IN THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, THE RESULT WAS A SURPRISE. Donald Trump, a reality-television star and real estate mogul who had never held elective office, won the presidency via the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote to former secretary of state, U.S. senator, and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. In 2020, it was President Trump’s churlish refusal to accept that he had lost that led some of his supporters to attempt a “dissident coup”1 at the U.S. Capitol as the Electoral College votes were being certified by Congress, plunging the nation into a bitter acrimony that continues to threaten the foundations of our democratic republic.
After winning acquittals in the U.S. Senate for two separate impeachments in the House of Representatives, facing a historic global pandemic and its associated economic collapse, as well as a summer of Black Lives Matter protests from coast to coast, President Trump’s reelection bid mustered 232 electoral votes to Joe Biden’s 306—the worst performance by an incumbent since 1992. As fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton did before him in 2016, Biden won the popular vote, 51.3 percent to 46.8 percent.2 While both Trump campaigns for the White House were unique in several important ways, much of what happened can be explained by carefully engaging with what political scientists have discovered about political behavior in the American electorate.
THE 2020 CAMPAIGN
While the 2016 election was a high-octane ratings bonanza filled with giant rallies and dramatic debates, much of the 2020 election was conducted virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the campaign began long before the word coronavirus had entered the American lexicon. President Trump announced his reelection bid on February 17, 2017, barely one year into his first term and before both of his impeachments. Tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang was one of the first Democrats to announce his opposition to the president, doing so in November 2017.3 Twenty-six Democrats would eventually spend some time in the 2020 race for the White House.4
In the United States, each election is in some way a product of the elections that came before it. The United States was a deeply divided country entering the 2020 election cycle. In the 2018 midterms, the Democrats gained forty-one seats, taking control of the House of Representatives. The Republicans expanded their U.S. Senate majority by two seats. President Trump’s approval rating never enjoyed the highs of his most recent predecessors, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, leaving him more vulnerable than the typical incumbent. Even so, President Trump enjoyed sky-high approval ratings among Republicans, signaling the difficulty Democrats would face in taking the White House from the president.
At the beginning of 2019, the Democratic primary had the most diverse field of candidates in the nation’s history. Frontrunner and former vice president Joe Biden; Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren; 2016 Democratic primary runner-up and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders; California senator Kamala Harris; South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg; Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar; former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke; and New Jersey senator Cory Booker were among the most prominent candidates vying for the chance to compete against Trump in the general election. While Biden led the national polls for all of 2019 and all but two and a half weeks of 2020,5 pundits and some party insiders considered him to be a weak candidate, too focused on middle-of-the-road voters.6
In a June 2019 debate, Senator Harris went on the offensive, attacking Biden for his position on school busing in the 1970s, claiming that Biden’s position on race and busing would have kept a little girl from going to a good school:
There was a little girl in California who was a part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.
Briefly, Harris vaulted into second place, but could not capitalize on the momentum in terms of public support or fundraising. Senator Warren’s “I’ve got a plan for that” messaging earned positive media attention in the later summer and early fall with Warren tying Biden in the polls in October, but by November, Warren began to fade and, in a repeat of 2016, the Democratic Party frontrunner’s main opponent was Senator Sanders.
When the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary kicked off the voting, Buttigieg eked out a win in Iowa and essentially tied Sanders for delegates in New Hampshire, becoming the first openly gay candidate for the presidency to win a statewide primary or caucus. Biden began facing questions about his electability—the very factor he had been claiming made him the best person to be the nominee in the first place. After Sanders won Nevada on February 22, Biden’s campaign was on fumes. As the important South Carolina primary approached, Biden received an endorsement from Congressman Jim Clyburn. Clyburn’s endorsement carried weight in the Palmetto State’s African American community, and Biden won a convincing victory—and ten of the next sixteen contests. In early March, most of the candidates had dropped out. After Biden won the Wisconsin primary on April 7, Sanders dropped out of the race the next day. Biden went to work on unifying the party, meeting with more liberal contenders and adopting some of their issue positions.7
Around the same time Biden began to wrap up the primary contest, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the American economy. President Trump generally downplayed the seriousness of the potential pandemic, saying in February 2019 that the virus would, “like a miracle, disappear.” At the end of March, the president claimed that the country would be on its way to recovery by June 1.8
He was wrong.
