Two weeks before the end of the 2020 election, Joe Biden appeared to be headed for a blowout. The FiveThirtyEight polling average showed him beating Donald Trump by 10.7 points, a victory that would have been the biggest landslide since Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale in 1984. And even as the polling averages ticked down a couple of points, on Election Day, they showed Biden up by 8.5 points in Wisconsin (he ultimately won by 0.63 percent), up by 4.7 points in Pennsylvania (where he won by just over a point), and up five points in Nevada (where he won by just over half that). Biden led in Florida and North Carolina (he lost both) and within a point or two in Ohio and Texas (states he lost by a lot). Democratic Senate candidates were pointing to polls showing them flipping Republican-held seats in South Carolina, Montana, and Maine (the party would go on to lose all three).
When Election Day was over, it appeared Democrats might have blown it. The Senate was out of reach, the House looked lost, and even the presidential race remained too close to call. While votes were still being counted across the country, the party would engage into rounds of recriminations over what went wrong. A conference call among House Democrats descended into chaos; moderates accused progressives of tanking the party’s chances over being associated with socialism and “defund the police.” Progressives responded that the party was too concerned with appealing to moderate whites. “How could it be so close?” lamented an op-ed writer in the New York Times. “Democrats,” wrote a columnist for MSNBC a few days later, “have spent the last three days vacillating between feeling certain the election has been a complete and utter failure, and holding on to fleeting shreds of hope.”
The feeling of hope would prevail by the end of the weekend, when Biden was declared the winner and final votes showed that Democrats would retain control of the House, albeit after losing 14 seats. But as Democrats now face the same opponent and head into the fall with polls showing a race far closer than it was four years ago, figuring out how Trump came so close back then and has twice outperformed the polls — and by a larger margin in 2020 than he did in 2016 — has become something that is of paramount importance to strategists on both sides of the aisle.
“In October 2016, when we were leading in the polls, Secretary Clinton said to me, ‘Ron, I’m worried about the hidden Trump vote — people who are Trump voters who aren’t telling that to pollsters,’” says Ron Klain, a close Biden adviser and his first White House chief of staff. “I said, ‘Hidden Trump vote? I’m worried about all the people wearing red hats that say Make America Great Again. It’s an affinity they are bragging about. People in central Pennsylvania are wearing the red hats in the same way that people in Brooklyn and Bethesda carry Whole Food shopping bags. It’s a self-identity statement they want everyone to see.’”
But if 2016 was shocking because few political analysts thought Trump would actually win, 2020 was almost as surprising even as the predicted winner ultimately won. The Trump years saw a pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and put millions more out of work. He was impeached. He had historically low approval ratings. The news was a constant churn of Trump’s corruption, incompetence, authoritarianism, and staff turnover. And yet, somehow, Trump got 12 million more votes the second time around.
“Trump’s voters are not for Trump’s record as president,” says Klain. “They want to make a statement about their own identity and beliefs — a vision of America that they want to stand for, publicly and visibly — whether or not Trump delivers. Their votes for Trump is a statement about themselves, not about Trump.”
Democrats are quick to point out that regardless of Trump’s overperformance in the polls, and regardless of how he seems to bring voters out beyond what most forecasters predicted, he still lost in 2020 — though one Democratic strategist compared the 2020 election result to a football team winning the Super Bowl 47-40: Congratulations on the victory, but spend some time in the offseason figuring out the holes in your defense.
Though 2016 was a political earthquake, it was seen by many political observers for years as something of a fluke: Trump was the least popular presidential nominee in American history, but Hillary Clinton was the second-least. She was under FBI investigation and could easily be caricatured as an out-of-touch member of the political Establishment. She did not vigorously campaign in the upper Midwest, which decided the election. Some voters thought the prospect of a Trump presidency was unimaginable and so felt free to register a protest vote. Trump’s whisker-away-from-a-win showing in 2020 revealed that his first victory had put together a durable electoral coalition with extraordinary strength among white working-class voters.
“Our politics right now are defined by three things: partisanship, polarization, and parity,” says Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. “Most people are partisans, and partisanship determines your political attitude more than anything else. People will change their minds on issues, even issues they care a lot about, like abortion, then change the party they identify with. And that leads to polarization, where Democrats hate Republicans more than they ever did before, and Republicans hate Democrats more than they ever did before. And then you have parity, which is that the two parties are basically even in terms of identification, which makes it very hard to move people.”
