The Election 2020 Matchups

Who has the edge in November?

By Edward Hamburg

We often see American elections through the metaphor of a horserace: candidates begin campaigns (earlier and earlier) by bolting out of starting gates, they race down tracks as their movements are breathlessly recounted by multiple announcers, odds-makers adjust to their changing positions in the final stretch, and crowds roar when finish lines are crossed and victors declared.

This metaphor, however, is not just inaccurate, it’s not fair to the candidates — or the horses. First the obvious: the goals are different. Horses run in races to earn purses for their owners; candidates run in elections not for a prize but for the privilege of governing others. Second, although guided by jockeys and disciplined by trainers, horses win races primarily on their own capabilities. Candidates, on the other hand, even as they get all the attention and almost all the credit, don’t win the privilege to govern on their talents and efforts alone. American elections involve an integrated web of personalities, ideas, coordination, rules-of-play, and unanticipated effects. The metaphor to understand them is not a horserace but a complex team sport, and as is done when two teams go head-to-head, these outcomes are often projected after drawing comparisons — “matching them up” — against the key determinants of success.

Candidates

We start by evaluating the stars on the teams, for quality candidates unquestionably increase the probabilities of electoral success. The ideal types are attractive, intelligent, charismatic, articulate, thoughtful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent women and men, professionals with experiences supporting their desires to become or continue as elected officials entrusted with governing the American polity. Unfortunately, such ideal types are often unavailable in the real world. Distinguishing quality candidates thus requires subjectively “scoring” them on this attribute list to see who measures at or above some threshold level of acceptability. Lots of newsprint is dedicated to examining how we make these candidate calculations, but they are just the first of five key determinants of successful outcomes in American elections.

Vision

For example, it also matters if candidates can: 1) effectively articulate what beliefs and values guide their governance decision making; 2) clearly describe how these beliefs and values lead to the pursuit of policies that achieve particular governance objectives; and 3) convincingly explain how all of this is part of or extends from a larger shared vision of the purpose of government at the given point in history. Many candidates do 1 and 2; most contemporary Republicans and just a few contemporary Democrats do 3.

At critical points in American electoral history, citizens have been presented with two distinctive visions of governance. One is future-oriented, describing the role of government in leading the country into what is hoped to be “A Great Tomorrow.” Embracing the societal diversification and economic transformations occurring at the time, this vision identifies the primary issues that government must address for the nation to effectively adapt to changing circumstances in the coming decades.

The second vision is the exact opposite: it’s preservation-oriented, describing the role of government in leading the country back to what was believed to be “The Great Yesterday.” Decrying the societal diversification and economic transformations occurring at the time, this vision extols the virtues of protecting existing advantages, and reinforcing existing prejudices, of constituencies whose interests and status are challenged by changing circumstances in the coming decades.

Republicans do an excellent job of articulating a coherent preservation-oriented vision, one that took form with Barry Goldwater, was popularized with Ronald Reagan, got effectively implemented by George W. Bush, and is exemplified by Donald Trump. In contrast, Democrats have not figured out the “vision thing:” they’ve lived off the remnants of the New Deal and Great Society, attempted Clinton-like pivots, or tried to expand the “Hope and Change” slogan into a coherent policy agenda beyond healthcare. Until very recently.

Organization

The third key determinant of electoral success is a highly efficient political party organization that is also integrated into a diverse supportive ecosystem of partners. This political network, through continuous communication among its various parts:

• identifies, recruits, and trains new candidates;
• works to compellingly articulate the party’s vision to multiple audiences;
• provides structure and substance to the development of a broad policy agenda;
• regularly interacts with the party’s base of supportive voters;
• constantly identifies and recruits new voters among those not yet regular participants in elections;
• mobilizes both the base and new supporters to cast ballots during every election period; and
• raises the money required to enable all of the above to happen.

Several studies describe how Republicans have over forty years conscientiously and efficiently built, financed, and leveraged such a political network, one with so much depth and so many tentacles that it transformed a numerically minority party into a dominant force. In contrast, Democrats as a party have done no better with this “organization thing” than they have with the “vision thing.” Until very recently.

Context

In a post-Jim Crow, post-Voting Rights Act America, citizens assume that their elections take place on a level playing field, with unencumbered access to voting, fair and transparent processes, and non-partisan, unbiased systems. This assumption may have been valid, but not since 2010.

Even with their powerful political network, Republicans realized they still have a problem: they remain, numerically, the minority of the two major parties, a position projected to worsen in the years ahead. America’s changing demographics and economy work against them. Growth is lower among traditional Republican constituencies, there are fewer less educated white male Democrats to convert, the growing number of American citizens of color find it hard to join their ranks, and younger citizens in the contemporary workforce are less drawn to the vision of preserving a past they never knew.

To compensate for their numerical electoral disadvantage, Republicans diligently pursue a comprehensive strategy to exploit electoral laws and procedures (which are set by the states, not the federal government) to alter in their favor the context of voting, the fourth key determinant of electoral outcomes. Even the best candidates, articulating the most compelling visions and supported by the most robust political networks, will struggle to win when the rules of the game prevent them from scoring or require their scoring multiple points for every one scored by their opponents.

This Republican strategy was not executed in secret. Countless studies detail the gerrymandering of voting districts for representatives to the US House and state legislatures where they had control, as well as their full range of voter suppression initiatives — from ID requirements to aggressively purging voter rolls to limiting early voting to restricting the number of polling places to disenfranchising citizens returning from prisons to spreading election misinformation. Combined with Supreme Court decisions that trashed the rulebook on campaign financing (Citizens United) and gutted the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder), these efforts caught Democrats unprepared and pushed them way back on their heels. Until very recently.

X-Factors

The fifth key determinant of election outcomes is, well, stuff — usually bad stuff — that can happen and is not inherent to the electoral system. Such exogenous forces include recessions, wars, and scandals, or disruptive campaigns orchestrated by foreign governments, or widespread pandemics. The impacts of X-Factors on election outcomes are difficult to evaluate because they interact differently with the candidate, vision, organization, and context determinants described above. But because their effects can be incredibly powerful, X-Factors are essential to consider.

The November 2020 Matchups

Team sports involve a combination of multiple factors — player quality, management philosophy, organizational depth, field or court conditions, and a host of X-Factors — to produce successful outcomes. That’s why when projecting the winners of team-sport contests, sports analysts examine the relative strengths and weaknesses of the competitors against key success factors and summarize their comparisons in “Matchups.” The following analysis takes the team sport-for-elections metaphor to another level by similarly presenting a Matchup for the national contests in November. It describes the projected advantages (or “edge”) for the Republicans and Democrats by evaluating their relative strengths and weaknesses against each of the five key electoral determinants, and concludes, like all good Matchups, with projections on the outcomes.

Notable Sources

Adam Hochschild, “Another Great Yesterday,” New York Review of Books (19 December 2019). He credits Ryszard Kapuscinski for coining the term “The Great Yesterday” to describe believers susceptible to demagoguery.

Samuel Lubell, The Future of American Politics (New York: Harper Brothers, 1952).

George Lakoff and Elisabeth Wehling, The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic (New York: The Free Press, 2012); and George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant! (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004).

Allan J. Lichtman, The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)

Edward Hamburg, “Anatomy of a Realignment: The Dynamics of Electoral Change in America, 1874–1906.” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1982).

Douglas R. Satterfield, “Core Values: Boy Scouts of America.” leadermaker.com (11 October 2013). The following were omitted from the ideal type candidate list of attributes only to simplify the presentation: “trustworthy, loyal, helpful, courteous, kind, obedient, and cheerful.” All would also be excellent candidate attributes.