The growing pandemic was infecting tens of thousands of citizens, closing down schools and businesses, and spurring a spike in the unemployment rate. By April 2020, the unemployment rate was 14.8 percent, the highest it had been since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began measuring the unemployment rate in 1948.9
Then, in May, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was captured on video murdering a Black man named George Floyd.10 Chauvin kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. Despite the pandemic, people in Minneapolis, and all across the nation, began a series of sustained protests. Biden spoke with the Floyd family and condemned the murder11 while President Trump called Floyd’s death terrible and as bad as it can get,12 but hastened to add that more white people than Black people are killed by police.13 Biden’s campaign adopted the pandemic response and racial justice as key themes.
The COVID-19 pandemic led the Democratic Party to delay their convention from mid-July—canceling the in-person event in Milwaukee, the largest city in the battleground state of Wisconsin (which Trump surprisingly won in 2016)—to mid-August, when they hosted a highly produced and carefully choreographed virtual event. The Republican Party held part of their convention as originally scheduled, in Charlotte, North Carolina, but the pandemic shifted most of the festivities to Washington, DC. The president even delivered his acceptance speech from the South Lawn of the White House, a highly unusual decision that was criticized for politicizing the “people’s house.”14
When the time came for the debates in late September, Biden had a six-point lead over the president. The first debate was plagued by dozens of interruptions and false statements—most of which came from President Trump. Critics called for the rules of future debates to change so that candidates’ microphones would be off when it was not their turn to speak.15 A few days after the debate, President Trump was diagnosed with COVID-19 and had to be hospitalized. The Commission on Presidential Debates announced the second debate would be held virtually, but President Trump declined to participate. Instead, the candidates participated in dueling town hall meetings, Biden’s airing on ABC and Trump’s airing on NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC. Both candidates squared off again for the third scheduled debate a few weeks later.
THE ELECTION
On the night of the election, it was clear that Biden would win the popular vote; he eventually earned a record 81,284,666 votes to Trump’s 74,224,319.16 Trump lost by more than 7 million votes, despite winning nearly 12 million more votes than he had won in 2016!
Of course, the popular vote does not determine the winner in the American political system. It was unclear on Election Day who won the Electoral College. On the Saturday after the election, the Associated Press and several other national media outlets declared that Biden would be the forty-sixth president of the United States after he crossed the threshold of 270 electoral votes by winning Pennsylvania. Biden continued to collect victories in most of the states wrapping up their initial counts—and engaging in recounts over the coming days.
How did he do it? This is a question we answer from multiple points of view in the pages that come. From a purely practical standpoint, however, Biden flipped Trump wins in Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Nebraska’s Second Congressional District (which Obama won in his 2008 election as well) to his column.
Despite clearly losing a free and fair election, President Trump continued to claim that the election had been stolen from him. On December 18, he demanded that congressional Republicans fight harder to overturn the election he falsely claimed he had won.17 The next day, he tweeted out a promotion of a rally in Washington, DC, to “stop the steal” of the election he had lost. On the morning of January 6, 2021, two weeks before Joe Biden would take the oath of office, Trump spoke at this rally, saying,
Our country has had enough. . . . We will not take it anymore and that’s what this is all about. To use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will stop the steal. . . . And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down. We’re going to walk down any one you want, but I think right here. We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators, and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.
Shortly after Trump’s speech, the joint session of Congress started the process of certifying the Electoral College vote certification. Prominent senators, like 2016 Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz of Texas, objected to certifying Arizona’s electoral votes for Biden, even though Biden clearly won. About twenty minutes later, much of the crowd at the president’s speech had made their way to the Capitol building, overtaking Capitol police and approaching entrances to the building.
