Results and Resources for the 2020 Elections
COVID-19 Policy Update
2020 Election Edition
FRIDAY 11/13
Last week's election was a bit of a "crossover" episode when COVID policy intersected with the election. I've wanted to keep the daily updates focused on COVID news and not dive too deeply into the politics of election. But obviously the election outcomes have policy implications for COVID response, economic policies, education reforms, and many other issues.
So I'm sending out a special update tonight summarizing the election results with the White House, Congress, State Legislatures, State Chiefs, Governors, and State Ballots. I also included summaries and analysis from some of our partners. And finally, I clipped a few pieces of commentary that I hope are received in the spirit of prompting some thinking and reflection on the deeper societal and political issues that surfaced in this cycle.
Hope these are helpful and useful. Grateful for you and all your work.
--John
ELECTION RESULTS
White House:
Joe Biden’s President-Elect Acceptance Speech: Full Transcript
CNN's final election results map.
House: Democrats were expected to expand their majority but instead actually lost seats. Republicans have picked up at least 10 seats - each that won was woman, minority, or veteran. Democrats' House majority in 2021 will be the smallest since 1944. FiveThirtyEight goes so far as to say that Republicans are on track to take back the House in 2022.
Senate: The Senate looks likely to remain in Republican control, but we will not know for certain until the Jan. 5 runoff in Georgia. If Republicans keep the Senate, Biden would be the first president in nearly four decades to take office without his party controlling both chambers of Congress. That makes it less likely he would be able to push through large parts of his platform, such as tripling Title I or advancing a free college proposal. It also creates a challenge for cabinet and other senate confirmed positions.
Governors: Focus's summary of the Governors. Winner's below along if they appoint the State Chief.
Delaware - Gov. Carney (D) re-elected; Appoints Chief and State Board
Indiana - Gov. Holcolmb (R) re-elected; Appoints Chief and State Board
Missouri - Gov. Parsons (R) re-elected; Appoints State Board
Montana - Gov. Greg Gianfort (R) elected; Appoints State Board
New Hampshire - Gov. Sununu (R) re-elected; Appoints Chief and State Board
North Carolina - Gov. Cooper (D) re-elected; Appoints State Board
North Dakota - Gov. Burgum (R) re-elected; Appoints State Board
Utah - Gov. Cox (R) elected; Does not appoint education leadership
Vermont - Gov. Scott (R) re-elected; Appoints Chief and State Board
Washington - Gov. Inslee (D) re-elected; Appoints the state system of higher education board and State Board
West Virginia - Gov. Justice (R) re-elected; Appoints State Board
More important are the upcoming 2022 election where there will be 36 Gubernatorial races.
State Chiefs: Four state chiefs were elected into office:
North Carolina - Catherine Truitt (R) elected
North Dakota - Superintendent Kirsten Baesler (R) re-elected
Montana - Superintendent Elsie Arntzen (R) re-elected
Washington State - Superintendent Chris Reykdal (D) re-elected
State Legislatures:
Voters in 44 states voted on nearly 6,000 state legislative races (80% of all seats). Great MultiState spreadsheet listing races, outcomes, etc.
Democrats had hoped for a “Blue Wave” to sweep statehouses that Republicans had controlled for years, but just four chambers flipped. For context, an average of 12 chambers change parties during each election cycle.
Republicans are projected to have added to their supermajority total nationwide with supermajorities in 31 states (+1) and Democrats are projected to have lost ground with 19 supermajorities (-1, after one gain and two losses). So far, Republicans are projected to gain three new trifectas — Montana, New Hampshire, and Alaska — for 2021. NCSL says 2020 will see the least party control changes since at least 1944.
State Ballot Measures:
Great MultiState chart of each ballot measure, outcome, and vote totals.
Another chart of ballot outcomes.
TRANSITION
Transition Agency Review Teams: The Biden-Harris Transition Team announced members of the agency review teams. The Education Team members:
Linda Darling-Hammond, Team Lead Learning Policy Institute
Ary Amerikaner, The Education Trust
Beth Antunez, American Federation of Teachers
Jim Brown, United States Senate, Office of Senator Robert P. Casey, Jr. (Retired)
Ruthanne Buck, Self-employed
Norma Cantu, University of Texas at Austin, School of Law
Jessica Cardichon, Learning Policy Institute
Keia Cole, MassMutual
Lindsay Dworkin, Alliance for Excellent Education
Donna Harris-Aikens, National Education Association
Kristina Ishmael, Open Education Global
Bob Kim, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
James Kvaal, The Institute for College Access & Success
Peggy McLeod, UnidosUS
Paul Monteiro, Howard University
Pedro Rivera, Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology
Roberto Rodriguez, Teach Plus, Inc
Shital Shah, American Federation of Teachers
Marla Ucelli-Kashyap, American Federation of Teachers
Emma Vadehra, The Century Foundation
Also - Rocio Inclan-Rodriguez from NEA is part of the DOJ review team. And Robert Gordon - alum from Obama OMB, ED and College Board - is the team lead for HHS.
