Background

Analyzing data drawn from the 2020 ANES survey of the American electorate is best done with some knowledge of basic background information on the 2020 election and with some general understanding of voting behavior in national elections. This website provides brief discussions of both topics through the links below. Students who desire more knowledge of these topics than they find in these brief overviews should consult the suggested readings at the end of each section.

The 2020 Election

Every presidential election is different and has its own unique aspects. The 2020 election was no exception. In a year consumed by the COVID-19 pandemic, public health and the government’s response to a highly contagious and sometimes lethal virus became the dominant issue of the presidential campaign.

When the year began, unemployment in the United States stood at 3.5%—its lowest point in decades—making the incumbent president, Donald Trump, a formidable candidate for re-election. Yet, by April of 2020, unemployment soared to 14.7% as businesses throughout the nation closed in response to state government lockdown measures put into place to slow the spread of the virus. With the economy suddenly in peril and public health in jeopardy, COVID-19 upended the 2020 presidential election, altering campaign strategies, tactics, outreach, and messaging.

Trump’s general election opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, ultimately emerged from a crowded field of candidates vying for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Biden led Trump in nearly all head-to-head national polls throughout 2020. Although pollsters generally overestimated Biden’s lead and support, narrow victories for Biden in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia were enough to give him a clear Electoral College majority (306 to 232). With the victory, Biden became the first challenger to oust an incumbent president since Bill Clinton’s victory over President George H. W. Bush in 1992.

The 2020 presidential election began as many expected with incumbent president, Donald Trump, easily defeating a challenge from former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld for the Republican presidential nomination. Trump crushed Weld in early contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, and went unchallenged in several other state primaries and caucuses. On the Democratic Party’s side, former Vice President and U.S. Senator Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont emerged as the two top contenders for the party’s presidential nomination in a field that included as many as 23 candidates who qualified for at least one of the party’s presidential debates. Most of these candidates—including several governors, U.S. Senators, and other elected officials—dropped out of the race before even a single voter had cast a ballot. Several of these early withdrawals were candidates with high name recognition within the party, such as Senator Cory Booker, Senator Kamala Harris, and former U.S. House member and U.S. Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke. Other major candidates remained in the race after the voting started. In addition to Biden and Sanders, these candidates included South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Senator Amy Klobuchar, former three-term New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Senator Elizabeth Warren.

The large number of Democratic candidates was due primarily to the perception that Republican President Donald Trump was vulnerable for defeat. His Electoral College victory over Hillary Clinton was the result of a few narrow victories in swing states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Trump was also just the fifth president in U.S. history to win the presidency despite losing the popular vote. Trump, moreover, was not exceedingly popular. According to the RealClearPolitics.com polling averages, President Trump’s job approval rating never reached 50% during his time in office (his highest mark was 47.4% in April 2020).

Potential challengers were emboldened further by a controversial phone conversation in the summer of 2019, where Trump allegedly attempted to leverage U.S. military assistance in exchange for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announcing an investigation into one of Trump’s political opponents, Joe Biden. This phone conversation was reported to Congress, and the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives impeached President Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in December 2019. The Senate later acquitted President Trump of these charges on February 5th, 2020.

Nonetheless, Republicans still had good reason to be confident at the start of the 2020 election. Economic indicators—from expansion in the nation’s gross domestic product to a booming Wall Street to historically low levels of unemployment—all suggested a favorable electoral environment for the incumbent president. Indeed, several electoral forecasting models—from Moody’s Analytics to some prominent academics—predicted a Trump victory based largely on the strength of the U.S. economy at the start of 2020.

Aside from the economy, Trump’s prospects of victory appeared bright because there was no clear frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination. The first contest, the Iowa caucuses on February 3rd, did very little to clarify which candidate would lead the Democratic Party’s ticket, as technical difficulties in the vote reporting system led to multiple days of confusion. On February 6th, Iowa Democrats announced that Bernie Sanders had won the most votes, but Pete Buttigieg secured more delegates. Elizabeth Warren finished in third place and Joe Biden placed a disappointing fourth in the voting.

