it is a potential loss he can afford as long as he does not let both others go to Biden.46 That is if he can also hold on to Arizona and North Carolina—and there are mounting signs that he might not. Trump won both states with roughly 3.5-percent margins, but there are signs that he may have lost ground in them since, with Arizona being an especially interesting race to watch this year. Stoking Democrats’ hopes for the state is Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s upset victory over the Republican incumbent in the 2018 midterms, as well as promising polling for Biden, who has consistently pulled ahead of Trump in polling since mid-March—

42 Nate Cohn: Trump’s Electoral College Edge Could Grow in 2020, Rewarding Polarizing Campaign. The New York Times. 19 July 2019. <https:/www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/upshot/trump-electoral-college-edge-.html> Accessed: 14 April 2020.

43 QuickFacts—Michigan. United States Census Bureau. <https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/MI> Accessed: 18 April 2020.

Robert Griffin: Two Years In: How Americans’ Views Have—and Have Not—Changed During Trump’s Presidency.

Democracy Fund Voter Study Group. May 2019. <https://www.voterstudygroup.org/publication/two-years-in> Accessed: 16 April 2020.

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Doug Palmer: Trump hopes to ride U.S.-China deal to win reelection. Politico. 14 February 2020. <https:// www.politico.com/news/2020/02/14/trump-hopes-to-ride-us-china-deal-to-win-reelection-115192> Accessed: 18 April 2020.

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Latest Polls—Michigan. FiveThirtyEight. michigan/> Accessed: 18 April 2020.

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<https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/

Antall József Knowledge Centre of Political and Social Sciences

and by a remarkable 9-points in the most recent survey.47 The last time the state went to a Democratic candidate for President was in 1996, but it is a prime example of a state that demographic trends—namely, the expansion of its Hispanic population, currently around 32 percent48—are slowly turning blue, although at the cost of growing polarization, as the state’s ageing, roughly 54-percent non-Hispanic white population is becoming gradually more Republican after.49 This, combined with the already-mentioned lower turnout rates among Hispanics, could keep the state red in November.

IN SEARCH OF A CONCLUSION In many ways, the 2020 Presidential race picks up where 2016 left off, with the lines that were drawn then largely intact. The last four years did little to make Donald Trump a popular president, but his many scandals also failed to make much of a dent in his base support.

In such a situation, people often look to potential wild card scenarios to tip the scale in any direction, and the current coronavirus epidemic looks to be as good a candidate for this role as any election-year event in recent memory—but how exactly its effect will materialize remains to be seen. It has the potential to do historical economic, public health-related, and social damage, leaving many voters see the President as seemingly unable to manage his first real nationwide crisis. On the other hand, if the epidemic’s effects begin to subside by the autumn in tangible way, people’s newfound optimism can easily carry Trump to victory again, regardless of his personal role in this relatively positive turn of events. Or they may subside so early that the entire episode will end up not being much of a factor by November (as unlikely as this scenario seems today).

In any case, the long-term demographic trends at play continue to favour the Democratic candidate in the race, and with Joe Biden, a moderate champion of the establishment, and a much less divisive figure than Hillary Clinton, being that candidate, the election is looking to test the effects of these trends in a remarkably clear manner against an opponent who first ran as an outsider but has since become the mainstream of his own party, which enjoys considerable structural advantages in the current electoral system. How the clash of these demographic trends and structural forces will play out is clearly too early to tell, but the most likely frontlines are nevertheless worth studying to fully appreciate the effect of any potential changes in the landscape.

Latest Polls—Arizona. FiveThirtyEight. <https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/arizona/> Accessed: 18 April 2020.

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48 QuickFactas—Arizona. United States Census Bureau. <https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/AZ> Accessed: 18 April 2020.

Ethan Epstein: Is THIS the Year Arizona Finally Turns Blue? Politico. 16 July 2018. <https://www.politico.com/ magazine/story/2018/07/16/deciders-arizona-election-democrats-219008> Accessed: 19 April 2020.

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Antall József Knowledge Centre of Political and Social Sciences