Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.

One thing you might have noticed during this presidential campaign is how Trump has spoken to “suburban women” in language along these lines: “The suburban voter, the suburban housewife … they want security and they want safety … they don’t want to have their American dream fulfilled and then have a low-income housing process [sic] built right next to their house or in the neighborhood.”

It’s a pretty clear anti-Black dog whistle on Trump’s part; it’s also pretty clear that he thinks the way to appeal to white women in the suburbs is through race-baiting language. The strategy doesn’t match with the ideological proclivities of that particular demographic group in 2020 — college-educated voters have grown more liberal on race issues and white women in the suburbs are a Democratic-leaning group these days — Trump’s clumsy appeals are rooted in history.

The Republican Party has for decades made the choice to pursue the votes of white people at the expense of those in other racial groups. I wrote about this decades-long strategy in detail this summer. Trump’s misguided attempts to talk to suburban women are framed clearly within the electoral playbook that has dominated the GOP for much of his lifetime. While the Black vote was evenly split between the Democratic and Republican Party in 1942, by 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan would win only 14 percent of the Black vote.

What happened in the interim was that indifference on the part of Republican Party when it came to Black voters — Republicans coasted for decades on Black voters’ affinity for the party of Abraham Lincoln — turned into outright animosity with the onset of the Civil Rights movement and the shift of Southern Democrats into the Republican Party. Pitting racial and ethnic groups against each other in Northern cities as well as in the South proved to be a winning electoral strategy for the GOP.

But in 2020, the GOP could be heading for a real reckoning. Polls consistently show that most Americans think Trump is racist. That’s not a great place for the head of a political party to be, especially since white people will no longer be a majority in the country in a couple decades. No matter the outcome of 2020, I think the next few years could prove a turning point for the party.

If Trump loses reelection, one of the main reasons why will be because he lost support compared to 2016 among white voters. Back in mid-October, we compared preelection polling from Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape to 2016 data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study to see how different demographic groups were shifting.

Among the takeaways was Trump’s reduced support among white voters, who will make up around 7 in 10 voters in this election. Whereas Trump won white voters by double digits in 2016, it appears his margin could be halved, mainly because Biden is attracting more support from white women and white voters without a four-year college degree than Clinton did four years ago.

At the same time, it looks like Trump may have improved his standing among voters of color. For instance, his support has gone up a bit among Black voters, mainly younger Black voters and Black men, as has his backing among Hispanic voters, including those with a college degree. While Trump will likely lose badly among voters of color, a slight uptick in GOP support with those groups could be important if Trump also does better among white voters than preelection polling has suggested.

While in-person voting is taking center stage today, mail-in ballots will still be trickling in. Some of them will be deemed invalid, and as the data is tabulated, we’ll get a sense of just how many absentee ballots were rejected.

In every election, a certain percentage of absentee ballots are rejected (the exact share depends on the state and who you ask). Most commonly, this is due to ballots arriving past the deadline, or missing some key information, like a signature. Because a record number of voters are expected to cast ballots by mail this year due to the pandemic, rejected ballots are a bigger concern than usual.

The mistakes that lead to ballots being rejected are more common among voters who have never voted that way before — it’s hard to do something for the first time — and disproportionately affect young voters and voters of color. Some states allow voters to “cure” a ballot with a mistake so their vote still counts, but not all. There have already been signs that ballot rejections could be higher this year: An NPR analysis of 30 state presidential primaries this year found more than half a million ballots were rejected, compared to the almost 319,000 absentee ballots rejected in the 2016 general election. In a few weeks, when all the ballots are counted, we’ll have a better picture of whether rejected ballots were a big issue in 2020, or if it was par for the course.