In the next two contests, Bernie Sanders swept New Hampshire and Nevada, while Joe Biden continued to have disappointing performances, placing fifth in New Hampshire and fourth in Nevada. Following Sanders’ dominant performance in Nevada, many political pundits considered him the frontrunner for the nomination considering he had won the popular vote in each of the first three contests, and his margins of victory were increasing. The day after his decisive win in Nevada, February 23rd, the RealClearPolitics.com betting odds had Bernie Sanders leading at 56.9%, followed by Michael Bloomberg (21.8%), Pete Buttigieg (10.7%), and Joe Biden (9.1%).

The contest turned very quickly when Joe Biden, riding the strong public endorsement from South Carolina Representative and House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, won the important South Carolina primary with 48.7% of the vote. Bernie Sanders, who many pollsters had predicted to win in South Carolina, finished a distant second place with 19.8% of the vote. This win convinced many Democratic voters that Joe Biden was the favorite among African American voters and the strongest candidate to defeat Donald Trump. Three days after the South Carolina primary, Biden won 10 out of 14 state contests on Super Tuesday, including an unexpected victory in rival Elizabeth Warren’s home state of Massachusetts. The day after Super Tuesday, March 4, the betting odds for Biden to win the nomination soared to 83.6%. Biden soon became the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party.

Following Biden’s Super Tuesday victories, President Trump focused his attacks on the former Vice President. Referring to him as “Sleepy Joe,” Trump openly questioned Biden’s mental acuity and fitness, stating at one campaign rally, “[H]e doesn’t even know where he is or what he’s doing or what office he’s running for.” Biden countered that he would bring a very different tone and demeanor to the White House, stating in a speech to his supporters on March 10th, 2020, “Replacing a president who demeans and demonizes people with a president who believes in empathy, compassion and respect for everyone, it is my hope that today’s divisiveness will soon be over.”

These early battlelines, however, soon became overshadowed by the COVID-19 pandemic. As the number of Americans infected with COVID-19 increased sharply in March, California became the first state in the nation to issue a statewide “stay-at-home” order. Soon afterward, businesses across the nation closed, leading to a dramatic increase in unemployment. Daycare centers, schools, and universities were forced to shut their doors, creating major disruptions in childcare and education for students from kindergarten through college. Sporting events and other forms of outdoor entertainment were canceled. When people did leave their homes and residences, new practices such as social distancing and wearing face coverings soon became a normal part of everyday life.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic forced significant changes to political campaigning. Campaign rallies and events were halted throughout the spring months, forcing candidates to reach supporters and donors exclusively through digital and online platforms. Party conventions, scheduled for August, shifted many of their activities to the virtual realm. State and local governments scrambled to find safe alternative ways to allow people to receive, cast, and submit their ballots. Presidential debates required a limited and socially distanced audience, and excluded the opening handshake between the candidates. Apart from 30-second campaign commercials, which remained ever-present in battleground states, campaigning in the 2020 election was anything but typical.

In this unusual environment, the Biden campaign drew its contrast to the Trump campaign by promising a return to decency in the White House and to unite a polarized nation. Biden further took aim at the president’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Trump campaign, by comparison, focused its message on restoring law and order in U.S. cities following a summer of national protest sparked by the death of George Floyd (i.e., an African American man who lost his life after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes for suspicion of using a counterfeit $20 bill). As Trump remarked to a crowd of supporters, “The people of this country want and demand law and order” and that if Biden were to defeat him, “the suburbs would be gone.” Trump also attacked Biden and congressional Democrats as “socialists” and returned to appearing at live campaign rallies in the closing weeks of the election in effort to excite and mobilize his base of supporters.

By the final week of the election, Biden led Trump in national polls by an average margin of 7 percentage points. Election forecasters at FiveThirtyEight.com, showed Biden winning 89 of 100 simulations. Nonetheless, Trump’s upset victory over Hillary Clinton four years earlier had defied the predictions of most pollsters and forecasters, giving Republicans some hope heading into Election Day that another surprise outcome could be in order.

Campaign Issues and Candidate Positions
Campaign Strategies and Developments

Voting Behavior

The most interesting questions about an election are not concerned with who won, but with why people voted the way that they did or what the implications of the results are. These questions are not always easily answered, and interpretations of an election often differ. Looking only at the campaign events and the behavior of the candidates will not tell us why people voted the way that they did. Even polling data reported in the media may not provide a complete explanation. To understand the behavior of the electorate in a given election, we must blend knowledge of the features of the election with a more general theoretical understanding of electoral behavior. We therefore need to discuss basic concepts and ideas used in the study of voting behavior as a basis for analyzing the 2020 results.

