The fragile blue wall: analyzing geographies of the 2020 US presidential election

US presidential elections are peculiar contests based on mediation by an Electoral College in which votes are aggregated on a state-by-state basis. In 2020, as in 2016, the outcome was decided by a set of states where the two candidates were equally competitive: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Two geographical stories tend to dominate accounts of what happened in 2020. The first story is based on red (Republican) versus blue (Democratic) states, and the second story relies upon rural versus urban biases in support for the two parties. After showing how and where Donald Trump outperformed the expectations of pre-election polls, we consider these two geographical stories both generally, and more specifically, in relation to the crucial swing states. Through an examination of the successes of Joe Biden in Arizona and Georgia, two states long thought of as “red”, and the role of the suburbs and local particularities in producing this result, we conclude that the polarization of the United States into two hostile electorates is exaggerated.

Towards Principled Unskewing: Viewing 2020 Election Polls Through a Corrective Lens from 2016

We apply the concept of the data defect index to study the potential impact of systematic errors on the 2020 pre-election polls in 12 presidential battleground states. We investigate the impact under the hypothetical scenarios that (1) the magnitude of the underlying nonresponse bias correlated with supporting Donald Trump is similar to that of the 2016 polls, (2) the pollsters’ ability to correct systematic errors via weighting has not improved significantly, and (3) turnout levels remain similar to 2016. Because survey weights are crucial for our investigations but are often not released, we adopt two approximate methods under different modeling assumptions. Under these scenarios, which may be far from reality, our models shift Trump’s estimated two-party voteshare by a percentage point in his favor in the median battleground state, and increases twofold the uncertainty around the voteshare estimate.

Foreign Policy Begins at Home

This chapter focuses on ordinary Americans, central figures in a foreign policy conditioned by democratic politics and popular opinion. It offers another look at World War II and its legacies with a view to broader societal debates about America's role in the world, highlighting the tension between grand strategy and democracy. Ordinary citizens were part of these debates to a much greater extent than is generally acknowledged. Apart from opinion and election polls, citizen voices have often been shunned by politicians and scholars, who have dismissed them as ineffective and marginal, deplored them as racist or sectarian, and criticized them as isolationist or detrimental to American strategic interests. Attending to what citizens had to say about their country's international role, especially over the course of the transformative 1940s, brings unsettling questions into clearer focus: what purpose and whose interests do grand visions of foreign policy serve?