Photo: John Raoux/AP
Thomas Brown — a former Republican political consultant who is now a history teacher and writer — writes for America Unfiltered, the joint project of EA WorldView and University College Dublin’s Clinton Institute
The US Presidential election is finally over. While Donald Trump is still sponsoring numerous legal challenges, he has conceded to the transition process for a Biden Administration. On January 20, Joe Biden will be inaugurated as the 46th US President.
And he may have Republicans to thank for it.
The Republicans Who Abandoned Trump
Four years ago Donald Trump famously foiled the polls and Hillary Clinton in no small part, as progressive strategist Ruy Teixeira summarized, “because people switched from Obama to Trump”. The insrugent candidate pulled independent and former Democratic voters into a winning coalition.
That shift for a winning coalition is exactly what the Biden campaign achieved, but with Republicans voting for him — or at least not voting for Trump.
Republicans turned out in force this election. The expected blue wave never materialized — Democrats may have outspent Republicans 2-to-1, sometimes 3-to-1, but they have very little to show for it in Congres.
The GOP cut into the Democratic majority in the House. Even if both of Georgia’s Republican Senate candidates lose the state’s mandatory runoff elections, the Democrats will still only control a 50-50 chamber because of Vice President Kamala Harris’s casting vote. Their agenda will be severely constrained.
Every incumbent Republican governor was re-elected and the GOP won the open seat in Montana. In 2021, Republicans will control 59 of the country’s 98 partisan legislative bodies (Nebraska has a single, nonpartisan chamber), including New Hampshire’s House and Senate, flipping red this year in a state that voted Biden.
In a dozen states, Republican candidates for the Senate gained more votes than Trump. In Texas, more than 100,000 voters chose Sen. John Cornyn but not Trump. Two thousand West Virginians voted red for the Senate but not for the White House. Four thousand people in Wyoming, 15,000 in South Dakota, and 16,000 in New Mexico backed a Republican senator but not the President. Republican voters in Nebraska, Massachusetts, Maine, Colorado, and Arkansas either voted for Biden or left the top of the ballot blank.
In 5 of 11 states voting for Governor, the Republican candidate got more votes than the President, including in Biden wins by large margins in Vermont and New Hampshire. Trump had less support than Republican candidates for the House in key states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
In the once-reliable red states of Alaska and Georgia, the signs were even starker. Georgia’s House candidates had more support than Trump. So did Sen. David Perdue, even as he was forced into a runoff with challenger Jon Ossoff.
Trump did expand his coalition a bit compared with 2016, especially among minorities. More Muslims, Hispanics, Asians, and Blacks voted for him. The only group were he lost significant support from was white voters – the only demographic strongly favoring Republicans.
Yes, more people voted for Donald Trump than for any Republican Presidential candidate in history, but both in states he won and in states he lost, Trump was frequently the most unpopular Republican on the ballot.