How To Survive Vetting: The Center for Presidential Transition has a podcast with advice on how to survive the vetting process.
ELECTION ANALYSIS
Election Impact Analysis:
MultiState's 2020 Elections (Governors, State Legislatures, Ballots)
10 Lessons: What 2020’s Elections Say About Our Nation & Future - another great deck from Bruce Mehlman
Exit Poll Compilation: From AEI Political Report examines exit poll results from 1972 to 2020, showing how different demographic groups have voted over time.
Top progressive groups - New Deal Strategies, Justice Democrats, Sunrise Movement, Data for Progress - are circulating a postelection memo that criticizes centrists for playing into Republicans’ “divide-and-conquer racism.”
Split Country: The NYT exit poll says 37% of voters were Democrats and 35% Republicans, with 28% identifying as independents “or something else."
Biden’s Electoral Edge Was Very Narrow: Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball:
We (and others) frequently noted the past four years that Donald Trump’s 2016 victory was built on the strength of a roughly 78,000-vote edge in three key states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). Flipping those states, which were Trump’s three-closest victories, to Hillary Clinton would have given her an Electoral College majority.”
“This time, Biden’s fate was in the hands of four states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia, that were collectively decided by about 97,000 votes (that number will change, and Biden’s edge at least in Pennsylvania should continue to expand while Arizona has gotten closer in later-counted returns). Give these four states to Trump, and Trump wins.”
“However, it’s actually more complicated than that, and Biden’s actual edge in the decisive states is really even narrower. If one gave Biden all but his three closest states (Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin), he would have been stuck in a 269-269 Electoral College tie with Trump.”
The Risk of Automation and Voting: NYT: "A more educated work force bodes well for future local economic success — and places with brighter prospects swung toward Joe Biden. Jobs requiring more education are projected to grow faster and be at less risk from automation. Counties where more jobs are “routine” (in the sense of being at greater risk from automation) voted strongly for Mr. Trump in 2016 and even more so in 2020, while counties with fewer such jobs swung toward Mr. Biden. Similarly, counties with a mix of occupations that are projected to grow faster voted even more strongly for Mr. Biden in 2020 than for Hillary Clinton in 2016."
Understanding the Shifts: Via the Economist:
Shy Trump Voters: POS has a great survey looking at who were the shy Trump supporters. One in five Trump supporters kept their vote a secret from friends.
Where the Polls Went Wrong: The New Yorker interviews Nate Cohn on the polling mishaps in the 2020 election.
"His biggest surprise: “The Hispanic vote. The swing towards Trump in Hispanic areas across the country is extraordinary. It was hinted at in the pre-election polls. The polls always showed the President faring better among nonwhite, and particularly Hispanic, voters than he did four years ago, but the magnitude of the shift was way beyond expectations. We learned that early in the night in Miami-Dade County, where no one had the President doing as well as he did. And it has proven true, as far as I can tell, basically everywhere in the country among Latino voters, to varying degrees. It’s true down-ballot. It’s not like this was just about the President. And I think it’s a huge and important political story.”
“And the second thing that really surprised me is the white, rural, Midwestern vote. The pre-election polls said that Joe Biden was doing much better than Hillary Clinton was four years ago among white voters without a degree. And those gains simply did not materialize. The results looked quite a bit like 2016 across most of rural America, and there were many areas where Donald Trump did better in white working-class areas than he did in 2016.”
Worried Pollsters Admit Huge Problem: Virtually every poll sampled too few Trump supporters, meaning there’s a huge sampling error the industry needs to reckon with.
COMMENTARY
Just Me: I've been reflecting on a metaphor I used to help explain the 2016 election that still seems relevant today. You'll remember the debate of What Color is The Dress? Those who saw Gold and White couldn't possibly understand how someone couldn't see it. It was clear. Obvious! And yet, many saw a Back and Blue dress who also couldn't understand how someone would see it differently.
That's the country right now - two sides that don't really understand how the other thinks, what they believe, or how they can't see something "so obvious." Jonthan Haidt's Righteous Mind (here's his talk at Google) still seems to provide the best explanation of some of the dynamics we've seen surface during the last two election cycles. My biggest fear is that we'll give up trying to better understand one another, which is easier to do when we demonize the other side.
Voters of Color Restored Democracy in America: Via America's Voice.
Latino Support for Trump Along the Texas Border: WSJ's Elizabeth Findell went to Starr County and Zapata County to explore why these overwhelmingly Hispanic counties broke so heavy for Trump (55 and 39-point swings toward Trump from 2016).
