A Lot Went Wrong for Democrats on Election Night
There’s still much we don’t know, but we can take some key lessons from the elections last night: Democrats’ weak economic message helped Trump, the Lincoln Project embarrassed itself, a ton of grassroots money was set on fire, Americans don’t love Obamacare, and the Democratic courts’ strategy failed.
Election workers adjudicate scans of challenged ballots at the Lansing city clerk’s office on election night on November 3, 2020 in Lansing, Michigan. (John Moore / Getty Images)
As the country awaits the final results of the presidential election, there are already several key lessons to be gleaned from election, campaign finance, and public opinion data.
1. Democrats’ weak economic message hugely helped Trump.
The Democratic ticket pretty much ran away from economic issues — sure, it had decent position papers, but economic transformation was not a huge part of its public messaging, and that failure buoyed Donald Trump, according to exit polls from Edison Research.
Trump won 81 percent of the vote among the one-third of the electorate that listed the economy as its top priority. Even more amazing — Trump and Joe Biden equally split the vote among those whose priority is a president who “cares about people like me.”
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