As partisans and analysts puzzle over the higher-than-expected turnout for President Trump (nearly 6 million fewer votes than for President-elect Joe Biden, but still high), they are poring over groups and subgroups: White, non-college-educated men. Suburban women. Young Black men. But much of the Trump 2020 phenomenon can be explained […] Read more »
How a post-election crisis was manufactured in Pennsylvania
It was the nightmare scenario everyone saw coming: a nail-biter presidential election that was too close to call on election night, with the entire world forced to patiently wait on slow results from Pennsylvania as it sifted through millions of mail-in ballots. … The delay was largely caused by Republican […] Read more »
Biden changed the electoral map, but can Democrats capitalize in the future?
The final projections for the 2020 election brought with them a new electoral map, one that highlights the changing shape of America and the divisions that now define the Democratic and Republican parties in the Trump era. … One major question is whether, without Trump on the ballot in the […] Read more »
How Republicans pulled off a big upset and nearly took back the House
There seemed to be one safe bet when it came to the 2020 election results: Democrats would easily hold on to their majority in the House of Representatives. Not only that, but the conventional wisdom held that Democrats would pick up more than the 235 seats they won in the […] Read more »
Why Couldn’t Democrats Ride the Blue Wave?
… So, what happened to the Democratic wave, if there ever was one? It is difficult for me to fathom that so many polls, conducted by dozens of pollsters from both parties using different methodologies, could all be wrong, and in the same direction. In my judgment, there was a […] Read more »
In the popular vote, why wasn’t Biden’s victory bigger?
In the 2020 election some Democrats, buoyed by misleading polls and their own hopes, believed that Joe Biden might win a landslide. But a quick look at recent history reveals how improbable those predictions were. We live in an era of closely contested presidential elections without precedent in the past […] Read more »