2020 Was More About Race Than Perhaps Any Previous American Election
Before this year, the 2008 race between Barack Obama and John McCain seemed like the American presidential election that centered most heavily on race. After all, it was the first (and still only) presidential election to feature a major-party presidential nominee who is a person of color. But 2020 has arguably surpassed 2008 in terms of being a referendum on American racial attitudes.
Obama tried to avoid talking much about being Black during his 2008 run, even as it was a central feature of media coverage of Obama and the election. His opponent, John McCain, didn’t talk about Obama’s race or racial issues much either. And there wasn’t a ton of civil rights activism happening in 2008.
In contrast, the protests over the police killing of George Floyd this summer were by some measures the largest political movement in American history, with estimates that somewhere between 15 and 26 million people attended at least one of the demonstrations. Neither Biden nor Trump was the principal reason for those protests, but the demonstrations made racial issues a central part of the campaign. Both men had to react. Trump ran against the core goals and general ethos of the protests. Federal officials used tear gas on people protesting Floyd’s death outside the White House to clear a walking path for the president to attend a photo op. The Trump administration has banned diversity trainings that could be categorized as anti-racist, a term many of the protesters were using. Restoring “law and order” by tamping down the protests became one of Trump’s central campaign themes.
In contrast, Biden embraced the protests’ core claim, suggesting that America has “systemic racism” that he would seek to fix as president.
But it wasn’t just reacting to the protests; Biden and Trump have themselves leaned into racial issues in ways that made those subjects more central than they were in 2008, or even 2016. During the Democratic primary, Biden linked his candidacy with defending Obama and Black Americans more broadly. He promised to pick a Black woman for the Supreme Court. His selection of Kamala Harris as his running mate was in part an acknowledgment of the large bloc of voters of color in his party.
Racial issues, of course, were a huge part of Trump’s political identity before 2020. He won a crowded GOP primary in 2016 in part because of his promises to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and ban Muslims from entering the country. As president, he has made a long list of controversial statements about race, as well as implemented race-focused policies, such as numerous measures limiting the number of immigrants to the country.
A Trump win would suggest that Americans, particularly white Americans, are comfortable with the president’s approach to race -- or at least more comfortable with that approach than that of the increasingly “woke” Democratic Party. A Biden win would suggest that Republicans can no longer win presidential elections, as they did in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, by appealing to white Americans’ racial anxieties.