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

This year, there’s been a lot of focus from the two campaigns on religious voters, and relatively little emphasis on people who aren’t religious. But that doesn’t mean religiously unaffiliated voters can’t — or won’t — make a big difference this election cycle. When I last checked in on religious subgroups, people with no religious affiliation were strongly in Biden’s camp.

Overall, according to a Pew survey from late September and early October, 71 percent of religiously unaffiliated people were supporting Biden, and only 22 percent were supporting Trump. The skew toward Biden was less pronounced among people who identify as “nothing in particular” (62 percent for Biden, 31 percent for Trump), but self-identified agnostics (79 percent for Biden, 15 percent for Trump) and atheists (88 percent for Biden, 7 percent for Trump) were overwhelmingly leaning toward Biden.

Those strong levels of support are despite very little outreach to religiously unaffiliated voters from the Biden campaign. As Daniel Cox and I wrote a few months ago, that’s in part because religiously unaffiliated people are hard to organize politically — and it can still be tricky for candidates to openly appeal to the unaffiliated without alienating religious voters in the process. But this is a large and growing group — and it’s likely to be a huge chunk of this year’s Democratic coalition. So it’s a demographic worth watching, because Democratic candidates may start more explicitly reaching out to religiously unaffiliated voters in the future.

It’s been a nasty election year, full of ugly name-calling and loathing. But how did our politics get to be so hate-filled?

After all, the parties didn’t always hate each other so much. Forty years ago, when asked to rate how “favorable and warm” their opinion of each party was, the average Democrat and Republican said they felt OK-ish about the opposite party. But for four decades now, partisans have increasingly turned against each other in an escalating cycle of dislike and distrust, and views of the other party are currently at an all-time low.

Broadly speaking, there are three trends that we can point to. The first is the steady nationalization of American politics. The second is the sorting of Democrats and Republicans along urban/rural and culturally liberal/culturally conservative lines, and the third is the increasingly narrow margins in national elections.

Yet beneath the surface of hyper-partisan politics, the parties themselves actually have a lot of internal division, which means they share a version of the same dilemma. Republicans and Democrats can’t please all the different voters and groups who fall into their party and want their issue to be prioritized. But in a polarized two-party system, they can make it clear why — whatever someone’s frustration is with their own party — the other party is worse.

Coming into their convention, for instance, Democrats had to bridge policy disagreements between progressives and moderates that were visible during the presidential primary. But the convention focused less on policy and spent more time discussing the existential risk presented by a second Trump term. The party reminded its voters that, whatever concerns they have about Biden, a vote for Biden is also a vote against Trump.

Republicans similarly focused on messaging against the Democrats (even if one of the reasons Trump emerged victorious in the 2016 primary was because the party was so divided that it couldn’t decide). Trump has remade the party in his image, but even for the few remaining Trump-skeptic Republicans, nothing unites like a common enemy. And in a two-party system, being anti-anti-Trump counts the same as being pro-Trump.

If all of this seems unsustainable, it should. The current levels of hyper-partisanship are clearly dangerous. It’s bad news for a democracy when 60 to 70 percent of people view fellow citizens as a serious threat to the country because they belong to a different political party. And the more the parties continue to unify their supporters by casting the other party as the enemy, the higher this number will rise.

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.