America’s Repudiation of Trumpism Was Stronger Than You Might Think
As the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election came into focus in the hours and days after election night, happiness and relief among Democratic voters over Joe Biden’s victory was increasingly tempered by dismay that Americans had not repudiated Donald Trump’s presidency in the dramatic, 400+ electoral vote landslide that many had hoped for. Now that the dust has largely settled with the vote counting nearly complete, it is worth reevaluating the breadth of the President’s repudiating defeat.
Joe Biden defeated President Trump by an electoral vote count of 306–232; exactly the same tally that Mr. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by four years ago, and that Mr. Trump described at the time as “a massive landslide victory” and (incorrectly) “one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history.” The similarities between the 2016 and 2020 election results largely end there, however — and not in a manner in any way favorable to President Trump.
Mr. Trump made history in 2016 by winning the electoral vote despite losing the national popular vote to Ms. Clinton by more than 2.8 million votes; by far the largest divergence between the popular and electoral vote winners in American history. In 2020, Mr. Biden won the same number of electoral votes that Mr. Trump won in 2016 while winning the popular vote by over 7 million votes. Mr. Biden thus more than doubled Ms. Clinton’s winning popular vote margin over Mr. Trump of four years earlier, with a margin of victory even larger than President Obama’s nearly 5 million vote 2012 re-election win over Mitt Romney. Even more notably, President Trump’s popular vote loss is the largest defeat an incumbent President has suffered in 40 years, since Ronald Reagan’s 8.4 million vote victory over President Carter.
Additionally, the 81 million+ votes cast for President-Elect Biden — and against President Trump — is also a record, shattering Mr. Obama’s 2008 vote record by more than 10 million.
President’s Trump’s re-election loss also completes the first ever hat trick of presidential undesirables, making him the first President ever to: (1) lose the national popular vote; (2) be impeached by the House of Representatives; and (3) lose re-election. That is a trifecta of failure that no other President has ever accomplished, and one that seems likely to attain added significance as the history books on Mr. Trump’s presidency are written.
To be sure, there are certainly legitimate reasons for disappointment among Democratic voters in this election, from the results of many down-ballot races to the fact that more than 74 million Americans cast a ballot in favor of continuing, rather than repudiating, the past four years of Donald Trump’s presidency. But when viewing the margin of President-Elect Biden’s victory in historical context — over a president running with all the advantages of incumbency, in a fragmented and distorted media environment entirely without precedent — the scale of President Trump’s repudiation by American voters appears far more emphatic than many initially perceived.
