In his masterful book Tides of Consent,” political scientist James Stimson explains that voters usually put a party in power in order to realize moderate change in a particular direction. However, once in office, parties regularly overstep their mandate, going farther than the public wanted. Other times, parties fail to realize the reforms they were voted in to accomplish, or pursue a number of much less popular policies besides.
As a result, the public tends to grow increasingly alienated from the regime it ushered into power, leading to shifts in favor of the opposition in subsequent elections. This is why enduring majorities don’t really happen in modern American politics: Voters are chronically faced with two choices, both of which resonate with them on some levels and alienate them on others. And once in power, for various reasons, parties often pursue the least popular parts of their agenda over those that have the broadest support.
The more a party misperceives its mandate, the more pronounced backlash it is likely to receive. Unfortunately, the Democrats already seem poised to badly misread the 2020 election, and it will likely come back to haunt them – sooner rather than later.
In a post-election press conference, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared that voters gave Democrats a “tremendous mandate … a bigger mandate than John F. Kennedy when I was in school, and a bigger mandate than others.”
A centerpiece of these narratives is the claim that President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris won a larger number of votes than any other ticket in U.S. history. So far, more than 78.1 million Americans voted for the Democratic ticket, with some final votes left to count. This does indeed surpass the previous record, set by then-Sen. Barack Obama in 2008, of 69.5 million votes.
However, President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence also beat Obama’s previous record by a healthy margin this cycle, pulling in 72.7 million votes to date, with their numbers also expected to climb.
As things currently stand, Biden is set to win about 50.8% of ballots cast. This is significantly below Barack Obama’s 52.93% in 2008, and even his 51.06% in 2012. Both are lower than George H.W. Bush’s 1988 vote share of 53.37%. Or Ronald Reagan’s 58.8% in 1984, or Nixon’s 60.7% in 1972, or LBJ’s 61.1% in 1964. You get the idea: Biden is very far from having won an extraordinary percentage of ballots cast.
In terms of the share of the total electorate Biden won – that is, his percentage not just of the people who voted, but of all voting-aged Americans — we see a similar picture. Roughly 31.1 percent of voting-aged Americans are expected to have cast their ballots for Biden when all is said and done.
This is very far from a majority of all Americans. Nor is it an historic level of support. Lyndon B. Johnson set the record in 1964, pulling in 38 percent of all voting-aged adults. And contrary to Pelosi’s assertions, Kennedy also pulled in a larger share of the total electorate than Biden and Harris are projected to win (31.8 percent) — as did Ronald Reagan in 1984 (also 31.8%).
In short, the electoral results do not show that the public is united behind Biden and Harris. Quite the contrary – they show that voters are deeply divided. Sure, Biden won a larger share of the electorate than most other recent administrations — but then again, so did Trump, whose vote share this cycle exceeds 9 of the last 13 winning presidential candidates:
Moreover, as you can see above, the margin between Trump and Biden was far from historic. As the Associated Press reports, “Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at New York University, has compared Biden’s still-growing popular vote and Electoral College margins to those of every winner of a presidential election since 1960. His finding: Biden’s win was right in the middle — tighter than landslides like Barack Obama’s 2008 win or Ronald Reagan’s 1984 wipeout reelection, but broader than Trump’s 2016 victory or either of George W. Bush’s two wins. The closest analogy was Obama’s reelection, which he won by virtually the same margin as Biden has now.”
In a nutshell, the ‘record’ in terms of sheer number of votes that the Democratic presidential ticket received in 2020 is a product of population growth. When we control for the size of the electorate, or even if we just look at the total share of cast ballots that Biden won as compared to others, it is clear that the incoming administration does not have an unprecedented mandate.
Indeed, even as Democrats won the White House, they may remain a minority in the Senate. Among other things, this will severely constrain their ability to rebalance the judiciary – meaning federal courts (not to mention the Supreme Court) will likely remain right-skewed for the foreseeable future.
Democrats have also lost seats in the House, a situation that’s only likely to worsen in the next midterm elections. When a party takes power, they lose about 35 seats on average in their inaugural midterms, which could flip the House to the GOP in 2022.
The state level results tell a similarly depressing story. Democrats failed to flip any governorships, while Republicans gained one. Democrats so far haven’t been able to take control of any new state legislatures, while Republicans took both chambers in New Hampshire. This control over most governorships and state legislatures nationwide will give Republicans a significant advantage as we head into the post-2020 census redistricting cycle: The GOP will be able to draw electoral maps in ways that advantage Republicans for years to come.
Many on the left have struggled with this apparent contradiction: Although Democrats are trending to have won the presidency by more than 5 million votes, the party looks like it will end up in an overall weaker position than before the election with respect to the other branches and levels of government — because many who elected Biden for president nonetheless supported GOP candidates down-ballot.
In truth, these results are pretty easy to understand. The public did not embrace Democrats this cycle, it merely evicted Trump. Indeed, although Biden’s victory was actually not historic, Trump’s defeat was; when a party initially takes control of the White House, they tend to stay in power for at least eight years. Going all the way back to the Civil War and the creation of the Democratic and Republican parties, the only true exception to this rule was the administration of Jimmy Carter. Until now.
Independents and moderates played a central role in this outcome. They had been uncomfortable with Trump from the outset. From 2008 through 2014, Democrats had been seeing consistent attrition with moderate voters and political Independents. However, the margins shifted significantly towards the Democrats beginning in 2016.
Democrats’ 2020 margin Independents was their best for any presidential cycle on record, going back to 1972 (when the records begin). Overall, it was the largest margin among Independents that either party has won in a presidential cycle since 1984. Their margins with moderates were also historic — not just among Democrats, but for either party — going all the way back to 1972.
Republican erosion with these voters throughout the Trump era was likely critical to flipping states such as Arizona, where nearly a third of all voters are registered Independent. However, precisely because they are not committed partisans, many Independent and moderate voters seem to have cast ballots for some down-ballot Republicans even while casting their presidential vote for Democrats.
And of course, the bad news for Democrats is that many of these moderate and Independent voters may shift back towards the GOP post-Trump — which could have bleak implications for Democrats’ electoral prospects in 2022 and beyond. Especially if the Biden Administration alienates these voters in the intervening years (as reflected in the chart above, Democrats saw consistent losses with these voters from 2008 through 2014. Apparently they had no love for the Obama Administration. It’s unclear Biden will fare much better).
In short, voters did not rally around the Democratic Party and its agenda this cycle. Mainly, they just rejected Trump.