- Conservative commentators like David Brooks and Peggy Noonan have recently argued that the 2020 Democratic field is too far to the left to have a chance at winning back voters who went for Donald Trump in 2016 after voting for Barack Obama.
- But an analysis of data from the 2016 election suggests that Democrats don't necessarily need to win back those Obama-Trump voters — or Trump voters at all — to win in 2020.
- Analyses have found that those who didn't vote at all in 2016 are much more similar to the base of the Democratic Party than to Obama-Trump voters.
- This was especially true for those who voted for Obama in 2012 but stayed home in 2016.
- An analysis from a Data For Progress cofounder and three political scientists found that Obama-Trump voters didn't just dislike "Medicare for All," but over 70% said they opposed the Affordable Care Act and less than half said they supported a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants — putting those voters out of step with even centrist Democrats.
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Over the past week, conservative commentators including The New York Times' Bret Stephens and David Brooks wrote columns in which they expressed concern about a sharp turn to the left among 2020 Democratic presidential candidates.
Stephens wrote on Twitter that he was concerned that the high price tag of some Democrats' policy proposals would scare away "ordinary voters (e.g., people who voted for Obama and later Trump)," and Brooks said that "the party is moving toward all sorts of positions that drive away moderates and make it more likely the nominee will be unelectable."
Tom Nichols, a Naval War College professor and self-described "Never Trumper," wrote in a USA Today op-ed article that Democrats' "lurching left" would alienate voters in swing states who went for Donald Trump in 2016 after going for Barack Obama. And Peggy Noonan, a Reagan administration speechwriter, similarly wondered in The Wall Street Journal what Democrats were offering voters who backed Trump in 2016.
These commentators argued that by embracing policies including "Medicare for All," government healthcare coverage for undocumented immigrants, and the decriminalization of border crossings, Democrats were alienating swing voters who chose Trump in 2016, throwing away their chances of ever winning those voters back and therefore becoming likely to lose the 2020 election.
While conservatives like Stephens and Brooks may boast hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers and big platforms, they don't represent the Democratic base or the Democratic primary.
A close examination of electoral data from 2016 suggests that Democrats don't actually need to win back a substantial number of Trump voters to win the 2020 election — and that focusing on turning out nonvoters may be a more promising strategy.
There may not be huge swaths of moderate swing voters
Brooks' column mainly argued that Democrats were alienating the 35% of Americans who identify as political moderates, per Gallup polling.
Max Boot, a conservative Washington Post columnist, expressed a very similar sentiment, arguing that "Trump doesn't need his own agenda if he can terrify independent voters in swing states about what would happen if the Democratic agenda is implemented."
A Pew Research Center study earlier this year, however, appeared to dispel the myth that the American electorate is full of up-for-grabs swing voters who are equally likely to vote for either party.
Pew instead found that the vast majority of political independents preferred one party over the other and that just 7% of Americans — including self-described independents and moderates — reported having no political lean at all.
It also found serious policy disagreements among independents on many key issues, making it "misleading to look at 'independents' as a single bloc," it said.
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Furthermore, the dynamics of the 2020 election are quite different from 2016, where voters had never seen what either candidate would be like as president. Trump has been in office for nearly 2 1/2 years, giving the electorate a much better sense of what another four years of his presidency would entail.
While there are certainly undecided voters across the ideological spectrum, it seems unlikely that voters who still fervently support Trump will change their minds now or be swayed by Democrats slightly moving to the center on certain policy issues — especially as Republicans like Vice President Mike Pence have accused all Democrats, including moderate ones like former Vice President Joe Biden, of "advocating a socialist agenda."
Obama-Trump voters are a smaller segment of the electorate than nonvoters
An in-depth analysis of validated voter data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study by Sean McElwee, a cofounder of Data for Progress, and the political scientists Brian Schaffner, Jesse Rhodes, and Bernard Fraga estimated that out of the 66 million people who voted for Obama in 2012, 53.2 million, or 81%, voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016; 6 million, or 9%, voted for Trump in 2016; or 2.3 million, or 3%, voted for third parties; and 4.4 million, or 7%, stayed home altogether.
Because the 207 counties that flipped from Obama to Trump were largely concentrated in Upper Midwest swing states, including Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin, they played a pivotal role in Trump's victory and have received significant media attention since.