Democrats’ ‘Blue Wave’ Crashed in Statehouses Across the Country: Via NYT:
At the City Level, Progressives Flex New Power: The “blue wave” didn’t materialize at the national level. But in America’s cities, younger Democratic leaders and progressive policy ideas scored several big wins.
Why Couldn't Democrats Ride the Blue Wave? Charlie Cook:
“In my judgment, there was a blue wave building, a pretty big one, then something happened, like a fish getting spooked before taking a bite out of a lure. Too many of the most experienced political operatives in both parties could see it coming. My guess is that while a majority, albeit a small one, wanted to unseat Trump, they got skittish about giving Democrats unified control. Was the electorate willing to put Biden in the driver’s seat, but not give him the full tank of gas and a credit card that a Democrat-controlled Congress would provide?”
“Did the label of “socialist” finally give enough swing voters cause for hesitation? What about charges that Democrats were going to push Medicare-for-all, or pack the Court? What about questions of exactly what would be in a Green New Deal and what would it do to jobs during a fragile economy? Was there a fear that Democrats would or could not keep law and order, given the ‘Defund the Police’ movement?”
Did the Woke Help Trump? Interview with political scientist Ruy Teixeira, whose 2002 book with John B. Judis, The Emerging Democratic Majority, is associated with the idea that Democrats would prevail because of demographic change.
John Arnold: Tweeted some musings on the election.
America’s Next Authoritarian Will Be Much More Competent: Zeynep Tufekci - "Trump was ineffective and easily beaten. A future strongman won’t be."
"Trump ran like a populist, but he lacked the political talent or competence to govern like an effective one. Remember the Infrastructure Week he promised? It never happened. Remember the trade wars with China he said he’d win? Some tariffs were raised here and there, but the jobs that would bring relief to America’s decimated manufacturing sector never resurged."
"The situation is a perfect setup, in other words, for a talented politician to run on Trumpism in 2024. A person without the eager Twitter fingers and greedy hotel chains, someone with a penchant for governing rather than golf. An individual who does not irritate everyone who doesn’t already like him, and someone whose wife looks at him adoringly instead of slapping his hand away too many times in public. Someone who isn’t on tape boasting about assaulting women, and who says the right things about military veterans. Someone who can send appropriate condolences about senators who die, instead of angering their state’s voters, as Trump did, perhaps to his detriment, in Arizona. A norm-subverting strongman who can create a durable majority and keep his coalition together to win more elections."
What the Voters Are Trying to Tell Us: David Brooks:
"The first thing we heard from most Americans — since Joe Biden’s popular vote victory seems all but certain — is that Donald Trump is unacceptable. We live in a divided, dug-in nation, but millions more white evangelicals voted Democratic in 2020 than in 2016. Many people voted against partisan predilections to remove a man who is a unique menace to the foundations of this country. That is no meager accomplishment."
"The second thing voters told us is this: Separate church and state. We’ve long had political polarization in this country and we still will. But over the last few years polarization has transmogrified into something worse: a religious war. Trumpism and Wokeism are not equivalent phenomena, but they both serve as secular religions for their disciples. They offer a binary logic of good and evil, a cultlike membership experience, apocalyptic or utopian visions, witch trials for the excommunication of the impure and the sense of personal meaning that comes while fighting a holy war."
"If there was ever going to be a Democratic blowout election, this was it — against an immoral candidate with a criminally incompetent record. But Democrats failed to pull it off."
"It’s not policies that cost Democrats. The core Biden policies are astoundingly popular. It’s that they’ve built a cultural blue wall that keeps the other half of the country out, no matter the circumstance."
America Changes Course, While Remaining Very Much the Same: How the Economist sees it:
"High turnout did not, however, deliver the dividend that Democrats, as well as most analysts, were expecting. Since at least 2004, the last time a Republican won the popular vote, Democrats have assumed that high-turnout national elections are necessarily good for their party."
"This is remarkable when you pause to remember all the things that have failed to break the partisan deadlock in 2020. Over the past year Donald Trump has been impeached by the House of Representatives, making him only the third president in American history to suffer this rebuke. Covid-19 has killed more than 230,000 Americans and caused the economy to oscillate wildly. The country saw well-publicised killings of unarmed African-Americans by police officers, the largest civil-rights protests in American history and episodes of violence in some cities."
"Democrats seemingly have to learn the same lesson over and over again: that Hispanic voters are not monolithic and that a more welcoming policy towards immigrants does not automatically translate into more votes from immigrants. In fact, county-level returns suggest the best predictor of a swing towards Mr Trump was the presence of lots of Latino voters."
