The week's big question: Why did Trump outperform expectations?

1. Why did Trump and Republicans outperform expectations?

As of Friday morning, the outcome of the presidential election has not officially been called. Joe Biden is on the verge of victory, but one other thing is clear: Both he and President Trump received more votes than any other presidential candidates ever. Despite four years of chaotic governance, impeachment, and a pandemic that has killed more than 230,000 Americans, Trump received millions more votes than he won in 2016. Many Republican House and Senate candidates also outperformed expectations, and exit polls suggest Trump's support increased across a number of groups, especially Latino voters.

This week's question is: Why did President Trump and Republicans outperform expectations?

2. Many voters don't care enough about COVID — yet

Leading up to Election Day, it was thought that COVID-19 had killed more than 230,000 Americans and also likely President Trump's chances of being re-elected. Now, an analysis by The Associated Press suggests that among the 376 counties with the highest numbers of new COVID-19 cases per capita, 93 percent of those regions went for Trump.

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It isn't that the electorate trusts Trump on the COVID-19. The problem is that they just don't care. At least not enough. Polls show that the issue that mattered most to Americans when they voted was the economy. While many public health experts have long argued that controlling the virus is probably the single best way to jumpstart the economy, that message just never landed.

That's probably because in the states where most of the AP's data centered — Montana, the Dakotas, Kansas, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Nebraska — a total of 2,283 COVID-19 deaths had been recorded by July 4th, or around one out of every 7,200 people in those regions. As far as these Americans were concerned, no one they ever heard of had died, but they had just spent months disrupting their entire way of life. In New York, by contrast, around one in 785 people had died of COVID-19 by then. Approximately every second-person there knows a victim, statistically. And just about everyone has two degrees of separation from a COVID-19 death. Not so in these "new COVID-19 hotzones."

At least not yet.

In these new COVID-19 areas, the deaths have only recently begun to rise. We know that COVID-19 deaths lag behind increased hospitalizations, which lag behind spikes in new cases. The problem is that if you wait until the hospitals are full and morgues are out of space to enact policies that control this virus, it's already too late.

3. Many liberal assumptions were proven wrong

When I picked Biden over Trump to win the election, I said that I found arguments against my position plausible but I wasn't prepared to predict a polling failure of the requisite magnitude. It still doesn't look like a big enough misfire to prevent Biden from becoming president, but it is awfully close and overall a worse showing for the polling industry than in 2016. Why?

Start with the possibility that the polls at least slightly overstated how unpopular Trump really was, an easy mistake to avoid second-guessing when even many of the conservatives in media and politics dislike him. The Trump campaign also did more to turn out its voters, with the perhaps fatal exception of the mail-in vote, and its data team are no dummies. Base-driven strategies evidently work in the battleground states.

Second, millions of Americans feel the left wing of the Democratic Party is as big a threat to their families and interests as many liberal voting blocs perceive Trump to be. There are also contradictions in the Democrats' "coalition of the ascendant" that could prevent demography from bringing the party to its promised destiny. Even many black and Hispanic voters do not see themselves in the apostles of wokeness who claim to speak for them.

Third, both political parties are increasingly trying to govern as if they have more than 60 percent of the country behind them when their coalitions can only win between 46 and 53 percent of the vote. This burned Republicans from the Tea Party to Trump's first year in office. It is also what drives progressives' desire to counter the "minoritarian" aspects of the Constitution. But this framework requires consensus behind sweeping changes.

Fourth, as much as conservatives complain about liberal media bias, it actually hurts Democrats too. Why? Because it shields their shortcomings from their own view.

Finally, Biden may be a nice man who has persevered through a great deal of personal suffering. But he was also a candidate with serious flaws who required a pandemic and economic downturn to conceal and overcome them. He barely did, and it is not self-evident that the other 2020 Democrats would have done better, his running mate included.

4. The Democrats blew their overarching message

One thing Democrats need to explain about their disappointing if not catastrophic election performance is why so many GOP congressional candidates ran well ahead of Trump. And if there's a unifying explanation it's that party elites fixated on Trump and Trumpism at the expense of any kind of critique of the GOP as an institution.

For House Democrats, it was moments like when they gave President Trump his big win on the United States Mexico Canada Agreement the day after they impeached him. In the Senate it was dutifully showing up for the Amy Coney Barrett hearings and having the overmatched chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee treat her like any other nominee. Republicans would have made it all as ugly as possible. Democrats, afraid of upsetting Ohio moderates they lost by a thousand points anyway, didn't.

And for Biden, it was his refusal to tie the Republican Party to Trump or even say the words "Republican Party" in his acceptance speech. He needed to critique not just Trump's behavior and pandemic response, but also the Republican Party's policies and hypocrisy. Having people like the Republican former governor of Ohio John Kasich speak at the Democratic National Convention may have given a small but crucial subset of Republican voters the permission structure to reject President Trump but still vote for Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), two critical races Democrats lost that will probably certainly keep the Senate in Republican hands.

Biden appears headed for more than 300 Electoral Votes and something like a seven million vote edge in the popular vote. It was Democratic underperformance in House and Senate races that has the rank-and-file moping around like it's Nov. 9, 2016, again. And if they ever want to govern again, Democrats are going to have to stop trying to appeal to Republicans and start trying to vanquish them.

5. It wasn't the record. It was the man.

"The charge is prepar'd, the lawyers are met, / The judges all ranged, — a terrible show!" Macheath's lines in The Beggar's Opera are a good description of the state of Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Whether the president himself has the stomach for a month of legal challenges is a very different question.

Unless he is able to overturn the apparent results in at least two states, he will lose this election. But only the most blinkered partisan could pretend this result — narrow victories for his opponent in a handful of states, upset wins for his party in Congress — is the total repudiation of Trump that was confidently predicted. Those of us who insisted that the polls were wrong — betting, as it were, against the spread — have been vindicated. In state after state the president beat expectations, in many places improving upon his 2016 vote totals. He also appears to have performed better with non-white voters than any Republican presidential candidate in modern history.

How was this possible? I think his strong showing has less to do with his actual record in office — tax cuts and economic stimulus, three Supreme Court justices who would have been nominated by any Republican president, a half-bungled trade war, an admirably restrained foreign policy, criminal justice reform — than with the fact that millions agreed with Trump about impeachment, lockdowns, and the hysteria of his enemies.

Trump's political career will end as it began, as a referendum on the man himself. Considering the forces arrayed against him in two successive elections — already forgotten conspiracy theories about Russia and Ukraine, media credulity, the contempt of our professional classes — it is difficult not to think he acquitted himself ably.

6. The pre-coronavirus economy and the CARES Act

It is rather mysterious why President Trump got such incredible turnout — as The Washington Post's Dave Weigel points out, if Republican turnout had been flat from 2016 to 2020, Democrats would have gotten over 400 electoral votes and easily swept control of both chambers of Congress.

One plausible explanation is the economy. The public tends to hold the president responsible for what happens economically, and the years 2018 and 2019 were the first time that America had even approached full employment since the year 2000. Jobs were plentiful, and wages were increasing strongly. Then, when the pandemic hit, the government passed a rescue package that was more generous to the working class and poor than any previous policy in American history.

Therefore, many voters may have given Trump credit for the pre-pandemic economy, and then given him a pass on the 2020 collapse because he didn't directly cause the pandemic (he did make it much worse, but that might not be obvious to some). Meanwhile, the CARES Act stimulus checks and super-unemployment put thousands of dollars into the hands of tens of millions of people who desperately needed help. Maybe it really was the economy, stupid.