Joe Biden is set to defeat President Donald Trump in the Electoral College with his 306 votes to Trump’s 232. Ironically, in 2016 Trump beat Hillary Clinton by nearly the same electoral margin. So how did everything completely reverse in just four years?
Simply put, Trump failed to adapt to the chaotic year of 2020. In 2016, he launched many effective attacks against Clinton, but COVID-19 made his attacks against Biden woefully underwhelming.
For example, Trump’s attacks over the Hunter Biden scandal never stuck. The email scandal did stick to Clinton.
Trump repeatedly attacked Clinton for mishandling classified information by using her own private email server. Validating the attacks, FBI director James Comey reopened the investigation into her emails just 11 days before the election. It was the October surprise of 2016.
The Hunter Biden scandal was hardly the October surprise Trump was counting on. One, the allegations of wrongdoing targeted Biden’s son Hunter, not Joe himself. Two, it was hard for voters to care about Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine as the pandemic ravaged the country. They were more concerned for their own families. Even Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., sympathized with this sentiment.
“I think most Americans probably care more about their family than they care about the Biden family,” Cotton said a week before the 2020 election.
While Trump attacked both the Clinton and Biden families, he also criticized Hillary on the substantive issue of outsourcing. She supported NAFTA as First Lady, a trade deal that, by one estimate, displaced over 850,000 jobs between 1993 and 2013. Clinton also called the Trans-Pacific Partnership “the gold standard in trade agreements.” Then, in the Sept. 26 presidential debate, she lied, denying she had said that.
Trump lied throughout the campaign too. But he succeeded in painting her as the worst choice for people who disliked both candidates. The data shows that dual-haters chose Trump in 2016.
In 2020, people who disliked both candidates favored Biden by a whopping 32 points. Additionally, Biden was always viewed more favorably than Clinton.
Attempting to chip away at Biden’s likeability, Trump continuously called him a tool of the “radical left.” Americans didn’t buy it. In a July survey, two-thirds of registered voters saw Biden as “in line with or more conservative than the party.” Because most voters disagreed with the characterization of Biden as a “radical leftist,” Trump failed to land the knockout blow.
In 2016, Trump cast himself as a political outsider who would take down the Clintons once and for all. In 2020, President Trump was no longer the outsider. He never found Biden’s Achilles heel. There was no October surprise. No early vaccine announcement. No surprise stimulus check. The election played out amid a pandemic most Americans believe Trump responded poorly to. And so, he lost.
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