Volume 18, Issue 4

A familiar framework for interpreting the politics of presidential nomination, built on an accumulating body of social science research plus the extended observations of experienced commentators, received remarkably little use in the day-to-day reportage of the Democratic and Republican contests of 2016 and 2020 as they unfolded. So this paper begins by sketching out the factional structure of the modern Democratic and Republican parties, along with the bandwagon dynamic that recurrently resolves their factional disputes. It then applies these foundational interpretive factors to the two most recent pairs of nominating contests. What results are four orthodox and recurrent stories that stand in sharp contrast to media narratives that were all too frequently a mix of incomplete basic understandings plus wildly overemphasized idiosyncrasies.

This article is a “first look” at political advertising in 2020. Spending on political advertising in the United States in 2020 obliterated records, and Democrats held huge advantages in the presidential race and in most congressional and senatorial races. In addition, all indicators suggest that spending on digital advertising continued to rise. Political advertising was largely similar in tone to past years and, in the presidential race, was substantially more positive than 2016. In addition, interest groups remained heavily involved in federal races in 2020, airing more ads than ever before, though their spending as a percentage of total ad spending was slightly less than in 2016. Political ad spending in 2020 may have been historically high because of the impact of COVID-19 on how campaigns could reach voters, suggesting that paid advertising may decline in 2022 and 2024, at least as a percentage of total election spending.

This article explores the causes for and the contemporary ramifications of the realignment of the American South with the Republican Party. Using the American National Election Surveys (ANES) Time Series Cumulative Data File (1948–2016), the 2016 and 2020 Blair Center Polls, and the election tracking data compiled by Richard Berg-Andersson and Tony Roza at www.thegreenpapers.com, the author first explores the role that racial animus, anti-feminism, and religious fundamentalism played in white southern voters’ emergence as the Republican Party base. Second, the author considers the structural advantages that this prominence in the GOP gives southern whites in the primary nomination process and to what degree these advantages benefitted Donald Trump in 2016. Finally, the author explores the influence of Racial Resentment, Modern Sexism, and Christian Fundamentalism on the 2016 Republican primary elections and the 2016 and 2020 General Elections.

What motivated Latinos to turnout in 2020 in the middle of a global health pandemic that has devastated their community financially, physically and mentally? How might we explain Latino support for each one of the Presidential candidates in the context of these crises? In this paper, we tackle these questions through an investigation of the factors that drove Latino turnout in 2020 and what might explain Latino favorability for Joe Biden and Donald Trump. To contextualize these findings, we compare these results to the 2016 election. We find that the most predictive factors of Latino turnout in 2020 were perceived group discrimination and mobilization efforts by campaigns and other organizations. We also find that Latino candidate preference in 2020 can be best explained by issue prioritization. Latinos for whom the economy was the most important issue were more likely to support Donald Trump. However, Latinos for whom COVID-19 and racism towards the Latino community were the top pressing political priorities were more likely to favor Joe Biden. These findings continue to shed light on the diversity and heterogeneity of the Latino vote and speak to the significance of outreach efforts by political parties, candidates and community organizations.

With the 2020 election marking the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, our attention has been keenly focused on women voters. Media coverage of women voters portrayed them as swing voters and focused on a small subgroup of women (white, married, mothers). I argue that women’s and men’s voting behavior in 2020 was highly similar to past elections and does not support the claims that women or a subgroup of women are swing voters. I illustrate the diversity of women’s voting behavior through analyzing the intersection of gender with race, ethnicity, education, marital status, and parental status. Even though women were not swing voters, women still play an important role in electoral politics, representing the majority of members in both the Democratic and Republican Parties and holding stronger attachments to these parties than men.

Religion played a prominent role in the 2020 presidential campaign. Donald Trump overtly courted white evangelical Protestants and Catholics, while Joe Biden emphasized his Catholicism far more than any Catholic candidate in American history. Did religion play as important a role in electoral behavior in 2020? If so, how and why did religion affect Americans’ voting decisions? We take up those questions by analyzing the religious vote in 2020 and the reasons why particular religious and non-religious groups voted as they did. We find that the religious divisions in the 2020 electorate were quite deep, but they were mostly unchanged from those present in 2016. Moreover, some electoral differences between religious groups are based in factors such as racial resentment, support for limited government, and anti-immigration attitudes that are not typically associated with religion. However, a key explanation for religious voting in 2020 was an old standby: the abortion issue. The religion gap in American electoral politics represents an enduring divide. The only changes were at the margins—but where elections are close, margins matter.

This study of the 2018 congressional midterms demonstrates how voting patterns and political attitudes vary across a spectrum of urban and rural areas in the United States. Rural America is no more a monolith than is urban America. The rural-urban gradient is better represented by a continuum than a dichotomy. This is evident in the voting results in 2018, just as it was in 2016. We found that the political tipping point lies beyond major metropolitan areas, in the suburban counties of smaller metropolitan areas. Democrats enjoyed even greater success in densely populated urban areas in 2018 than in 2016. Residents of these urban areas display distinctive and consistent social and political attitudes across a range of scales. At the other end of the continuum in remote rural areas, Republican candidates continued to command voter support despite the challenging national political environment. Voters in these rural regions expressed social and political attitudes diametrically opposed to their counterparts in large urban cores.

The 2020 elections brought to an end one of the most divisive and historic campaigns in the modern era. Former Vice President Joe Biden was elected the 46th President of the United States with the largest number of votes ever cast in a presidential election, defeating incumbent President Donald Trump in the process. The record turnout was especially remarkable in light of the ongoing pandemic surrounding COVID-19 and the roughly 236,000 Americans who had died of the virus prior to the election. This article examines the electoral context of the 2020 elections focusing on elections in both the House and Senate. More specifically, this article examines the candidates, electoral conditions, trends, and outcomes in the primaries as well as the general election. In doing so, we provide a comprehensive descriptive analysis of the climate and outcome of the 2020 congressional elections. Finally, the article closes with a discussion of the broader implications of the election outcomes on both the incoming 117th Congress as well as the upcoming 2022 midterm election.

Seth Masket’s new book, Learning From Loss: The Democrats 2016–2020 (Cambridge University Press, 2020) asks how the modern Democratic party absorbed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat and responded to it while preparing to nominate its candidate in 2020. Masket makes a persuasive case that the Democratic party managed its coalition and made strategic adaptations to its rules to help it win the 2020 election. In particular, he shows how competing narratives about Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss to Donald Trump played an important role in activists’ decision making in the lead-up to 2020.