Part of what makes Trump a difficult opponent, ex-Biden hands say, is that even when he is saying ridiculous things and turning off swing voters, he is able to reach voters who do not otherwise follow politics. “Whatever else you want to say about the Trump people, they are really good at social media, they can be really good at the pure politics of dominating a news cycle, and they are really good at getting in the head of the average person,” says one former senior official on the Biden campaign.
During Trump’s tenure, traffic to news sites spiked. So did social-media engagement, subscriptions of major newspapers, and cable-news viewership. Democrats say that it is part of Trump’s ability to turn the otherwise boring back-and-forth of politics into a near-apocalyptic battle, one that keeps voters on both sides of the aisle on a low boil. That is part of the reason why the 2020 election had the highest election turnout of the 21st century, and the increase in turnout from 2016 to 2020 was the largest between two presidential elections ever recorded.
Michael Podhorzer, the longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, agreed, saying that Trump’s unique skill was to get politics to infiltrate all aspects of American life in a way most presidents do not. “It’s like people who don’t know what a line of scrimmage is, and suddenly they show up to your Super Bowl party convinced of what plays the Kansas City Chiefs should run,” he says. “Trump makes politics something everyone is talking about and something you can’t escape.”
That can cut both ways, though: Trump himself is the greatest turnout mechanism of Democratic voters ever created, which helps explain why Biden ended up with more votes than any presidential candidate in history.
Trump officials agree with Podhorzer’s analysis but say that something else is going on. As they tell it, as much as the media and Democratic elites are in a state of permanent dismay about Trump’s behaviors and outrages, they resonate with Trump’s base, the kind of voters who don’t pay that much attention to politics or answer pollsters but come out for Trump. (When he is not on the ballot, as was the case in 2017, 2018, and 2022, the GOP tends to lose and the “Trumpism without Trump” that Ron DeSantis and others in the GOP primary field attempted failed against the real thing.)
“It’s watching two different movies on the same screen,” says one Trump adviser. “The media is full of people who all think the same, and then when they see something that Trump says or does, they all think, Oh, this is terrible, and then the polling they see reinforces that. But the normal person in Wisconsin just sees something that Trump said and thinks, This is common sense, or at least says, ‘You know what, I am more concerned about my 401(k), let Trump tweet, I don’t really care.’”
Indeed, one consistent through-line of Trump’s life in the public eye is a belief that his time in the business world has made him a better steward of the economy than his Democratic opponent, even as evidence shows that presidents rarely have much sway over the nation’s economic output and that by some measures, the economy fares better under Democrats than under Republicans.
A late-2020 poll from Quinnipiac University showed that 50 percent of voters said Trump’s policies helped the economy, while only 30 percent said his policies hurt, a 10 percent improvement over the type of economic performance voters expected under Biden and a 6 percent improvement over Barack Obama’s numbers. As CNN reported, Trump’s economic record is viewed as one of the better ones for a first-term president over the last 45 years.
Trump 2020 campaign officials are quick to point out that for two straight elections now, the former president has vastly outperformed his polls. A race that is tied heading into Election Day, as this one is, favors Trump, they say.
“The average American voter is a whole lot different from the kind of person who obsessively follows politics,” says Bill Stepien, Trump’s last campaign manager. “They are not tuning in, and they don’t care; they are not paying attention until close to Election Day. And when they do, they aren’t paying attention to tweets or comments and controversies; they are paying attention to their bottom lines.”
Consider this year: Trump has questioned Kamala Harris’s racial identity, gone to a 9/11 ceremony with a 9/11 truther, mused aloud on a debate stage about immigrants stealing pets and eating them — to say nothing of being a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist and on trial for much of the year on 91 felony charges, all after trying to overturn the last election. And still, polls show a coin toss between him and Harris.
“I think polls don’t capture the kind of turnout Trump drives in rural areas when he is on the ballot,” says Klain. “His core voters are very enthusiastic, and what happened in 2020 is some swing voters in suburban areas who voted for him in 2016 did repudiate him and vote Biden. But the Trump true believers remain in rural areas and small towns, and they show up in droves when he is on the ballot because they see voting for Trump as a statement of defiance that they want to make. They are MAGA and proud.”