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But a 2018 analysis from Pew found that the nearly half of eligible voters who did not cast a ballot in 2016 also substantially contributed to Trump's 2016 election by staying home, largely because many expressed political leanings and belonged to demographic groups that lean Democratic.
Pew found that of nonvoters, 55% identified as a Democrat or Democratic-leaning, and 37% expressed a preference for Clinton, compared with 30% for Trump.
The Pew study and the analysis of CCES data further suggest that nonvoters are more similar to the Democratic base in many respects:
- 49% of nonvoters and 51% of Obama-to-nonvoters were nonwhite, compared with 16% of Obama-Trump voters. In 2016, Clinton overwhelmingly won among African-Americans and carried about two-thirds of both Latinx and Asian-American voters.
- 29% of nonvoters and 23% of Obama-to-nonvoters were under 30 — an age group Clinton won — compared with 11% of Obama-Trump voters.
- More than 56% of nonvoters and 60% of Obama-to-nonvoters made less than $50,000 per year — a group that went to Clinton by 53% to 41% — compared with 52% of Obama-Trump voters.
There are a myriad mathematical ways Democrats could win in 2020 without winning back any of the estimated 6 million Obama-Trump voters, by turning out the 65 million voters who cast ballots for Clinton — combined with a share of those who voted for third parties in 2016 — or making inroads with the electorate that didn't cast ballots at all in the 2016 race.
The Post's Dave Weigel said in a tweet last Saturday that, for example, "Democrats could win in 2020 by taking the Clinton 2016 voter and 2/3 of people who voted third party in 2016 — and not a single Trump voter."
"Trump's base won't be as static," Weigel said, "but they don't *need* Trump voters."
Obama-to-nonvoters are more in line with Democrats on policy than Obama-Trump voters
Not only are there numerically more nonvoters than Obama-Trump voters for Democrats to win back, but the policy positions of the former group are already more aligned with the Democratic Party, the analysis by McElwee, Rhodes, Schaffner, and Fraga found.
The case made by Brooks, Noonan, and Nichols for Democrats to move to the right on healthcare and immigration to win back those voters makes even less sense given what many Obama-Trump voters actually believe.
Obama-Trump voters don't just dislike Medicare for All — over 70% said they wanted to scrap the Affordable Care Act, a law that even the most moderate Democrats in the 2020 field have said they want to preserve and expand.
When it comes to immigration too, just under 50% of Obama-Trump voters said they supported a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants — a mainstream position in the Democratic Party— compared with about 70% of Obama-to-nonvoters.
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The analysis found that Obama-to-nonvoters were much closer on issues from healthcare to abortion and the environment to the consistently Democratic voters who went for Obama in 2012 and Clinton in 2016.
Noonan argued that the embrace of policies like Medicare for All was "too extreme for America, and too extreme for the big parts of its old base that the Democrats forgot in 2016." But it's not even clear that Obama-Trump voters could be considered solidly part of the Democratic base in the first place.
McElwee, Rhodes, Schaffner, and Fraga said that "less than one-third of Obama-to-Trump voters supported Democrats down-ballot in 2016, and only 37 percent identify as Democrats."
It's too early to really know who's most 'electable'
David Byler, a Post data columnist, wrote in February that "electability" is often falsely conflated with winning over the stereotypical image of a white working-class voter in the Rust Belt and Upper Midwest.
He argued that while working-class whites are an incredibly important voting bloc for both major parties, low turnout among voters of color in crucial swing states likely cost Clinton in 2016 and would be essential for the eventual 2020 Democratic nominee to turn out.
Byler said Democrats could solidify their position by restoring African-American voter turnout in battleground states like Michigan and Wisconsin, which plateaued in 2016 after reaching highs in 2008 and 2012.
Citing a study from the demographers Ruy Teixeira, Robert Griffin, and John Halpin, Byler said Clinton might have won the Electoral College had she replicated Obama's performance among African-American voters in swing states in the Midwest and South.
Asian-American and Latinx voters represent two other segments of the electorate among which Democrats have a slight advantage but turn out to vote at relatively low rates, Byler noted.
Such voters tend to be concentrated in safely blue states, but Byler said that concerted outreach and voter-registration efforts in those communities could help Democrats flip Arizona, where the party is gaining ground, or make inroads in Florida, where Republicans have recently prevailed in statewide races.
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