Around that same time, suspicious packages containing pipe bombs were found at both the Democratic and Republican National Convention headquarters. Forty minutes later, around 2:15 p.m., the pro-Trump mob broke into the Capitol, breaking windows and climbing inside the building. Five minutes later, both houses of Congress voted to adjourn and take cover. At about 3:40 a.m., more than half a day after the Capitol was breached, Congress met in the secured Capitol to certify the election for Biden.18 A total of five people died due to injuries sustained during the coup attempt.19
Why do we use the term attempted dissident coup, not insurrection as so many news organizations and politicians do? We are bound to present to you what the best scholarship reports about American political behavior. The Cline Center for Advanced Social Research Coup D’état Project concluded that the storming of the Capitol was “an organized, illegal attempt to intervene in the presidential transition by displacing the power of Congress to certify the election.”20 We do no one any favors by watering down the severity of what happened on January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol.
The aftermath of the election leaves the United States as an asymmetrically polarized country.21 How we got here, how individual attitudes and behaviors are organized today, and what we should look for in the future will be described in the pages that follow.
THE APPROACH OF THE BOOK
In this fifteenth edition, we follow a question-and-answer approach by asking critical questions about people’s attitudes, behaviors, and perceptions of government and answering them with the best longitudinal data available. We focus attention on the major concepts and characteristics that shape Americans’ responses to politics: Are Americans committed to upholding basic democratic values? Who votes, and why? How does partisanship affect political behavior? How and why does partisanship change? How are preferences about diversity, equity, and inclusion related to individuals’ politics? How much does the flow of information—both accurate news stories and misinformation or “fake news”—in the news and on social media influence attitudes and political choices? How do party loyalties, candidates’ personalities, issues, and events influence voters’ choices among candidates? Throughout the book, we place the answers to these and other questions in the context of the changes that have occurred in American political behavior with respect to concerns regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion. We compare individual attitudes and behaviors by factors such as partisanship, ideology, race, gender, religion, region, education, and income.
To do this, we rely heavily on data from surveys conducted by the American National Election Studies (ANES). The ANES surveys, covering a broad range of political, social, and psychological topics and offering the best time-series data available, have been conducted during the fall of every presidential election year since 1952. Unless otherwise noted, the data come from this extraordinarily rich series of studies. We hope that the numerous tables and figures contained in this book will be used not only for documenting the points made in the book but also for learning to read and interpret data. Moreover, the ANES surveys allow students to learn how to interpret data over time. What factors in American politics have been stable over the past eight decades? What things have changed? How can we tell? That is, the tables and figures in this book serve as a gateway to data literacy and engaged citizenship. Students interested in asking their own questions of the data can also explore a much wider range of topics from the ANES at www.electionstudies.org. The data from the ANES and other studies are available for classroom use through the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (to see the full range of political studies available to the academic community, visit www.icpsr.umich.edu). An especially good introduction to the analysis of ANES data is a website at the University of California, Berkeley, that is open to all users: http://sda.berkeley.edu.
We have written this book to help students foster the building of professional skills and analytical abilities with respect to data literacy and an accurate understanding of American politics so that students can apply that knowledge to productively engage civically and politically, applying the lessons of this book to their own lives and their own desires for how our society should be organized and governed.
THE ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK
We tell the story of political behavior in the American electorate. Since a deep understanding of American political history helps inform our understanding of American politics, we engage deeply with evidence from the last seventy years of public opinion research conducted by the ANES to put contemporary findings into historical context.
We begin by analyzing the 2020 election in the context of the foundational beliefs required to maintain a democracy. Chapter 1 explores the necessity of free and fair elections, trust in government, and support for democracy over undemocratic alternatives. The opening chapter sets the stakes for the book, and the country, as U.S. democracy is in peril as a nontrivial number of Americans do not believe in a democratic system and democratic electoral administration. Readers will be able to engage critically with the question of whether American democracy is in crisis, in danger, or moving along as normal.
Chapter 2 pulls back to a structural view of the American political system during presidential campaigns, highlighting the critical roles of features like the state of the economy, presidential approval, whether a state is a “swing state,” how seemingly apolitical behaviors like getting a COVID-19 vaccine are related to state voting patterns, and why elections turn out the way that they do. Students will develop the ability to apply data literacy skills to interpreting how structural features shape individual behaviors in electoral contexts.
