Meet the Biden Coalition
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have won 51 percent of the votes nationally, compared to about 47 percent for President Trump. (Some absentee ballots are still being counted.) Four years ago, Hillary Clinton won about 48 percent, compared to Trump’s 46 percent. Starting with the 1992 presidential election, the Democrats have won the national popular vote in every election except for 2004.
So the Democrats are the majority party in many ways in America. So it’s worth zoning in on the Biden coalition and understanding it precisely, as it comprises a majority of American voters.
The Biden coalition is probably best understood as Metropolitan/Urban/ Pro-Density America
The red states and blue states framing is useful and important because of the Electoral College---basically the votes in a state for a candidate who doesn’t carry that state don’t matter in our system. But that focus on states can somewhat obscure dynamics in the overall electorate. Democrats are often described as the coastal party. In the Electoral College framing, that is accurate---the Democrats do win most of the states on the coasts. But the percentage of Biden voters who live in California (around 14 percent) is similar to the percent of Americans overall who live in California (12 percent). Same for New York (around 6 percent of Biden voters and Americans overall.) Biden won more total votes in Texas than in Massachusetts, more in Ohio than Connecticut. (Texas has way more people than Massachusetts, Ohio way more than Connecticut.)
Where Biden really won was in metropolitan areas across the country--the Atlanta area, the Houston area, the Phoenix area, the Los Angeles area, the New York City area, the Boston area, the Minneapolis area, even smaller metro areas like around Omaha, Nebraska and Salt Lake City, Utah. Biden won the Louisville area (Jefferson County) by 20 percentage points over Trump. In his landslide national victory in 2008, Obama only won Jefferson County by 12 percentage points. You can find this kind of trend across the country--Joe Biden, who was supposed to help Democrats woo voters in rural areas and small towns, instead ended up winning the presidency because he carried metro areas by even bigger margins than the very urban and urbane Obama. That’s not really about Biden. The Obama and Trump presidencies have resulted in this kind of polarization where Democrats can win Georgia by running up the margins in the Atlanta area but get blown out in a state like Kentucky that doesn’t have a megacity.
What I mean by metro area is both a core city and its surrounding suburbs. But it’s important to understand that in today’s America, city does not mean “black” or “people of color” and suburb does not mean “white.” Lots of white people live in the core cities, plenty of people of color live in the suburbs. Most metro areas (cities and suburbs) have sizable Asian, black, white and Latino populations.
The writer Will Wilkinson argues that a lot of American politics can be described as a “density divide”--the closer you are to the center of a city (generally the more dense part), the more likely you are to be a Democrat, the further away, the more likely you are to be a Republican. That framing doesn’t capture everything and it’s probably too agnostic about race. (I suspect that many people of color in particular are moving to cities and closer-in suburbs because that’s where the jobs are, not necessarily because they prefer living close to other people. And then some people who are wary of more people of color living in their neighborhoods move to less dense areas that are also whiter.)
But that density notion does capture important dynamics in our politics. White people who choose to live in metro areas, particularly those who live in the center of the city in an urban area, are kind of voting with their feet in favor of a multiracial America, which is a bit of a political statement as the parties are increasingly divided on questions of race and identity.
The Biden coalition is very diverse in terms of demographics
We have county-by-county and state-by-state data on who voted for Biden and Trump. But in terms of the demographic characteristics, that’s a bit tougher. We have to rely more on polling and other research. But I think we safely conclude that around 60 percent of the people who voted for Biden are non-Hispanic white, 20 percent black, 15 percent Latino, 5 percent Asian. (Take that as a range, perhaps the white number is 56 or 64.) Those voters are probably about evenly split between those age 50 and over and those under 50. It’s likely that the majority Biden voters don’t have a bachelor’s degree. (Only about a third of adults have a BA or higher.) It’s likely that a majority of white Biden supporters have BA’s, but there will be a split and it will be more like 55/45 than 75/25. It’s likely that around half of Biden voters are Christian, more than a third are religiously unaffiliated, another bloc is Muslim, Jewish or another religion.
The author and public opinion researcher Robert Jones says that in terms of religion and race, Democrats resemble the cohort of Americans who are around 30 years old, Republicans the cohort that is around 70 years old.
So this is a very diverse coalition. That’s why the fights between various Democratic elites are so intense--they are undergirded by different underlying priorities and values in many cases. While I assume basically all Democratic elected officials think that George Floyd and Breonna Taylor should not have been killed by the police, the urgency of major police reforms is probably greater for Democratic officials who represent areas with a lot of young black men and aggressive policing of those black men, compared to those who don’t represent such areas. The specter of socialism is likely more worrisome in areas with a lot of people whose families emigrated from countries like Cuba or businessmen for whom the current U.S economy is working well, and less worrisome in areas where people don’t think capitalism is working that well for them.
