Presidential election years sometimes feature major news shocks, such as the 2008 financial crisis or the 1979-80 Iranian hostage mess. But 2020’s turmoil exceeds any since at least 1968. Even so, some generalities about the elections held up well, including:
- Despite the unique awfulness of Donald Trump, in essence this would be a party-vs.-party election.
- Democrats should emphasize that democracy itself was at risk.
- Republicans would accuse Democrats of being crazy extremists, and …
- … Democrats would and should do the same about Republicans.
Many specifics, however, could not have been predicted, without foreknowledge of the events on which they were based. In particular:
- COVID-19, and Trump’s astonishing falsehoods about it, created a much stronger “extremist science denier(s)” argument than had seemed likely based on environmental issues alone. The successful centrality of “science” to election messaging was one of Democrats’ big positive election surprises.
- The COVID-19 fiasco fit very well into the healthcare and economic justice stories Democrats anyway wanted to tell.
- Republicans hit back hard, however, painting pro-lockdown (or just pro-mask) Democrats as the supposed true extremists.
- Racial justice protests, especially when they turned into riots, looked like extremism to many Republican voters. The widely misunderstood slogan “defund the police” supported such impressions.
- Trump’s and his Administration’s opposition to the protests looked like dictatorship and/or extremism to many Democratic voters. (This was especially true of the Lafayette Park debacle.)
- Supreme Court battles looked like extremism to Republican and Democratic partisans alike. Democrats also sensed an anti-democratic stench in how the Amy Coney Barrett nomination was rushed through, and the contrast between that and the blocking of Merrick Garland.
- Republicans cobbled together a fairly persuasive pitch of “No, they’re the authoritarians” from ingredients that included COVID rules (masks, lockdowns), culture-war gripes, and of course the socialism-ends-freedom trope that dates back at least to Ronald Reagan’s 1961 attack on “socialized medicine”.
Where Democratic messaging got messed up was around the economy.
- Trump claimed credit for the continuation of Obama’s economic boom, and in particular for its benefits finally reaching the lower-income segments of society.
- The COVID-caused economic calamity was politically two-edged; Republicans claimed that Democratic lockdowns made disruption worse than it needed to be.
- Health-care, often viewed as a largely economic issue, became a life-and-death one instead. Overall, that was good for Democrats. But it did sideline of their strongest economic pitches.
- Joe Biden’s low-volume campaign strategy had considerable overall merit. But he did little to push an economic vision different from that of the left-wingers he thumped in the primaries.
- Similarly, little effort was made to sell the (true!) story that huge tax cuts for the rich had only a small benefit to everybody else.
- Democrats always start in an economic messaging hole vs. Republicans, because:
- The Republican story is simpler.
- The Republican story puts or leaves tax money in people’s pockets.
- But the disparity in economic messaging success was disappointing, especially since economic facts favor the Democratic side.
The final point I’d like to highlight is that, at the presidential level, this was in significant part a competence-in-crisis election. Basically, if an executive is seen as mishandling a crisis, and an election follows soon thereafter, it’s likely curtains for the executive. (It’s a truism that the worst thing that can happen to a mayor’s reelection chances is a mishandled snowstorm; if the mayor doesn’t remove the snow fast enough, the residents soon remove the mayor.) So it was for Carter and the hostages. So it might have been for Bush had Hurricane Katrina hit in 2004 rather than 2005. And so it was for Trump once he was widely agreed to have botched the pandemic.
