President Elect Joe Biden will win the popular vote by perhaps 5 points and the Electoral College with 306 votes. He did it by reinforcing the Democratic trends in the new diverse states and country, winning Arizona and Georgia by razor thin margins. He did it by taking and holding onto the blue wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in the face of a tsunami of white working-class voters.
What happened and what does it mean?
That is why Democracy Corps, in collaboration with Integral Resources, Inc., conducted this 2,000-phone sample in 16 battleground states from October 31st to November 4th. Because it has polled in this battleground repeatedly in 2020, we are able to see what happened. We also are able to learn from comparisons to previous cycles using exits and Catalist estimates and our own post-election surveys since Bill Clinton’s election.
The big story is Donald Trump led an incendiary, race-laden working class revolt against the elites, fueled by attacks on defunding the police, ads with Black urban violence and his demand for law and order that cost Democrats dearly in rural areas, with older voters and white working-class men, some GOP defectors, some suburban voters, and importantly, produced an unprecedented rush of white working-class voters in the blue wall states. Trump pushed his white working-class men’s vote up 7 points at the end to match the support he got in 2016 and pushed up his rural vote 14 points to exceed it.
Trump accomplished that even though the trends in these states and the nation was to be less white and more holding four-year college degrees.
