This page contains articles and longer pieces of text that I have written.
I hope you enjoy reading.
The 2020 Presidential election was overwhelmed by one dominating topic: coronavirus, and what should be done about it. The situation in the U.S. was dire; it had one of the worst rates of infection in any developed country, with over 200,000 Americans dead by September 2020. Although the Republican President had resisted the idea, mail-in voting began to be implemented across the country to accommodate for the large swathes of the electorate who felt uncomfortable voting in person. Incumbent President Donald J. Trump came under intense scrutiny from challenger Joe Biden, the Democrats and the media, for a lack of Federal action in restraining the virus. Biden 'should' have won this election in a landslide. Perhaps no incumbent President in recent history had faced such an uphill battle for re-election, and yet, had Trump received just less than one more percentage point of the vote share in Wisconsin, Arizona and Pennsylvania, he would have won the Presidency. The technicalities of this will be clearly explained later in this article, but this fact alone is a testament to the strengths of the Trump campaign, and an indictment of the Democratic party after the failures of 2016. In this piece, I will argue that Biden's win was an exploitation of circumstance, and due more to Republican drawbacks than Democrat strengths. The Democrats also had key faults which prevented them from winning to a larger extent.
The circumstances — the national and political context — of 2020 were frightening, just as they would have been for any incumbent seeking re-election. As mentioned in my introduction, the coronavirus was a national disaster for which the President had no definitive answer to, and Joe Biden positioned himself as the candidate to solve this problem. Trump's passive approach to COVID allowed the national context to worsen for ordinary Americans — including for swing voters who may consider rejecting the incumbent candidate because of this. Also, Trump's passive approach, in my opinion, was detrimental to the character trait which was one of his key strengths: being proactive to solve a problem. It made him look less competent, and this weakened the classic appeal of 'outsider' Donald Trump over the Washington politicians. After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, protests began from Minnesota and spread to major cities in America. Violent demonstrations caused chaos, and Trump struggled to put this chaos to ease. At his MAGA rallies, he had used continuously vowed to make America safe again
— it seemed he was failing to deliver.
It's no secret in American politics that the electorate tend to choose the candidate they feel safest with. For instance, if Russia or China declared war on the United States, who would Americans want to serve as their Commander-in-Chief? In 2016, Trump may have won in the electoral college, but that election didn't take place in a national backdrop of disaster. Plus, Americans distrusted Hillary Clinton far more than they ever could distrust a candidate as mild-mannered and soft-spoken as Biden.
Donald Trump's campaign was weak. During 2019, and the start of 2020, I had actually thought it would be incredibly strong through the election season because of the financial factor; you would hear the headlines of the record amounts of money that the campaign continued to rake in. To Trump supporters, this seemed very encouraging for their electoral prospects, as they had been outspent by the Democrats in 2016. However, after Joe Biden rose in the primaries and received the official nomination for President, he began to outraise and outspend Trump by large margins. The strategy of the campaign also seemed reactionary at many points, showing that they were less able to influence the national conversation. After Trump's freefall
in the polls during the Summer of 2020, not least because of the chaos caused by coronavirus and the race protests, he demoted and replaced his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, during July in a clear recognition that things were not going his way. He made the U-turn on masks, calling their use patriotic
. His campaign was also able to use the national conversation on race and policing as a means to reject the progressives' demands to defund the police
, calling for 'law and order' instead. Although some Republicans were frustrated that these calls were generally no more than a series of block-capital tweets, it still helped him take a clear stance on law enforcement, where it seemed that voting for the Democrat ticket could risk 'law and order'.
Biden had perfectly fit the stereotype of the typical 'Washington politician', and the Trump campaign was able to exploit this. The continued tag line of 'Trump accomplishing more in 4 years than Biden did in 47 years' was, in my opinion, a smart attempt to dissuade the undecided voter from voting blue. The incumbent President tried to highlight the accomplishments of his administration to underscore his image of an effective leader in contrast to his opponent whom he labelled sleepy Joe Biden
. He also tied Joe Biden to China, and underscored his own success at securing 'America first' trade deals with other nations. The fact that many Americans believed that China was ultimately responsible for the pandemic was another factor that weakened Joe Biden.
Let's look at the big picture of what candidates Trump and Biden represented. The incumbent President offered a continuation of the successes seen from the first three years of his Presidential term in office. Joe Biden offered short-term security, in resolving the issue of coronavirus. Any Republican would have faced the same challenges that Trump did: the reason he didn't advocate for lockdowns is because it would have alienated the libertarians and government-sceptics that contributed to his Republican vote share.
Trump was built for something quite specific. He was an outsider, a man who wanted to strengthen the United States, primarily in terms of renegotiating trade deals. However, the events of 2020 didn't give him much to work from. Not only was Trump inherently unsuited to dealing with a pandemic which arguably required shutdowns, but his America-first agenda was undermined by the importance of the pandemic.
