The NPR Politics Podcast - We Just Got Our Clearest Picture Yet Of How Biden Won In 2020

Episode Date: June 30, 2021

The Pew Research Center just released the most comprehensive analysis of the demographic breakdown of voters in 2020. We dig into the data and look at what it means for the both parties moving forward.This episode: Congressional correspondent Susan Davis, political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben, and White House correspondent Asma Khalid.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

We're the Jensident, a twang wave and grunge grass band in Berlin. We're busking right here where the Berlin Wall once stood. This podcast was recorded at 2.21 p.m. on Wednesday, June 30th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but we'll still be here in Berlin playing twang wave tunes and watching to be sure no new walls pop up. Enjoy the show. That's a nice tune.

They have some skills. Our listeners are so impressive. They really are. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House.

And I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover politics. And today we're going to take a step back and look at how voters changed from the 2016 presidential election to 2020 and how it delivered Joe Biden's victory. The nonpartisan Pew Research Center has a new report out today on validated voters. This is people they independently confirmed voted in the 2016, 2018 and 2020 elections. So, Danielle, before we dig into what the report says, you know, there's a lot of reports about the election. Why does this one stand out among the

rest? This one is known for being very accurate. It is known for giving us a better picture than those exit polls tend to give us. It looks at validated voters. Now, what that means, like you said, is that they go to state voter files, these records of who voted in each state. They go to these voter files and they say, OK, did this survey respondent that we're talking to right now, did this survey respondent vote in 2016? Did they vote in 2020? That eliminates one place where there can be some unreliability. Aside from that, this has other advantages over exit polling because it has a bigger sample. It has a better way of sampling. So let's get into the data. What are the top lines that are the most standout to you? So for one thing, we have to remember that this was a very

high turnout election. That's an important thing to keep top of mind when we talk about this. On top of that, what we know is that Joe Biden, of course, won the election by six points. And here are a few places he made the biggest gains. One is suburban voters, those voters that we talked about all the time leading up to 2020, that we talk about all the time leading up to any national election. He made big gains among suburban voters, particularly among white suburban voters. So Joe Biden gained among suburban voters, he gained nine points among suburban voters and nine points among white suburban voters. That is huge because suburban voters are just over half of the population. That is a very big deal. Aside from that, he made gains among men.

Our listeners have definitely heard me talk a lot about the gender gap in how Americans vote. And last year, that gender gap, which had been near historical highs in 2016, it shrank. Men, and particularly white men, swayed towards Biden as opposed to where they were in 2016. Women, meanwhile, swayed towards Trump. In particular, white women did, and we can get more into that later. But there are some really interesting things under the hood there. Aside from that, one more thing to look at, Hispanic voters. Hispanic voters significantly swung towards

President Trump. This was a group we were watching closely in 2020. Hispanic voters, Trump gained 10 points among them. Now, a majority, around 60 percent, still voted for Biden. But that is a huge gain for President Trump. 38 percent of Hispanic voters said they voted for him. Yeah. You know, I mean, I think that the gain among Hispanic voters is definitely notable. But to me, I mean, I feel like the story of the last couple election cycles has been white voters. I mean, I know we've been talking about this ever since President Trump was elected in 2016. But there are just so many white voters in this country. And so when you look at some of the gains that President Biden was able to make with white voters, specifically white male voters,

and that to me really helps explain essentially the big gains that President Biden saw during the 2020 election. Because when you look at other races, notably black voters, there really wasn't much of a change at all between how Clinton performed, how Hillary Clinton performed in 2016, and how Joe Biden performed in 2020. Does the report illuminate at all this growth in voters between people that may have switched from being Trump voters to Biden voters, or people who are just showing up for the first time to vote for Biden? It's really hard to tell much about what happened. I mean, yes, like we said, we had massive voter turnout in 2020. One thing we do know, for example, is that there was higher turnout among men and women alike, but men's share of the electorate went up. They grew from 45 percent of the electorate

to 48 percent. So that means that men's share grew more. And the question is why? I asked Pew, when we look at these composition effects, are these changes because a bunch more 18-year-olds came out and voted for the first time? Is it because people came in off the sidelines? And they said, you know, we really genuinely can't tell. One place we can tell, interestingly, and it's a sliver of the election, but it's telling from 2016, is that people who reported voting third party in 2016, that was 6% of the electorate back then. In 2020, it was 2%. And among those people who switched, they were much more likely to vote for Joe Biden than they were for Donald Trump. Oh, that's really interesting. That really holds up with a lot of the reporting that we did leading up to the election as well. I mean, I remember being out in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, speaking with folks who had voted third party. And by and large,

you know, you saw this evidence that they were leaning towards President Biden. So I mean, I feel like that to me is a really interesting nugget. And I don't know if it's just indicative of who was on the ballot in 2020, or it's actually indicative of independents now beginning to sway more towards the Democratic Party. Did anything in the report surprise you, Danielle, or challenge what you thought you knew about the 2020 election? Yeah, I mean, I would say that the gender gap, the fact that it didn't stay as big, that it actually shrank, is something that surprised me because it really did seem to be widening over time or at the very least staying wide. And there were so

many women I talked to out on the campaign trail who had been so vociferously against Donald Trump. There were so many men I talked to who were so vociferously for him. It is easy to glean from that, admittedly, anecdotal data that, okay, well, the gender gaps are just going to be bigger. That was not true. Now, the really, really curious thing for me is, okay, like you asked, Sue, is this about people sitting on the sidelines and coming in in 2020, or is this new voters? What happened? That is the thing I'm curious about, particularly with men. What happened that either made men stay home in 2016? I have no idea. That suddenly made them come out in 2020, particularly white men. What is it about the difference between those two elections? Was it a woman on the ticket and then a man?