It’s Clear That America Is Deeply Polarized. No Election Can Overcome That: David French:
"Rarely in American history has so much happened and still changed so little. In 2020 alone, the House impeached the president, a pandemic killed more than 230,000 Americans and seriously sickened countless more, we endured a historic economic collapse, and a shocking act of police brutality in Minneapolis ripped the scabs off America’s racial divisions, leading to protests and civil unrest in cities and towns from coast-to-coast. Any one of those events would be historic and traumatic. All of them together have rendered 2020 uniquely painful for the American public. Yet, politically, it’s remarkable how these seismic events have led to very little political change."
"And so the nation’s politics look like a version of trench warfare, where massive effort is expended to achieve the most incremental gains and the emotional and financial costs of stalemate only escalate."
Americans' Rx for Nation Starts With Neighborliness: Pew Study
Unifying Our Country: From Psychology Today: How to bring Americans together.
"We unite the country by establishing compelling goals that all members of our society willingly commit themselves to achieve. Positive goal interdependence exists when citizens commit themselves to mutual goals that are compelling enough to ensure that all citizens will work together to achieve them."
"The country may be united through establishing a national identity as an “American” that binds all citizens together. An identity is a consistent set of attitudes that defines "who you are." Identity interdependence may be created by establishing a mutual identity through group symbols such as a pledge of allegiance, flag, or national anthem. Creating positive identity interdependence among citizens means that each person’s view of themself unites them with all others who have a similar national identity."
"Resource interdependence exists when citizens realize that in order to achieve their goals they must depend on the resources of others. Building a national economy, ensuring all citizens have the ability to communicate with each other, traveling from one part of the country to another are all examples of goals that require the resources and contributions of many citizens to achieve them."
The Left Still Doesn’t Understand Trump’s Appeal: Dismissing Trump’s supporters as racist is way too simplistic.
We Need to Talk About the White People Who Voted for Donald Trump: Via Vox.
The Most Important Divide in American Politics Isn’t Race: Via the Atlantic:
"The slight but significant depolarization of race didn’t happen out of nowhere. As the pollster David Shor told New York magazine in July, Black voters trended Republican in 2016, while Latino voters also moved right in some battleground states. “In 2018, I think it’s absolutely clear that, relative to the rest of the country, nonwhite voters trended Republican,” he said. “We’re seeing this in 2020 polling, too. I think there’s a lot of denial about this fact.” After this election, the trend may be harder to deny."
"Driving both the polarization of place and the depolarization of race is the diploma divide. Non-college-educated Latino and Black Americans are voting a little bit more like non-college-educated white Americans, and these groups are disproportionately concentrated in sparser suburbs and small towns that reliably vote Republican. Meanwhile, low-income, college-educated 20-somethings, many of whom live in urban areas, are voting more like rich, college-educated people who tend to live in the inner suburbs that are moving left."
What If This Happened Abroad?: From Politico's James Hohmann: “Imagine being a diplomat in another country, sending a cable to Foggy Bottom about what’s happening. Would be grim. Unpopular leader won’t accept election defeat. Parliament not challenging him. Defense minister fired, replaced by loyalists. Justice minister weaponizing law. Etc. Foreign minister insisting that there will be no transition, even in the face of other countries congratulating the opposition leader. Etc, etc, etc. Democracy is fragile. Institutions are only as strong as the people who lead them.”
Three Reasons Biden Flipped the Midwest: Via Politico - worth reading the whole piece.
Biden kept Trump from running up the score with working-class whites
Biden peeled away Trump’s support in conservative suburbs
Biden got Black voters to turn out in big numbers
What Does This Mean for Advocacy: Via Politico:
"Whether Democrats or Republicans command a bare majority — and Republicans still seem like the better bet right now — the margins are going to be tight. “We’re likely to see a return to the ‘three yards and a cloud of dust’ offense,” Bruce Mehlman, a veteran of President George W. Bush's administration, who's now a lobbyist at Mehlman Castagnetti Rosen & Thomas , wrote in an email to PI. “Slow and steady incremental progress though smaller bipartisan collaboration,” rather than big, ambitious bills such as the Affordable Care Act, the Republican tax law and the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation. “It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you can keep it off cable,” he added."
“Progressives may have to temper their expectations,” Invariant, the lobbying firm led by Heather Podesta , wrote in a memo to clients on Wednesday. “The left’s vision of a Biden New Deal, progressive tax reform, aggressive Wall Street regulators, social justice reform including policing, an expanded Supreme Court, and reforms to the Senate’s legislative filibuster may have to wait. A Biden-Harris Administration could face a closely divided but largely intransigent Senate in 2021, one opposed to confirming left-leaning federal judges and liberal political appointees and one bent on again blocking progressive policy proposals that emerge from the House.”
Powerful: This is how Ireland's RTE News ended a recent broadcast:
"US president-elect Joe Biden reads the words of Irish poet Seamus Heaney."
The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes - Seamus Heaney
Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.
History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
and hope and history rhyme.