In my introduction, I said that Trump would have won the election if he'd got more of the vote share in three states (Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin), each by less than one percentage point more. This is because the mechanism used to win the Presidency, the electoral college, requires 270 E.C. Votes to receive a majority and win the Presidency. If two candidates are locked in a 269-269 tie, the vote goes to the House of Representatives and the Senate to elect the President and Vice President respectively. Even though the Democrats controlled the House, the Representatives vote in groups by their respective states, and this is presently in such a way that the Republican candidate would win the Presidency, providing all the Representatives voted strictly by party alignment. If Trump had won those three states, the 269-269 tie scenario would have played out. Note that this is dependent on faithless electors not defecting from Trump: the scenario where members of the electoral college change their vote from the way their state voted, meaning in this case that Trump may not have got 269 votes in the initial electoral college vote.
We've talked about the big and significant factors which hindered Trump and aided Biden, but there are a few smaller, isolated factors which had the same effect, all of which happened closer to election day.
The first Presidential debate on September 29th went badly for Trump. In my view, his idea of verbally dominating Biden to give the impression of strength was a good idea on his part. However, Trump went way overboard. I watched that Presidential debate live, and I swear, I felt physically uncomfortable just five minutes in, listening to all the interruptions and nastiness — for which Trump was mostly responsible. Also, Bob Woodward's book contained damaging information on the Trump Administration, in which it was revealed that both Trump and Pence had been informed, back in February, that the virus was deadly and airborne — which made their inaction worse, as seen through many in the eyes of the public. When Trump contracted COVID in October, this seemed to be the absolute proof that the Administration was either unable or unwilling to control the virus, which would have worsened the President's image in the minds of some independents.
Also, the one big factor on election day: mass mail-in voting. This is a type of voting which, in practice, aids the Democrats, as conservatives are generally more likely to vote in person, with liberals less so. In the end, turnout was boosted hugely because of this, bringing in any more voters to the electorate: some Republican, many Democrat.
Just think about how challenging those factors were for the incumbent President, let alone any Presidential nominee from a major party. And after all those factors, Trump still got 232 E.C. Votes and 45% of the vote share. He was still so close to victory — and much closer than he 'should' have been. 2020 proved that the 2016 election was not an aberration, and this is something that cannot be understated. Remember: after nearly four years of the Trump Presidency, all of which were highly controversial, and of which the last year was a national disaster, Trump received a very similar pattern of support to 2016. Now think of how the vote share may have changed if if it wasn't for the factor of mass mail-in voting. Obviously, most Democrat voters would have voted in person if they couldn't have voted by mail, but inevitably, some wouldn't have, and perhaps enough so to have flipped states like those three — Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin — plus more states that were close, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Joe Biden only happened to have had it easier than most, with the salient issues working against his challenger. Remember, he announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination in 2019, when no one knew of the impending doom the virus would cause; I really think, providing there hadn't been a recession or any other major disaster in 2020, Trump would have wiped the floor with Biden. Why? Two main reasons. The lack of a disastrous national context, and the lack of mass mail-in voting. Another Democrat probably could have won: someone who was more energetic, charismatic and directed. Joe Biden's promise was that he was the most electable
, given that voters were relatively familiar with him and he was a relatively low-risk candidate who was not in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, was enough to convince the party that he was the right choice — but I disagree. He simply wouldn't have been able to make a winning argument to the American people that they should choose him over a hypothetically successful incumbent. COVID was a godsend to Biden; it gave him an issue — a winning issue — to campaign on.
In the 2020 election, Donald Trump was able to improve his share with minority groups such as blacks and Hispanics, for reasons quite specific to the candidates and their campaigns. Although a gain in any single demographic could never help a candidate uniformly on a national level, it could help the vote share in a given state. For example, Trump said that the Democrats would implement a socialist agenda if elected, which many descendants of Latin American immigrants in Florida feared. This is how Trump was able to expand his vote share in Florida from 2016.
One of Joe Biden's key achievements in his political career was writing and passing his 1994 crime bill. Many black voters held a grievance with him for this, as it perhaps unfairly led to many blacks being imprisoned. Trump capitalised on this issue, and expanded his share of the black vote. He was also able to turn rural areas more Republican, but Biden had also turned urban areas bluer. Trump received a reduced share of the suburban vote from 2016, and Joe Biden ultimately improved the Democrats' vote share in the majority of states.
One of the most interesting things from the 2020 election, with respect to the House of Representatives, is that the Republicans gained seats, instead of losing seats as many thought they would — despite not taking overall control. Some Democrats who lost their seats to Republicans complained that voters had felt alienated by their Party, on social issues like race and policing. I would draw the conclusion that Republicans generally won on the issues, with the exception of managing the Coronavirus, and that this benefited the Congressional Republicans more than it did their Presidential nominee.
The Democrats must learn from this, in finding important and meaningful issues for Biden and Harris to align themselves with. They were elected to solve COVID. Once the virus is no longer a salient issue, they at risk of losing, and perhaps losing very badly indeed. Only time will tell what's going to happen in 2024.