Was it something else? Who knows? Similarly, what is it that made white women sway towards Trump? One very important point I want to make here is that an often repeated statistic from 2016 is that a majority of white women voted for Trump. According to Pew's data, that was not true. 47 percent did. That was a slight plurality. I know it sounds like I'm splitting hairs here, but it's important to get the numbers right. Because this year, a majority of white women did. And I'm very curious what's behind that as well.

You know, when we look at the gender dynamics that you're describing, Danielle, I guess the big question to me is that, you know, a lot of folks saw Joe Biden as this safe choice. When you talk to Democratic primary voters, they said that he, in their view, was the best candidate to defeat Donald Trump. He was an older white man who, it seems, according to Pew's data, was able to do better, say, with, you know, white men in particular. And the question that I have is that when you look forward to the Democratic Party and who's kind of the future of the Democratic Party, a lot of those folks don't necessarily look like Joe Biden. And so when a candidate who's not,

say, Joe Biden is at the top of that ticket, are they able to do as well as Biden seems to have done in 2020, specifically with white voters, specifically with white male voters? All right, there's a lot more to dig into here. So we're going to take a quick break. And when we get back more on this report and what it can mean for the 2022 midterms. Three years ago, a man with a grudge murdered five people at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Maryland. And now, finally, his trial has started. What we wanted to know was how did the staff who survived the shooting keep going? Find out in our Capital Gazette series from NPR's Embedded podcast. And we're back. And one thing the data in this report proves is the math by which Joe Biden won.

But one of the things I think about in 2020 is that Republicans didn't walk away from that election truly brokenhearted. They made pretty strong gains in the House. They saw a lot of what was happening down ballot and felt encouraged about their possibility of winning future elections. So as you read this data, did you see information about demographics or other groups that is reason for the Republicans to feel good about? Where are their growth opportunities? I mean, one very key number from this report is 38 percent. The 38 percent that this report finds of Hispanics who voted for Donald Trump.

Now, for me, that rings a bell because it makes me think of George W. Bush. George W. Bush in 2004 got 40 percent of Hispanic voters. And that, for a long time, has been a high watermark for Republicans and has made Republican pollsters I've talked to say, God, how do we get back there? Well, if this report is right, that's an if. But if it is, it appears that Donald Trump gained a heck of a lot of ground and made it most of the way back up there. So for Republicans, that's a huge deal. According to what Pew is saying itself in this report, the Republican candidates in the House received about 25 percent support from Latino voters in 2018. So I guess this goes back to, again, my question of how much of this is really indicative of the two men who are at the top of

the ticket in 2020 and how much of it is actually indicative of the two men who are at the top of the ticket in 2020? And how much of it is actually indicative of the parties writ large? Because in both 2016 and in 2020, you know, the Trump campaign did do outreach to Latino communities. You saw this in Florida, they did, you know, quite a bit of outreach, specifically in the evangelical community, you know, the Puerto Rican evangelical community there, they were going to churches visiting, they had a number of surrogates out there. And I guess my question is just that, like, I think there was an assumption that because of some of the president's kind of flamboyant language and rhetoric around immigration, that it would turn off a lot of voters within the Latino community. Again, if this report is accurate, it seems like it did not do that to

the degree that maybe some analysts had expected. But it doesn't seem like Republicans writ large are necessarily making the outreach to Latino voters. At least we didn't see that in the 2018 midterms, right? So we all cover the 2020 election. We've all been looking at this data and the coalitions, and we're all covering the 2022 midterterm. So I'm not going to ask you to make predictions, because we don't do that here. But when you look at who's voting and why, what are at least the questions you have or the things you're thinking about going into 2022 and how those elections could shake out? One question I have, and that this report did not cover, I believe because of sample size issues, is the divide that are related to church teachings, Republicans will be making a play for those Hispanic voters.

I'm really curious to watch Republican enthusiasm, because 2022 will be the first election that Donald Trump is not on the ballot in any way, right? 2018, even the midterms, it was a referendum on his presidency. And he really was a high turnout president, right? I mean, people were motivated both to show up for Donald Trump for him and against him. And I wonder what the electorate looks like when he's not on the ballot. And I think one of the things Republicans are concerned about is that are they a party that people vote for because of the party? Or did people just show up to vote for Donald Trump, and they're going to experience lower turnout? And that could hurt the party, especially in their efforts to try to win the House and Senate. That's an excellent question. So and I, I would say related, I'm

really interested in what's happening in suburban communities. And maybe that is related to your very point. Because in 2016, you saw Donald Trump do better than Hillary Clinton in the suburbs. And you've seen Democrats do better in the 2018 midterms with those suburban voters. And then you saw them do even better yet during the 2020 election cycle. And I don't know, is that just a reflection of the suburbs or suburban voters being turned off from Donald Trump? Is this like an aberration? Will they go back to voting for more Republican candidates? And I guess we'll find out, as you said, because this will be the first election where Trump isn't on the ballot. All right. That's a wrap for today, but we'll be back in your feeds tomorrow with what could be a pretty big news day. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress.

I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. And I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover politics. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.