It’s also diverse in terms of ideology
In a poll released in October by PPRI, the research institute that Jones runs, Democrats were asked who they originally preferred in the Democratic primaries. 31 percent said Bernie Sanders, 28 percent Joe Biden, 14 percent Elizabeth Warren, 10 percent Pete Buttigieg, 6 percent Michael Bloomberg, 4 percent Amy Klobuchar and 2 percent Tom Steyer. (The survey only offered those names as options and excluded people like Harris who dropped out earlier.) In the actual primaries, Biden won 52 percent, Sanders 26, Warren 8, Bloomberg 7, Buttigieg 2, Klobuchar 1. (It’s worth noting that Biden ran up the score in some of the primaries after all the other candidates dropped out.)
So the cohort of Democrats who back more left-wing candidates (Sanders, Warren) is at least a third of the party and perhaps 45 percent. That’s a big bloc. And that bloc is not really represented by the three people who dominate the party’s decision-making (Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer.) This is the real reason Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is so prominent. Her looks, charisma, media attention, social media presence and other dynamics have made her more famous than the other three members of “The Squad.” But The Squad itself represents a younger cohort of Democratic voters who are more ideologically-similar to Sanders and Warren, who also have little power in the formal Democratic Party.
The Biden coalition’s ethos is more anti-racist than populist
The 2020 Democratic primary featured basically three kinds of candidates: return to the pre-Trump-Obama-era status quo (Biden, Klobuchar); the-Obama-presidency-wasn’t-that-great-either (Sanders, Warren); and people trying to straddle between those views (Buttigieg, Harris, Cory Booker and lots of others.) Those lanes mapped onto the electorate---older Democrats generally preferred the more status quo approach, younger Democrats the more transformative one, middle-aged Dems were kind of unsure. These dynamics reflected and reinforced the rhetoric of supporters of the various candidates--Biden’s backers focused on his electability, Warren’s backers focused on her policy ideas, Sanders’s supporters cast all of his rivals as too tied to the establishment.
Before he even entered the presidential race, Biden led among older voters overall and had a huge advantage among older black voters. Those voters were with him before he said a word about his policy platform, since those voters were likely looking for a candidate they viewed as not too transformative, electable and someone who jived with their sensibilities.
But Biden, as a presidential candidate, had to still run a campaign---speeches, policy plans, etc. He couldn’t just say, “I’m Joe Biden, we all know why you guys want me as the nominee, vote for me.” What he settled on as the platform for the moderate, electable Democrat was modest economic policies but an unabashed anti-racism/cultural liberalism approach. Biden launched his campaign by saying that he had been inspired to run because of his horror with how Trump had dealt with the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. During the primary campaign, Biden explicitly promised he would pick a woman as vice-president and a black woman as his first Supreme Court nominee. If Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama had made two identity-based promises for the most important jobs in government, there would have been an endless stream of dumb columns attacking them for doing too much identity politics. Biden’s promises weren’t really criticized on those grounds.
During the protests in June and July, Biden did not embrace movements to cut police funding, but he did repeatedly suggest that America has systemic racism that he would address as president. He followed through on his promise to pick a woman as a running mate--and picked an Asian and black one. Biden has implied his cabinet and White House will be full of women and people of color.
“I promise you, win or lose, I’m going to go down fighting, I’m going to go down fighting for racial equality, equity across the board,” Biden said when he visited Kenosha, Wisconsin during the campaign.
Biden won the primary and the general election with this approach, and I think it underscores where the Democratic electorate is. It’s not clear that Democrats, particularly older ones, want to transform America in a way that might fundamentally alter its capitalist structure or the nation’s overarching power dynamics, as Warren and Sanders were calling for. But Democrats are fairly united in the idea that they want women, Muslims, black people and other groups to have the same opportunities in America as white Christian men. It may not actually be possible to equalize opportunity without more fundamental changes. But the Biden coalition that is the majority in America is one that is more about changing policing practices so unarmed black people are not killed than fundamentally rethinking the idea of policing, more about expanding health care to as many black people as possible rather than untethering health insurance from jobs.
This is a slightly different coalition than the one that elected Obama. Obama is black, but his 2008 campaign was in some ways about how America had moved beyond race and other cultural divisions. Biden and Trump were explicitly arguing about race-based issues (like policing) and Biden won.
“There has never been an anti-racist majority in American history; there may be one today in the racially and socioeconomically diverse coalition of voters radicalized by the abrupt transition from the hope of the Obama era to the cruelty of the Trump age,” the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote in a pre-election recent piece.
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