Ah, election season is in full swing! Political ads in the air, campaign stop after campaign stop, continual arguing on social media, it’s a splendid time of the year indeed! For me, it actually is; it’s filled with happiness, anger, stress, enlightenment, sadness, and every other emotion in between. Because of the lack of down time I have to record a podcast, I decided to continue on what I was planning on doing, but via writing.
I’ll be continuing to monitor, update and/or create new articles on the election. The only difference here being I’m going to focus on Minnesota AND the presidential (and, perhaps a few congressional races, because there are going to be some fun races to watch). I’m going to divide these segments into two parts- the analytical portion, where I’ll be looking at campaigns (including strategy, messaging, etc.), polling data, and perhaps prior history in that district/state. The second part will be more opinionated- what my thoughts are, how I think things could go, what I’d do differently, etc.; I hope you all find this valuable and let me know your thoughts!
This is my first attempt at doing this, so there will likely be a lot of changing, different formats, etc., so please bear with me. This election season is essentially a trial in hopes the next (2022) will go better!
First and foremost, the presidential election. Needless to say, 2020 has been insane, and it just so happens that it falls on a presidential election year. Let’s break down what’s happening!
Trump (R) v. Biden (D), what an awful matchup. It feels like 2016 all over again. Now throw into the mix that President Trump has COVID (that in of itself is a major story, and no one outside of him and the doctors know his current health status) and the last two debates have hereby been cancelled. However important you or I view the debates, the data suggests they have little to no effect on voters (source). So I expect there being no debates really has a null effect on the outcome.
The messaging hasn’t changed much for Trump in 2020; a lot of his ads are attack ads, attacking Biden for everything from being radical left, pro antifa, raising taxes, and court packing. It appears from public opinion polling, these ads have fell flat. Trump certainly has lacked the same energy he did in 2016, but if there’s anything Trump can do, it’s turn those poor polling numbers around and fire up his base. Looking back to 2016, even after the Billy Bush video, Trump doubled down at the next debate and was still able to spin the video to work out in his favor. Trump is excellent at theatrics, and it’ll be interesting to see how he approaches the last few weeks before the election.
Biden’s ads have been focused a little less on attacks, and more so on policy. His ads have focused on healthcare, taxes, and COVID related issues. It’s hard to parse the effect ads have on polling, but Biden seems to be doing things right so far.
Next, poll numbers. They look dismal for Trump, great for Biden. Biden is up anywhere from 7-11 points nationally, as well as a nice lead in quite a few swing states. Polling numbers nationally don’t carry a lot of weight; elections are won at the state level, and there is no national popular vote, rendering these numbers almost useless. They are, however, still an okay metric to look at. They’re generally used to just gauge the room temperature of a particular candidate. As was the case in 2016, these numbers don’t predict a winner. We saw Clinton up big en route to election day, but ultimately ended up losing. Its easy to picture elections in the US as such: 50 individual elections (plus D.C.). I’ll put a link to a few polls at the end of this article.
I think the last thing I want to touch on is voting by mail, which has skyrocketed this year v. 2016. So far (as of October 12, 2020), about 5.6 million ballots have been cast. According to the United States Elections Project, at this same point in 2016, only about 75,000 ballots were cast. So far this gives Democrats a huge advantage- they have requested roughly double the ballots that Republicans have. However, looking at the ballots mailed in (for states that require you to register by your party), only 55% are Democrats. Of course, we are early on, about 3 weeks or so away from the election, so this number will change as we approach November 3rd.
Things are looking good for the Biden campaign, but I certainly don’t think its set-in stone that he wins. There are so many variables to account for when talking about electoral politics, especially when we are talking about a presidential election. During a pandemic. In a hyper-polarized society. Certainly, the polling looks great for Biden, but polls aren’t the be all end all of how an election will turn out. In 2016, there were a number of Trump supporters that either didn’t respond to the polling questions, or they failed to disclose that they were indeed voting for Trump. Will that be the case in 2020? My personal thought is yes, I think Trump supporters will be more open this time around, considering trump IS the president.
Another such reason I don’t think a Biden victory is absolute is the power of incumbency- the effect of holding public office, thus gaining favorable (or unfavorable) name recognition. Name recognition plays a large roll in American politics- big names like the Bush family, the Kennedy’s, Clinton’s, etc., generally get a nice bump in polling as people know who they are and their background. The counter to that is at the presidential level, between two high profile candidates, the power of incumbency can be watered down a bit, especially considering the longest a president can stay in power is two four-year terms. You see the power of the incumbency more so in Congress, where you have high profile names such as Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, and others, that can serve a number of consecutive terms and generally hold a higher position in Congress (such as Speaker of the House, Senate Majority Leader, etc.).
Overall, my prediction is Biden wins with a vote count of 290ish, a contest that will not be decided until a few days after November 3rd. Biden is polling too well, and there have been a slew of top profile Republicans coming out against Trump.