New Pew Study Explains President Joe Biden’s Success in 2020: NPR

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The new data gives us a clear picture of how President Joe Biden won in 2020, and reveals the voter groups that Donald Trump has improved. That data could be an encouragement to Republicans heading into 2022.

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

We now have the clearest picture of how Joe Biden won the White House, and we’re learning more about where Donald Trump slipped into voters, coming in that Republicans can see encouraging entry into the midterms in next year. All because of a big new report about the 2020 election from the Pew Research Center. Here’s NPR’s political detail Danielle Kurtzleben. How are you.

DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, BYLINE: Hey, Lulu.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Before getting to where Trump has improved, can we kind of talk in general about what happened in 2020? What does this latest data tell us?

KURTZLEBEN: Sure. So to some degree, this data calculates some things we already know or at least suspect. So, for example, let’s start with Joe Biden. He did well in the suburbs, and he won a slight majority of those voters, particularly white suburban voters. This data allows to define that. In addition, Joe Biden rose to Hillary Clinton along with men and specifically some men-again, white men, married men, college educated men, and the main voting bloc. of Black voters who are a large part of the Democrats base. Black voters stuck to Biden, about 9 out of 10 of them did, as they did in 2016.

Now, let’s go to Donald Trump, you mentioned. Some groups swung towards him at this time. One is Hispanics. Pew’s data shows Trump got it here, garnering 38% of the support of Hispanic voters. In addition to that, we know she has made gains with women, especially white women. He had a small benefit to millennials. And then there are the white evangelicals. Now, they’ve always been Republicans, and they were more Republican last year.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: The election was eight months ago. Why are we getting this data now? And what is special about it?

KURTZLEBEN: So this is what Pew calls a verified voter report. People are watching the polls really, really waiting for it after the election these days. Pew did the same in 2016 and 2018 as well. This is considered a better estimate of voters and demographics than exit polls. So what Pew does – they take their survey responses, and then they match the respondents to the state’s public voter records. Now, those public records, they don’t say who you voted for, but they say you voted. This eliminates the possibility of Pew’s survey over-reporting how many people voted, which is something that happens in surveys, where people sometimes say they voted when they didn’t.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: What else do we learn about this data about why Hispanics moved 10% toward Trump?

KURTZLEBEN: Sure. So, of course, we can’t really get into, you know, psychological motivations, but we can get the nuances of how groups vote. And one of Hispanics is an education gap. Hispanic voters with a college education were more likely than Hispanic voters who were not college educated to vote for Joe Biden. Often in our reporting we talk too often about white, non-Hispanic, non-college-educated voters, but this trend can actually go beyond ethnicity.

Another one I want to get to is the gender gap. That’s the thing we’re really watching going into 2020, is the Hispanic gender gap, how big it is, because women of all races and ethnicities tend to vote more Democratic than men, and there’s some evidence entering 2020 which could be particularly big on Hispanics. But Pew didn’t really find evidence of that, so that’s pretty interesting as well.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: It is. But the figure you said earlier, that Trump won 38% of Hispanic voters, means that’s a big part of the voting bloc.

KURTZLEBEN: Yes, absolutely. I mean, if you look at some historical context, 38% is close to the 40% that George W. Bush got in 2004, according to exit polls. And that 40% is actually an important number because it’s a recent high watermark for Republicans with Hispanic voters. So what it might signal is that Trump made a fair reach to Hispanic voters in 2020 and that reach worked that he got some Hispanic voters.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: I wanted to circle the gender question because you pointed out that the gender bias sank last year, which is really interesting.

KURTZLEBEN: Yeah. And one group I want to highlight here are white men. Biden scored eight points with white men on how Hillary Clinton performed on that group in 2016. There was a bigger swing with white men than white women. And the interesting question for any of these numbers is why did that happen, right? So looking at these white men, it appears that some shares that voted third party or that didn’t just vote for Clinton or Trump in 2016 or that didn’t show up in 2016 passed about four years ago and came out and vote for Biden. So we don’t really know exactly why any of this happened. But looking at these numbers, it’s really hard not to think about the fact that the historic gender gap we had in 2016, a year that was also historic for having the party’s first female primary nominee, that gap was sank last year without a woman at the top of the ticket.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: That’s an interesting point. That’s NPR reporter Danielle Kurtzleben. Thanks a lot.

KURTZLEBEN: Thank you.

(SOUNDBITE OF IVY SONG, “FASCINATED”)

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