Biden victory tempered by concerning signs for Democrats

As Joe Biden prepares to become the 46th president of the United States and the dust settles on last week's elections, attention is turning to the performance of both parties. While final results are still coming in and states have yet to certify the outcome, the main contours of the election results have emerged.

As expected, the increased use of postal ballots and early voting options meant it was not possible to call the result of the presidential contest on election night. Instead, Joe Biden was declared the winner four days later – after he built up a sufficient lead in Pennsylvania for networks to call the election.

As many commentators had warned, the concept of the “red mirage” came to pass – Trump did better in the early tallies in states where votes cast on election day were counted first; as more mail-in ballots were counted in subsequent hours and days, Joe Biden moved ahead.

Nonetheless, while Biden decisively won the election, this was hardly a blow-out victory for the Democrats. Yes, Biden won the popular vote by more than five million votes, but it was not a landslide. By comparison, Barack Obama defeated John McCain by 9.5 million votes in 2008 out of 131 million cast, winning 365 Electoral College votes in the process.

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In 1980, Ronald Reagan won by an eye-watering 16.9 million votes of 92 million cast, sweeping the board by winning 49 states – accounting for 489 Electoral College votes.

Analysts point out that such landslides are increasingly rare in today’s political climate where the electorate is more polarised and there is a smaller percentage of undecided voters.

And there is a lot that Democrats – particularly Joe Biden – can point to with pride in this election result.

The former vice-president's primary campaign was rooted in his conviction that he was the candidate who could win back the three rust belt states that deserted the Democrats in 2016 and delivered Donald Trump the White House – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

He was proved right, restoring the “blue wall” that appeared to be lost to the Democrats in 2016. Four years ago, Trump won those states collectively by just under 80,000 votes. According to the latest tally, Biden won them by a combined total of approximately 220,000 votes. His performance in Michigan was the most decisive of the three – he won the state by 146,000 votes, compared to Trump’s victory of 10,500 in 2016.

Rust belt

Drilling down into these numbers, however, there are some signs of concern for Democrats, suggesting that future victory in these rust belt states – so-called because of their past dependence on heavy industry – is by no means guaranteed.

In Pennsylvania in particular, Trump’s supporters turned out for the president. In Luzerne County, for example, a stone’s throw from Biden’s home town of Scranton, the former vice-president improved on Hillary Clinton’s performance, but shaved only 2 per cent off Trump’s margin of victory.

Biden did swing Erie County – one of three rural Pennsylvania counties that voted for Obama but then backed Trump in 2016 – but by just 1,400 out of 135,000 votes cast.

Biden's Pennsylvania win appears to have been based on driving up turnout in counties in the suburbs of Philadelphia and the Pittsburgh area. While tallies show he won thousands more votes than Hillary Clinton in these urban and suburban areas, the challenge for Democrats in winning working-class white voters remains.

Overall Biden’s strong performance in the suburbs was the big positive for Democrats in this election. From Atlanta to Pennsylvania to Wisconsin and Michigan, suburbs that once could be reliably trusted to vote Republicans swung to Democrats, boosting Biden’s numbers across the country.

His performance here underlines a growing divide in US political life – highly educated, white, suburban voters who once voted Republican for economic reasons are now voting Democrat, while the white, working-class vote in rural areas of the rust belt increasingly views the Republican Party as its home.

Suburban surge

However, there were limits to the Democrats’ suburban surge. Despite much speculation, particularly given hopes among Democrats that the high early-vote turnout there would benefit Biden, Texas did not turn blue. Trump won the state by 5.8 percentage points, though this was down from the nine percentage point victory he clocked up in 2016.

The result in Texas may reflect in part one trend that is emerging as the most concerning takeaway for Democrats from this election. While the suburban voter boosted Biden’s performance in the state compared to that of Clinton, the Latino vote did not turn out for the former vice-president.

A county-by-county breakdown of Texas shows that counties in the south of the state near the Mexico border swung away from Democrats in big numbers.

Zapata County on the Rio Grande voted for Donald Trump. Elsewhere, where Biden won, he did so by smaller margins that Hillary Clinton. Clinton won the border counties of Starr and Hidalgo in southern Texas by 60 and 40 per centage points respectively, but Biden won the first by just five points and the second by 17.

The Democrats’ under-performance among Latinos was also pronounced in Florida, a state that Biden lost in this election. He won Miami-Dade – the state’s largest county with a Latino-majority electorate – by just seven percentage points, compared to Hillary Clinton’s 29-point margin.

These figures are particularly concerning for Democrats in the context of the of US demographics generally and their impact on the political map. Hispanic voters comprise an increasing proportion of the US electorate. According to Pew Research, while 7 per cent of eligible voters were Hispanic in 2000, this increased to 13 per cent in 2018.

The prospect of more Hispanic citizens reaching voting age in the coming years had fuelled Democrat hopes the US’s shifting demographics would benefit them electorally (though the fact that more than 10 million undocumented Hispanic voters are not able to vote dampens the impact this ethnic group can have).

Hispanic vote

In fact, the 2020 election has challenged the widely held view that Democrats have a natural advantage among Latino voters. The Hispanic vote is of course not monolithic, and Trump’s strong performance among this group of voters in Texas and Florida may reflect specific situations there. For example, the two Bush presidents did a lot of work in bringing Hispanic voters into the Republican fold, while southern Florida has a particularly high percentage of Cuban-Americans who tend to vote Republican due to their antipathy towards socialism.

Finding ways to bring all parts of the Latino coalition into the Democratic camp will most likely be a priority of the Democratic National Committee, which is chaired by Latino Tom Perez, in the coming months.

As a recount commences in Georgia, Joe Biden's lead there is a big bright spot for Democrats. The state last voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 1992, and the party has long eyed opportunities to win the state, given the demographic changes that have taken place in suburban Atlanta. Former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams's efforts to expand voter participation, particularly in the black community, have appeared to pay off, and Democrats will be hoping that the high presidential election turnout will be replicated in January's two Senate run-off races in the state. Victory in both would give Democrats a working majority in the Senate.

Nonetheless, the tight margins in Georgia are a reminder for Democrats that there is no room for complacency. The year 2020 saw Joe Biden run against one of the most polarising incumbent presidents in living memory. If Democrats cannot score a decisive victory against Donald Trump, who can they beat definitively?

The tight margins in the likes of Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania suggest these states will be very much in play in 2024. The question now is, will states like Georgia still vote Democrat if a more palatable candidate such as former UN ambassador Nikki Haley is on the ballot in four years' time, or was the 2020 result a Trump-specific phenomenon?

Further, the Democrats may have won the presidency, but they suffered a net loss of seats in the House of Representatives, despite House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s hopes of expanding her majority.

Democrats may have unseated Donald Trump, but there is plenty of food for thought about the best long-term political strategy for their party as they prepare for the Joe Biden presidency.