Three hours after the first polls closed in the 2020 election, the broad national rejection of Donald Trump that many pollsters predicted has not materialized. Instead, there are the same familiar divides that have characterized American politics for a decade: rural areas across the country continue to offer big margins for the President, while Joe Biden has capitalized on the continued slide of affluent suburbs to the Democrats. But there appears to be a shift: Trump won the first big victory of the night in Florida, where his totals in Miami-Dade County, home to a large Cuban-American community, traditionally anti-communist and Republican, surpassed 2016 numbers of more than one hundred thousand votes, making up the deficiencies in other parts of the state. The race is tight and the results uncertain. But some patterns are emerging.
President Trump's strength among Latino voters goes beyond Florida. Democrats watching the early returns in Miami-Dade took comfort in the reminder that South Florida, with its Cuban and Venezuelan immigrant communities, is a very special place. But by midnight, it appeared that Biden was trailing Hillary Clinton's totals in Latino counties along the Texas border. The Trump campaign has focused on increasing its margins with Latino voters across the country since the start of the race, as the President has made anti-immigration talk a much smaller part of his speech this time around. So far, that strategy seems to have paid off.
Democratic hopes for the Senate have faded a bit. To win the Senate, Democrats need to pick up three seats if Biden wins and four if Trump wins. So far each party has picked up one seat from the other: in Colorado, Democrat John Hickenlooper beat incumbent Republican Cory Gardner, and in Alabama, Democratic Sen. Doug Jones likely lost to challenger Tommy Tamperville. Meanwhile, several key states – Georgia, North Carolina and Maine – look likely to return Republican incumbents to the Senate. We have a long way to go, but charting a path to a democratic majority is harder.
The Midwest holds the key. The most likely path to a Biden victory has always been through the Midwestern bloc of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the so-called Blue Wall that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016. One of the strongest arguments for Biden's candidacy was that he was also seen to win back those states. The complexity of voting (and vote counting) in the upper Midwest means we may not know the results in those states for days, but early results in other Northern and Midwestern states have offered some reassurance to Democrats who are still they hope Biden can walk away with a decisive victory. A key question: Will Biden's margins in the Democratic strongholds of Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia exceed Clinton's and be enough to propel him to victory?
There is not much adjustment. The final average of the fivethirtyeight.com polls gave Biden a national lead of about nine points, and those pollsters who calculated the President's re-election chances put it at around 10 percent — numbers that suggested a dramatic reorientation of American politics. Several hours after election night, this looks far less likely than more of the same: a protracted urban-rural trench war, with some strategic differences this time. The circumstances surrounding this election were very different from those of 2016, with an unpopular incumbent on the ballot, an ongoing pandemic that has killed more than two hundred thousand Americans and battered the economy, and a widely-liked Democratic challenger. And yet the same essential pattern holds true until now. The progressives' dream was that tonight could put 2016 firmly in the past. Whether Biden wins or loses, it seems likely we'll keep reliving it.
Read more about the 2020 election
- Live election results: see the latest updates from presidential, senate, house and caucuses.
- The New Yorker endorses a Biden Presidency. What should he do to build our democracy?
- Donald Trump has survived impeachment, twenty-six sexual assault charges and thousands of lawsuits. His luck may well run out if Joe Biden wins.
- What if Trump fights the election results?
- Here's what you can do if Trump pulls off a coup.
- To understand the path Trump has taken in the 2020 election, look at what he has brought to the executive class.
- Mitch McConnell's refusal to rein in Trump looks riskier than ever.
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