The Midwest Holds the Key for Biden

Three hours after the first polls closed in the 2020 election, the broad national rejection of Donald Trump that many pollsters forecast has not materialized. Instead, there are the same familiar divisions that have characterized American politics for a decade: rural areas around the country continue to deliver large margins for the President, while Joe Biden has taken advantage of the continued slide of prosperous suburbs toward the Democrats. There does seem to be one change, though: Trump won the first major victory of the night in Florida, where his totals in Miami-Dade County, home to a large Cuban-American community, traditionally anti-Communist and Republican, exceeded his 2016 numbers by more than a hundred thousand votes, making up for shortcomings elsewhere in the state. The race is tight and the results uncertain. But a few patterns are emerging.

President Trump’s strength among Latino voters goes beyond Florida. Democrats watching the early returns in Miami-Dade consoled themselves with the reminder that South Florida, with its Cuban and Venezuelan immigrant communities, is a highly specific place. But, by mid-evening, it seemed that Biden was lagging behind Hillary Clinton’s totals in the Latino-majority counties along the Texas border. The Trump campaign has focussed on increasing its margins with Latino voters across the country since the beginning of the race, as the President has made anti-immigration talk a much smaller part of his pitch this time. So far, that strategy seems to have paid off.

Democratic hopes for the Senate have dimmed a bit. In order to win the Senate, Democrats need to pick up three seats if Biden wins and four if Trump does. So far each party has taken one seat from the other: in Colorado, the Democrat, John Hickenlooper, beat the incumbent Republican, Cory Gardner, and in Alabama the Democratic Senator Doug Jones has likely lost to his challenger, Tommy Tuberville. Meanwhile, several key states—Georgia, North Carolina, and Maine—all look likely to return incumbent Republicans to the Senate. There is a long way to go, but it has got harder to map out a path to a Democratic majority.

The Midwest holds the key. The likeliest path to a Biden victory has always run through the Midwestern bloc of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, the so-called Blue Wall that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016. One of the strongest arguments for Biden’s nomination was that he was seen as well positioned to win back those states. The complexity of voting (and vote-counting) across the upper Midwest means that we may not know the outcomes in those states for days, but the early results in other Northern and Midwestern states have offered some reassurance to Democrats still hopeful that Biden can pull off a decisive win. A key question: Will Biden’s margins in the Democratic strongholds of Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia exceed Clinton’s and be enough to carry him to victory?

There is no major realignment. The final fivethirtyeight.com average of the polls gave Biden a national lead of roughly nine points, and those aggregators who estimated the President’s chances at reëlection put it around ten per cent—numbers that hinted at a dramatic reorientation of American politics. Several hours into Election Night, that looks much less likely than more of the same: a drawn-out trench war between cities and rural places, with a few strategic differences this time. The circumstances surrounding this election were much different from those of 2016, with an unpopular incumbent on the ballot, an ongoing pandemic that has killed more than two hundred thousand Americans and cratered the economy, and a Democratic challenger who was broadly liked. And yet the same essential pattern has so far held. The dream of progressives had been that tonight might put 2016 firmly in the past. Whether Biden wins or loses, we seem likely to keep reliving it.