[koolba]

This election should be a wake up call to entire country and Democrats in particular. There was no blue wave, if anything Biden has barely squeaked past the post.

If it were not for the pandemic I'm convinced the Trump turnout for this election would have produced results rivaling Reagan in 1984. Even with a pandemic he was able to drive more voters to the polls on election day than any point in American history.

[ModernMech]

> There was no blue wave, if anything Biden has barely squeaked past the post.

Trump under-performed his 2016 margins in 38 states, including many deep red ones.

[rayiner]

In an election where polling was showing him losing the 60+ vote in Florida. Hispanic people may not turnout for Republicans the way they did this year, but retirees certainly won’t be doing the same for Democrats.

Trump is historically unpopular among people in the suburbs. Biden won my county by 15-20. It hadn’t voted Democrat before 2016. And Larry Hogan won my county by 38 points in 2018.

[laverya]

Yes, Trump underperformed relative to 2016 - and yet the Republicans made gains in the House, and maintained control of the Senate. The fact that the presidential race is close enough to still be under contention days after election night should be evidence enough that there wasn't a significant blue wave!

[nobody9999]

>The fact that the presidential race is close enough to still be under contention days after election

There were a number of factors that pretty much guaranteed the delays we've seen, all of which had lots of press coverage long before election day[0]:

"There’s a good chance we won’t know who won the presidential election on election night. More people than ever are voting by mail this year due to the pandemic, and mail ballots take longer to count than ballots cast at polling places. But because each state has its own rules for how votes are counted and reported, some will report results sooner than others. Those disparate rules may also make initial returns misleading: The margins in some states may shift toward Democrats as mail ballots (which are overwhelmingly cast by Democrats) are counted, while states that release mail ballots first may experience a shift toward Republicans as Election Day votes are tallied."

[0] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/election-results-timing...

[laverya]

Yes, Trump performance decreasing as mail-in votes were counted was predicted. But people also predicted a lot more of a margin for Biden than actually appeared, and if we had had those margins the races currently under contention would not be. Sure, PA might still be waiting on another 100k mail-in votes - but if Biden was 300k in the lead, no one would really care.

49.7% to 49.2% is a HELL of a lot closer than the D+6 projections I saw.

[ModernMech]

The Democrats maintained control of the House. There were 435 seats up for election, and a majority went to the Democrats. In 2018 they had their biggest House win ever, so it's not that surprising that a couple seats when back toward the Republicans.

Senate control is still an open issue. There will be a runoff in GA in January to determine control.

The only reason this was under contention days after the election is that PA wasn't able to start counting their mail in ballots until election day. This was a choice made by the PA legislature. I don't know why. If PA was allowed to precanvas, PA would have announced like FL on election night and this would have been over Tuesday.

[laverya]

> so it's not that surprising that a couple seats when back toward the Republicans.

My understanding is that Republicans were projected to lose even more seats this election - in the 10-20 range - and instead gained seats. So yeah, surprising.

I'm not entirely sure how Georgia's senate runoffs work.

> The only reason this was under contention days after the election is that PA wasn't able to start counting their mail in ballots until election day. This was a choice made by the PA legislature. I don't know why. If PA was allowed to precanvas, PA would have announced like FL on election night and this would have been over Tuesday.

Well, maybe. PA still looks to be within 50k votes, and while it's possible that precanvassing would have allowed the election to be called on Tuesday night, the policy of accepting votes postmarked up to election night even if they arrived late would still leave things potentially up for grabs. And there's a LOT of close states this year. (And to answer "why", I believe it's to prevent vote counts from leaking before people actually go and vote)

The more general point that "If there was a blue wave, we wouldn't be worrying about states with margins of under 50k votes or talking about how control of the senate will be determined later" still stands.

[dragonwriter]

> and maintained control of the Senate.

That's kind-of true. They've definitely maintained it through the end of the Trump Administration, since when the Senate convenes it will be 48-48 with two vacancies to be settled by runoffs two days later, and Pence will still be VP. But as of January 21, the outcome of the two Georgia runoffs will decide the balance of the Senate.

> The fact that the presidential race is close enough to still be under contention days after election night

It's not particularly close, it just has an unusually hard to project due to the pattern of vote counts resulting from one candidate urging voters not to vote by mail-in ballots, large mail-in vote totals, and the timing of mail-in ballot counts vs. counts of in-person ballots in various states. Both by popular and electoral votes, it's going to be less close than the average election of the 2000s.

“Easy to project the winner” and “close” are generally correlated, but fundamentally different, qualities, and this is a case where the usual relationship between them did not hold.

