2020 Election

[GMDino]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/upshot/biden-polls-demographics.html

Quote:White Flight From Trump? What a Decisive Biden Win Would Look Like
Republican structural advantages in the House, the Senate and the Electoral College would be in jeopardy.


Recent national polls show that Joe Biden’s commanding lead has eroded longstanding demographic divisions that have favored Republicans, endangering their hold on a tier of states where the Democratic Party usually has little chance to prevail in federal elections, even Republican strongholds like Kansas or Alaska.

President Trump still has plenty of time to close the gap with Mr. Biden. But with Mr. Biden’s lead enduring well into a second month amid a worsening coronavirus pandemic, it’s worth considering the potential consequences of a decisive Biden victory.

Remarkably, Mr. Trump’s lead among white voters has all but vanished. On average, he holds just a three-point lead among them, 48 percent to 45 percent, across an average of high-quality telephone surveys since June 1. His lead among white voters has steadily diminished since April.


White Voters Move Toward Biden
In 2016, Donald Trump carried white voters by about 13 percentage points. He still leads among them, but in recent months these voters have moved sharply toward Joe Biden.

Whom white voters preferred in national polls



In the long view, the president’s losses among white voters compared with his final standing in 2016 polls are broad, spanning all major demographic categories. In more recent months, the president’s losses have been somewhat narrower and concentrated among younger voters, according to the polls. Mr. Biden has made no gains among voters over age 65 at all since May, and as a result his once-distinctive lead among the group now looks similar to what one would expect in this national environment.


At the same time, Mr. Biden has made few to no gains among nonwhite voters. He still has a wide lead among these voters, but his failure to improve over Hillary Clinton’s standing in the final polls of 2016 is something of a surprise, given the recent national attention to racial issues and the disproportionate effect of the coronavirus on Hispanic and Black communities. Many surveys do not break down nonwhite voters into more specific racial groups, since there aren’t always enough respondents for a reliable estimate. But a longer-term compilation suggests that Mr. Trump is modestly outperforming his 2016 standing among both Black and Hispanic voters, with more uncertainty about the extent of his strength among Hispanics.

 

If the race tightened, perhaps Mr. Trump would make broad gains, allowing him to reclaim a lead among older white voters and to outperform his showing against Mrs. Clinton among nonwhite voters by a wide margin. It’s also possible that an improvement in Mr. Trump’s standing would mainly involve rolling back Mr. Biden’s most recent gains, which would lead to outsize gains among younger white voters and few or no gains at all among nonwhite and older voters.

But if the president does not claw his way back into a tighter race, Mr. Trump and his party face a harsh political environment without many of the advantages that have insulated the party from public opinion in the past. Over the last two decades, Republican strength among white voters has given the party structural advantages in the House, the Senate and the Electoral College. A competitive race among white voters would deprive Republicans of those advantages, threatening carefully devised gerrymanders and raising the specter of previously unimagined losses in the Senate.

After 20 years of closely fought presidential elections, it’s hard to imagine the range of possibilities such a decisive margin of victory would create. To illustrate, we took the results of the 2016 election by demographic group and calculated what would happen if those groups backed Mr. Trump at the levels shown in recent polls.
This sort of analysis offers only a rough idea of what could unfold. A demographic category like “white voters without a college degree,” however useful, encompasses an extremely diverse group of voters. They can move in meaningfully different directions, and there is no reason to assume that Mr. Biden’s strength would be felt equally in West Virginia and Vermont. Nonetheless, that’s exactly what this exercise does. A similar effort in previous years would not have anticipated the vagaries of real election outcomes, like Iowa moving 15 points to Mr. Trump while Wisconsin moved just eight points; or Indiana moving 22 points toward Barack Obama in 2008 while Ohio moved just seven points. This hypothetical offers only a rough guide to the kinds of districts that might be competitive.

But in this situation, Mr. Biden would win by 10 percentage points, 54 percent to 44 percent, and would win 375 votes in the Electoral College, including all of the states won by Mr. Obama in 2012, in addition to North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona. Mr. Biden’s weakness among nonwhite voters would leave Texas short of turning blue.
Notably, in such a hypothetical, Mr. Biden would also win by nine to 10 points in the three Northern battleground states that decided the last election: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Four years ago, Mr. Trump fared better in these states than in the national popular vote, but this potentially decisive advantage in these relatively white states fades along with his lead among white voters.

This result would be close to current polling averages. Perhaps more surprising is how Mr. Biden would fare in a long list of traditionally Republican states and districts. He would fight to within single digits in Alaska, Utah, South Carolina, Indiana, Montana, Missouri and Kansas.

Again, it’s important to emphasize that these are rough estimates. But the prospect of somewhat competitive races in these states is borne out in recent polling: Mr. Trump leads by an average of seven points, 49 percent to 42 percent, in an average of 13 polls taken of these states since mid-April, when Bernie Sanders left the Democratic contest.

It’s not terribly consequential whether Mr. Biden wins these states. But four of them have Republican-held Senate seats that are up this year, and a strong showing by him would help Democratic chances further down the ballot. If Democrats actually could win one Senate race, most likely Montana, it would materially improve their ability to govern. It could even give them a serious chance to hold the chamber through Mr. Biden’s hypothetical first term, since the Republicans have relatively few opportunities to flip states in the 2022 midterm elections.

Republicans in the House may also face severe consequences. In this analysis, Mr. Biden would carry a staggering 260 congressional districts, including a half-dozen districts won by Mr. Trump in Texas. He could even carry districts where Mr. Trump won by double digits in 2016, like Indiana’s Fifth, Arizona’s Sixth, Florida’s 16th, or Ohio’s 14th. Mr. Trump would win another set of 25 districts by less than five points each. Many of these districts were only somewhat competitive in the 2018 midterms, while many others were not competitive at all. Already, various ratings outfits like the Cook Political Report have classified them as competitive.


The idea that Democrats could run so far ahead of their showing during a so-called wave election year like 2018 may seem hard to believe. But at the moment, Mr. Trump’s approval rating is a net six points worse among voters than it was heading into the midterm election, according to FiveThirtyEight estimates. The national political environment is substantially worse for the Republicans than it was two years ago, and the possibility that Democrats can extend their gains further can’t be dismissed at this stage.