Trump’s Contrasting Usefulness
By: Eric Hensal
Tags: Trump, White Privilege, Republican Party, Election 2020, White Supremacy

Contrast

To borrow a metaphor from Trump’s pandemic expert — sometimes an x-ray or MRI alone cannot picture what a radiologist must see, and to improve images, a patient is given a contrast agent. These compounds interact with the x-ray or MRI to highlight differences in a body’s tissues and cast clearer images for radiologists to identify disease or abnormalities. Contrast in a body makes the present , but the hard-to-see, very visible. Without it, dangerous diseases may pass by unseen.

Left, no contrast. Right, contrast. Arrow points to lesion.

Donald Trump is the contrast injected into our body politic.

Proud Boys. Q Anon. MAGA rallies in pandemics. Trump galvanized all the racist, xenophopic, sexist crazy the Republican party had quietly collected and covertly weaponized for decades and brought it out from the closet. He energized the unappreciated backbone of Republican success and demanded respect for them from a GOP that had used them for generations without public recognition. The right wing loves Trump because he spoke truth to Republican power on their behalf and told the world that their white views matter.

So, pre-Trump elections, no Republican contrast. Trump elections, contrast and Republican brain lesions visible everywhere. The 2020 election results are an opportunity to empirically explore this contrast-dyed electorate and see who votes Republican where and why with remarkable detail. This is no call to obsess, yet again, about flipping white red voters to blue, but rather a project to understand the electorate and plan accordingly for 2022 and beyond.

Conjectures

While access to the complete final counts across the country is not yet possible, based on the results so far, these are conjectures about the election to consider.

The 2020 Republican turnout is their high-water mark.

Republicans voting against Trump still support the party that enabled him.

Republican turnout was the main cause of Democratic losses, not language or tactics.

Why the high water mark? Just look at county maps across the states. Ohio, for instance, has 88 counties, six large metro counties have a heavy throw weight, but those 82 smaller rural counties add up. And Trump wrung out those places out with up to an 80% vote in many counties. The Republican problem moving forward is you cannot perform better than those rates in rural counties and you quickly reach the upper vote limit with their smaller populations. A party can be remarkably sophisticated in data operations and targeting, but you cannot make new voters out of thin rural air, in spite of what Giuliani may say in court about Democrats.

Moreover, much of the unprecedented pandemic door-to-door Republican ground game, I believe, was done by and aimed towards white evangelical voters. A job in their wheelhouse, if you think about it. It was evangelicals who voted like their lives depended on it. Dana Milbank wrote a helpful piece on this point. In short, while white evangelicals are only 15% of the population, they were 23% of the electorate and voted near 80% for Trump. As Milbank summarized “This means White evangelicals turned out in mind-boggling numbers… it also means some 40 percent of Trump voters came from a group that is only 15 percent of America.”

Trump pressed hard to foster the panicked intensity of white evangelical support in 2020 that shepherded in a maximum of Republican votes. But, as visible as their contribution is now, white evangelicals are on the decline nationwide, from 23% in 2008 to 15% of today’s U.S. population. And as the Democratic Party suffered from union membership rate declines, Republicans face a similar loss of a shrinking base for votes and activism from a white evangelicalism declining at nearly 1% per year. This election, Republicans can see their red wave, having crashed, now receding from the shore. The GOP is by no means gone, but it has reached a vote limit that will only shrink if the party does not adapt to demographic change.

Democrats, on the other hand, have room to improve turnout. Cuyahoga County, Ohio, for one example, cast only 1.3% more votes over 2016, while the city of Cleveland within it actually cast about 10,000 fewer votes than 2016. Improved Republican turnout likely explains the small uptick. Democratic-targeted states turned out better, but there are states were votes are still on the table for the next election. Republicans do not have that bank of votes in reserve.

Republicans are still Republicans though. You can see that in the Pennsylvania results, among other places — Biden won going away, but Democrats lost 2 of the 3 statewide positions. Some Republicans voted against Trump, then switched red the rest of the way down ballot. These Republicans may have made an extra effort to vote against Trump, but they do not hold the party accountable for enabling him and will not punish it. Such voters rebelled Trump against for reasons that may be harnessed by Democrats in future elections to persuade them again to vote some blue. But Democrats must face the reality that any hoped for rejection of the party by Republican suburbanites is not happening. Some may find Trump objectionable, but the party will endure alive and well, and still beholden to Trump for the near-term.

Democrats lost seats because of Republican turnout. Progressives argue losing candidates were too moderate and social media deficient. Moderates complain about socialism and de-funding police. The truth will likely be that most marginal gerrymandered districts won in 2018 by motivated Democrats at the federal and state level were re-taken by panicked, high turnout Republicans in 2020. The left and center will argue, but sometimes a campaign can do everything right and still lose. The useful insight here is that these loses came at the high water mark. Democrats will not soon face a Republican turnout as high as 2020. Construct a campaign in lost districts next time able to overcome those numbers, and Democrats will win.

Conclusion

Trump’s contrast revealed exactly how Republicans win elections by weaponizing hate and fear to whip votes cycle after cycle, by saying that quiet part very much out loud to eager tweeters and enthusiastic crowds. Today though, we know where every lesion is and their sizes, precinct by precinct, because of his campaign. Even while losing, Trump revealed the maximum shape of Republican support in our country.

Democrats should learn that focused efforts, such as in Georgia, overcomes the best the GOP can throw. Every red state in 2020 likely drew its maximum Republican vote. That cost us seats nationwide this cycle, but shows us how and where Democrats can expand our turnout with clear targets to overcome top GOP performance in states across the country for 2022.