November 5, 2020

What Did Joe Biden’s Coalition Look Like? What Does it Mean for Education?

By Bellwether

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As I write this, we’re not done counting votes in several key states, including Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. But if current trends hold, Joe Biden appears likely to become our 46th President.
What’s astounding is his coalition of voters. According to a review of exit polls, Biden performed better than Hillary Clinton did in 2016 among white men, but performed worse among white women, Black women, Black men, Latina women, and Latino men. See the graphic below via CNN:
Back in August, Alex Spurrier and I warned that Joe Biden’s campaign platform overlooked effective education policies that Black and Hispanic voters tended to support. While the two things may or may not be related, it’s striking that Biden did worse among non-white voters, collectively, than any Democrat since JFK in 1960.
As someone who worked in the Obama Administration, it’s hard for me to look at President Trump’s record and understand how he could increase his support among Black and Hispanic voters. But somehow he did.
Readers of this blog will also have to grapple with the fact that education itself has been politicized over the last four years. In 2016, Trump won among voters without a college degree. In response, pollsters changed their methodologies to account for educational attainment. But polls this time seem to be off again, and Biden, like Clinton, maintained a stark advantage among voters with at least a bachelor’s degree, while Trump continued to win among voters with an associate’s degree or less. See the graphic below via Patrick Ruffini’s analysis of AP VoteCast data:
In other words, the Biden coalition looks quite a bit different than the ones assembled by recent Democrats. Per Andy Rotherham’s suggestion on Tuesday, who wins the election matters the most, but how they win is also important for understanding how they might govern after all the votes are counted.

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