In Chapter 3, we describe voter turnout and other kinds of campaign participation in U.S. national elections. In particular, we pay attention to historical efforts to make voting harder for certain groups of people, in particular Black Americans, and to new innovations to make voting easier, such as the growth of early voting and voting by mail, that are currently being contested. Students will see how the rules of the game shape who is allowed to play and what the outcome of contests over these rules can be.
Chapter 4 is new to this edition of the book, focusing on the importance of unconventional participation in American politics, especially for groups who feel their voice is not being heard. While from an economic perspective not participating in unconventional activities is “rational,” we focus on how involvement in major events, like the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, hinges upon three factors: opportunities, recruitment, and politicized social identities. Students will begin to see how political behavior is the result of how contextual factors interact with individual-level factors.
Chapter 5 maintains our decades-long look at political party identification and change in the United States. We focus on over-time comparisons so that readers will understand both the stability of the party system and the dynamic ways in which party identification has changed over the past eight decades. In particular, we focus on how partisanship interacts with structural factors like the region one lives in and individual-level factors like one’s religious beliefs. Readers will get a rich description of how changes in partisanship and partisan identity have ushered in our current era of asymmetric polarization.
Chapter 6 explores U.S. public opinion, showing how attitudes toward some issues, like government spending, have varied over time and how contemporary issues, like support for the Black Lives Matter movement or the Green New Deal, array across factors like one’s partisanship and ideology. Students will also come to grips with the difficulties of measuring public opinion, helping them to increase their accuracy-motivated skepticism rather than their directionally motivated skepticism when it comes to understanding what a majority of citizens prefer on a major issue.
We live in a mediated democracy.22 Chapter 7 explores how the information we get from the news media, social media, and conversation influences what we believe, want, and do. We pay particular attention to the role that news use can play in fostering partisan polarization, how the media repertoires used by different groups influence what people believe to be true, and how perceptions of media use affect what we think of other actors in the political world. Readers will be encouraged to think about how their own media diets contribute to their attitudes and behaviors in the political system.
Finally, we close the book with an analysis of the determinants of vote choice in 2020, looking at the impact of both long-term and short-term factors. Many people have called for reforming the Electoral College, but students need to think through what impact any given reform will have on the electoral system. Students will put together what they have learned with respect to data literacy, theories of political behavior, and applying theory and evidence to contemporary politics to thoughtfully explain electoral outcomes in the twenty-first-century American political system.
NEW TO THIS EDITION
American politics has always been contentious. However, the changing roles of social groups, growing—both asymmetric and affective—polarization, historic protests for racial justice, and, of course, a once-in-a-century global pandemic are contemporary features that deserve special attention from scholars and students alike. As such, we have updated the fifteenth edition in the following ways:
· A new chapter focusing on social groups and unconventional political participation
· Multiple analyses of support for and opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement
· Examination of beliefs in QAnon and other false rumors and elements of misinformation
· Reports of public assessments of President Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and analyses of pandemic-related behaviors’ relationship with presidential voting
· Descriptions of postelection attitudes about the January 6 coup attempt, confidence in electoral administration, and shifting beliefs in democracy
· Updated longitudinal tables and figures with evidence from the 2020 presidential campaign
· Learning objectives at the beginning and study questions at the end of each chapter
Long before the Democratic Party primary season ended with Biden as the major party challenger to President Trump, the last two national public opinion polls of 2019 that asked about the 2020 presidential election showed the former vice president beating the incumbent by four and five points, respectively.23 Nearly one year later, Biden defeated Trump by . . . four and a half points. This book tells the story of what happened in between—and how structural, event-related, and individual-level factors can help us make sense of American politics, understand political behavior in the American electorate, and more effectively engage as citizens of a democratic republic.
NOTES
1. Cline Center for Advanced Social Research, “It Was an Attempted Coup: The Cline Center’s Coup D’état Project Categorizes the January 6, 2021 Assault on the US Capitol,” University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, January 27, 2021, https://clinecenter.illinois.edu/coup-detat-project-cdp/statement_jan.27.2021.
2. “Presidential Results,” CNN Politics, accessed June 23, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/results/president.
3. Hunter Schwarz, “Here’s How 2020 Democrats Announced Their Campaigns,” CNN Politics, February 13, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/03/politics/2020-dem-announcements/index.html.