Two major concerns characterize the study of electoral behavior. One concern is with explaining the election result by identifying the sources of individual voting behavior. With this approach, we attempt to understand the election outcome by understanding how and why the voters made up their minds. Another major concern in voting research emphasizes changes in voting patterns over time, usually with an attempt to determine what the election results tell us about the direction in which American politics is moving. In this case, we focus on the dynamics of electoral behavior, especially in terms of present and future developments. These two concerns are complementary, not contradictory, but they do emphasize different sets of research questions. For our purposes, these two concerns provide a useful basis for discussing key aspects of voting behavior.

On what basis do voters decide how they will cast their ballot? Several basic factors can be identified as reasons for choosing a candidate in a presidential election. A voter may choose a candidate based on one or more of the following considerations:

When voters are asked what they like or dislike about a specific candidate—i.e., what might make them vote for or against that candidate—most of their responses fall into one of those three categories.

These orientations and evaluations in turn are influenced by two more general attitudinal factors:

  • Party identification
  • General ideological dispositions

Party identification and ideology are more general, long-run factors that influence voting behavior primarily by affecting the attitudes that are more immediate to the vote decision in a particular year.

The various factors that influence the vote decision vary in their stability over time. Evaluations of candidate qualities and government performance are distinctly short-term forces, capable of substantial shifts from one election to the next. Party identification and ideology are much more stable in the short term. Not many voters change their party identification or ideology from one election to the next, and the changes that do occur often are small ones. Issue orientations fall in between. While the specific issues crucial in presidential elections can change dramatically, as can how the voters evaluate the presidential candidates on the issues, many basic policy questions (e.g., defense spending, social welfare programs, abortion) stretch across several elections, with partisan differences remaining relatively constant.

The various attitudes and orientations that influence voting behavior in presidential elections are interrelated. Understanding the interrelationships among attitudes and orientations is important for a full understanding of voting behavior.

Election results change, often dramatically. A clear victory for one party may be followed by a defeat for that party in the following election. Electoral changes can be divided into two types: short-term and long-term. Short-term changes are the result of fluctuations in factors that are specific to an election, such as the characteristics of the candidates or the condition of the economy. These short-term factors may be moderately favorable to the Democrats in one election, strongly favorable to the Republicans in another, and evenly divided in a third.

Long-term shifts result from alterations in basic partisan loyalties and represent changes that last beyond a particular election. The most significant long-term change occurs when there is a critical realignment of the party system, which refers to a rapid, fundamental, and durable alteration in the pattern of party loyalties held by the electorate (Burnham 1970, 1-10; Sundquist 1983, 1-14). Critical realignments occur infrequently; the last major upheaval of the party system occurred in the 1930s, and before that in the 1890s and 1850s. Changes in the party system since the end of World War II have not been as rapid and dramatic as what occurred during these earlier critical realignments, though the American political party system has been significantly altered over the past several decades.

The New Deal realignment of the 1930s reshaped the American political party system. Some of the current differences between the parties can be traced back to this realignment. However, there have been important developments since the 1930s that have altered the nature of the party system. The more recent developments have not been as sweeping in their scope nor as abrupt in their effect as what occurred in the 1930s, but the cumulative impact of these developments has been substantial.

A number of attitudinal and social factors are related to individual voting behavior. Among attitudinal factors, assessments of the character traits of the candidates, evaluations of government performance, orientations on specific policy issues, party identification, and ideology are the primary determinants of candidate choice. For demographic or social factors, race, religion, socio-economic status, gender, marital status, and age appear to be the characteristics that have most closely related to voting over the past several decades. Examining how these factors are related to the vote in particular elections both allows us to explain individual election outcomes and to understand electoral dynamics.

A good introductory discussion of elections and voting is:

  • William H. Flanigan, Nancy H. Zingale, Elizabeth A. Theiss-Morse, and Michael W. Wagner. 2018. Political Behavior of the American Electorate, 14th ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ Press.

A somewhat more advanced overview of the factors that affect voting behavior is:

  • Aldrich, John H., Jamie Carson, Brad T. Gomez, and David W. Rhode. 2018. Change and Continuity in the 2016 Elections. Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ Press.

References