[laverya]

Perhaps we're using "blue wave" differently. To me, a "blue wave" would be Biden scraping a win on election night and then solidifying it into a 338+ blowout, not "Trump wins on election night and then loses as mail-in votes are counted". Having a 50-50 Senate at best isn't exactly a "blue wave" either. (Which is what happens if the Republicans win NC and AK, but lose both the Georgia Senate seat runoffs)

[toomuchtodo]

Even the Trump campaign said their base of old, white voters were dying off [1]. In another 4 years, another 7.3 million older voters (typically conservative voters) will have aged out. The country will continue to turn blue [2]. Democrats still have a lot of work to do on messaging.

This was high tide for conservative votes. [3]

[1] https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2020/11/04/old...

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/20/a-wider-par...

[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/29/gen-z-mille...

[ThrowawayR2]

Not necessarily. Note that minority votes for Trump increased (even among blacks) in the 2020 election: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/here-are-the-voter-d... The Democrats really need to get on the ball and start listening to the public.

[toomuchtodo]

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) warned that President Trump should not concede defeat in the 2020 presidential election in part because Republicans will "never" be able to elect another president from their party again.

"If Republicans don't challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again," Graham said Sunday on Fox News. "President Trump should not concede. We're down to less — 10,000 votes in Georgia. He's going to win North Carolina. We have gone from 93,000 votes to less than 20,000 votes in Arizona, where more — more votes to be counted."

https://thehill.com/homenews/525063-lindsey-graham-if-trump-...

[laverya]

Trump appears to have done better with minority voters than any other Republican presidential candidate in recent memory, which will do something to counter the 'aging out' that you describe.

[toomuchtodo]

I haven’t dived into the exit poll data yet (by county, race, income, and age), but it really depends on which states those voters reside in. If they’re in states almost blue (Texas and Georgia, for example), it’s moot.

Florida is likely a lost cause (between conservative minorities and the elderly), but you don’t need Florida to win national elections (clearly). If the electoral college is done away with, it’s also moot, as there is enough popular vote margin at the national level to always go blue.

[laverya]

I don't understand your meaning. Texas and Georgia are almost blue at least partly because minority voters overwhelmingly vote blue, and the proportion of minorities has been increasing over time. Changing that vote share to 60-40 instead of 80-20 would do quite a lot to solidify republicans in those states.

And with Trump showing that it's possible to increase the Republican vote share among minorities... I'd expect political strategists to focus more effort there in the future. A self-fulfilling prophecy, in a way.

[toomuchtodo]

Across the board, the GOP would need to convert minorities to consistent GOP voters faster than the electorate conversion (where the electorate tilts progressive) occurs naturally due to older voters dying and newer voters turning 18 or naturalizing, and this conversion needs to happen even faster in states that are turning blue (to overcome sociopolitical demographic momentum). I will add that just because Trump was able to pull more minority votes doesn't mean the GOP will be able to do the same; different messaging. Someone supporting Trump is unlikely to vote for Mitt Romney (who is, imho, a reasonable conservative), for example. Also, historically, the GOP typically doesn't put forth public policy that is friendly to most minorities and immigrants.

Sorry my thesis wasn't clear, although I appreciate the opportunity to refine the message. Better to get the kinks out here before speaking to an audience IRL.

[laverya]

In general, a two-party system will evolve such that both parties control ~50% of the relevant votes averaged over multiple elections. Individuals might stick to their principles and refuse to compromise, but parties are not so limited.

Losing a solid voter base might mean that the Republicans need to change their platform to appeal to more voters, but it doesn't mean that they're forever doomed and will never win another election. Maybe that means compromising on abortion. Maybe it means immigration reform - but from the Republican perspective, and not giving amnesty to illegal immigrants. (And funnily enough, IIRC amnesty isn't particularly popular among LEGAL immigrants) Maybe it means pulling their heads out of their asses re: climate change, and running on a revenue-neutral carbon tax.

All of this means changes, but not an end to the party.

[rayiner]

Democrats have been saying this for decades and it hasn’t panned out and won’t pan out: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-is-losing-ground-...

> While older Black voters look as if they’ll vote for Biden by margins similar to Clinton’s in 2016, Trump’s support among young Black voters (18 to 44) has jumped from around 10 percent in 2016 to 21 percent in UCLA Nationscape’s polling.

> It’s a similar story with younger Hispanic Americans, a group where Trump has also made gains. According to UCLA Nationscape’s polling, Trump is attracting 35 percent of Hispanic voters under age 45, up from the 22 percent who backed him four years ago in the CCES data.

UCLA polling in battleground states shows that Black voters 30-60 are three times more likely to trust congressional Republicans that Black voters over 60 (21% versus 8%). In the 18-29 group it’s almost four times (29%).