4. Renee Klahr, Alena Sadiq, Domenico Montanaro, and Alyson Hurt, “2020 Presidential Candidates: Tracking Which Democrats Ran,” NPR, January 31, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/01/31/689980506/which-democrats-are-running-in-2020-and-which-still-might.
5. “Polls: Democratic National Convention,” RealClear Politics, accessed June 23, 2021, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/2020_democratic_presidential_nomination-6730.html.
6. E. J. Graff, “The New Rules of ‘Electability’ Mean Joe Biden Can’t Win. Guess Who Can?,” Boston Globe, October 9, 2019, https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2019/10/09/the-new-rules-electability-mean-joe-biden-can-win-guess-who-can-biden-can-win-guess-who-can/HznRjHMCRuhy0AOyWO7ZEI/story.html.
7. Adrian Carrasquillo, “Biden Adopts Sanders’ Agenda Items—Here’s Where He Aligns With the Left,” Newsweek, July 10, 2020, https://www.newsweek.com/biden-adopts-sanders-agenda-itemsheres-where-he-aligns-left-1517078.
8. Kathryn Watson, “A Timeline of What Trump Has Said on Coronavirus,” CBS News, April 3, 2020, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/timeline-president-donald-trump-changing-statements-on-coronavirus/.
9. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “The Employment Situation—May 2021,” U.S. Department of Labor, June 4, 2021, press release, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf.
10. Chao Xiong and Paul Walsh, “Derek Chauvin, Convicted of Murdering George Floyd in Minneapolis, Is Led Away in Handcuffs,” Star Tribune, April 21, 2021, https://www.startribune.com/derek-chauvin-convicted-of-murdering-george-floyd-in-minneapolis-is-led-away-in-handcuffs/600048324/.
11. Alana Wise, “Biden Calls George Floyd Killing ‘an Act of Brutality,’” NPR, May 29, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/05/29/865511082/biden-calls-george-floyd-killing-an-act-of-brutality.
12. Allyson Chiu, “‘Who Could Watch That?’: Trump Says He Hasn’t Seen Full Video of George Floyd’s Death,” Washington Post, June 18, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/18/trump-floyd-video-fox/.
13. Mark DeCambre, “President Trump Says George Floyd’s Death Was ‘Terrible’ but Says ‘More White People’ Die at Hands of Police Than Blacks in U.S.,” MarketWatch, July 15, 2020, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/president-trump-says-george-floyds-death-was-terrible-but-says-more-white-people-die-at-hands-of-police-than-blacks-in-us-2020-07-14.
14. Zach Montague, “What Is the Hatch Act? Is Trump Violating It at the R.N.C.?,” New York Times, August 26, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/26/us/politics/hatch-act-trump-rnc.html.
15. Michael W. Wagner, “Take Back Our Presidential Debates,” Isthmus, September 30, 2020, https://isthmus.com/opinion/opinion/taking-back-our-presidential-debates/.
16. “Presidential Election Results: Biden Wins,” New York Times, November 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/results-president.html?action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module=styln-elections-2020®ion=TOP_BANNER&context=election_recirc.
17. Amy Sherman, “A Timeline of What Donald Trump Said Before the Capitol Riot,” Poynter, February 11, 2021, https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2021/a-timeline-of-what-donald-trump-said-before-the-capitol-riot/.
18. Shelly Tan, Youjin Shin, and Danielle Rindler, “How One of America’s Ugliest Days Unraveled Inside and Outside the Capitol,” Washington Post, January 9, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2021/capitol-insurrection-visual-timeline/.
19. Kelly McLaughlin, “5 People Died in the Capitol Insurrection. Experts Say It Could Have Been So Much Worse,” Business Insider, January 23, 2021, https://www.businessinsider.com/capitol-insurrection-could-have-been-deadlier-experts-say-2021-1.
20. Cline Center for Advanced Social Research, “It Was an Attempted Coup.”
21. Mathew Grossmann and Daniel A. Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
22. Michael W. Wagner and Mallory R. Perryman, Mediated Democracy: Politics, the News and Citizenship in the 21st Century (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2020).
23. “General Election: Trump vs. Biden,” RealClear Politics, accessed June 24, 2021, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_biden-6247.html#polls.