Although Green Party candidates continue to draw votes, consolidation around Joe Biden among Democrats has come quickly. Some of the third party “defectors” Democrats lost in the 2016 cycle have “returned” to the party. Due to negative partisanship, the negative emotions partisans feel toward the opposition party, turnout by the Democratic coalition (including partisan Democrats and independents that lean left) has surged in what I call the “Trump Effect.”įurther, the intra-party factionalization that plagued the Democratic Party throughout the 2016 cycle, powering Bernie Sanders’ surprisingly strong challenge for the party’s nomination, has been dramatically reduced as attention has shifted to interparty conflict. In a nation in the grips of a trifecta of crises- a pandemic, a racial justice crisis, and a democratic crisis - the president’s approval rating presents as a steady, flat line across months of chaos and unrest.ĭoing the Political Math in a Polarized Eraĭemocrats entered 2020 with a powerful structural advantage over Republicans for both the presidential contest as well as congressional elections. Yet, despite this once-a-century pandemic that has killed more Americans than all the wars since the Korean War and leveled a significant portion of the American economy, the fall general election begins almost exactly where it was before the pandemic occurred. Perhaps not truly recognizing the power of the “bully pulpit,” Trump unwittingly undermined his own administration’s efforts to manage the pandemic, and thus compounded the pandemic’s severity. Trump’s posture on masks, which ranged from dismissive to hostile, undermined the official efforts of his administration, which was simultaneously urging widespread use of face masks and compliance with mandates. Voters received signals from a powerful elite, the President of the United States. But in the United States, mask mandates became a “culture war.” The public’s widespread rejection of masking is highly conditioned on elite signaling. ![]() Widespread public cooperation with mask-wearing has been key for other countries’ ability to “crush their curves” and reopen without new waves. The severity of the pandemic has also been affected by President Trump’s politicization of mask-wearing. In states that reopened without controlling the pandemic, infection rates skyrocketed, depressing demand and revealing the limits of self-regulated behavior. The strategy was designed to achieve the goal of limiting the amount of time the economy would be stagnated. President Donald Trump’s pandemic response, driven by a desire to reopen the country quickly and avoid imposing mandates on states, made matters worse. ![]() a death toll expected to rise significantly by year’s end. As of early September, 6.4 million Americans have become infected and 190,000 have died. This summer has been marked with social upheaval over racial injustice and police violence, while a once-a-century pandemic rages unabated through most of the country, disrupting normal life and schooling for most Americans. ![]() In order to really understand election 2020, one must understand why America finds itself holding an election on the precipice of a mounting democratic crisis of a magnitude not seen here since the election of 1860, an event that sparked the American Civil War. Most analyses of the 2020 election will treat it as an isolated event, but this is a mistake because polarization now ties our elections together into one collective story reflecting broader trends in American politics. Nowadays, polarization and hyperpartisanship affect the electorate, not just elites, in part because voters identify the major political parties with particular ideologies and sort themselves accordingly. ![]() The 2020 presidential contest is the seventh to occur within this era of polarized politics.
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