There are lots of theories about why Joe Biden beat Donald Trump.
That Trump had offended lots of people. That Trump had alienated Americans of color. That female voters hated him.
But the reality is that Trump dramatically increased his vote total over 2016 — including with minorities and Republican women. The reality is that the Republican President received the second-highest share of the popular vote in American presidential history.
But it wasn’t enough. He lost.
Because the reality is also this: Joe Biden won an even bigger share of the popular vote. And that happened — his win happened — because of organization.
Full disclosure: This writer worked as an unpaid volunteer for Joe Biden and the Democrats for many months. I’ve helped the Democrats for years, and was to be an accredited volunteer at their August leadership convention in Milwaukee.
But the coronavirus had other plans. With the border closed, I couldn’t cross the border to knock on doors and get out the vote for Biden.
So, I and many others worked the phones. Night after night, day after day, we ran phone banks, calling millions of American voters. And our objective was always the same: Encourage them to use absentee ballots. Encourage them to vote early. Encourage them to mail in their ballot.
Over and over, we’d tell voters how to use the so-called absentee ballots: Get them from the town clerk. Put an X on the ballot. Put it in the small envelope, seal it. Sign it — with your real signature. Put the small envelope in the big one. Then take the sealed big envelope back to the town clerk — and don’t trust the postal system!
I made hundreds of such calls to Americans from New Hampshire to Florida to California. And, over and over, I was amazed by how enthusiastically voters — particularly Democratic voters – were embracing early voting.
We would’ve preferred a landslide election-night win, of course.
But months ago, Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley-Dillon told us on a conference call three things: One, the polls were wrong, the race was going to be tight. Two, our voters were much more concerned than GOP supporters about the coronavirus. They were more concerned about possible vote suppression dirty tricks, too. And, three, we weren’t going to win big landslide on election night. Instead, O’Malley-Dillon told us, we’d have to fight a long, hard organizational war to identify our voters early — and then get them to vote early.
So we did that. And the Republicans just didn’t.
The other guys had big rallies, sure. But those rallies are always just preaching to the converted — particularly when the TV networks aren’t televising them.
Trump needed to grow his vote base. He needed to reach out to first-time voters. But he didn’t do that.
Joe Biden did. The Democrats did.
The media, and the Republicans, didn’t pay attention to what we Democrats were doing. I will never understand why. When around 100 million Americans are voting in advance, isn’t that newsworthy? When that many voters are motivated enough to vote in that way, isn’t that something that should deeply worry the incumbent?
Joe Biden won because he was a specific antidote to Donald Trump — he was decent, he was human, he was less partisan, he was experienced.
But mostly, we won because our voters were more motivated, and because our disciplined army of staff and volunteers were one thing the Trump Republicans simply weren’t:
Organized.
[Kinsella worked as a volunteer for Joe Biden and the Democrats in several US states]
I still think I’m going to get that last one right. Plan to work on the Georgia runoffs – as I did in the midterms and in 2020 – to help make it happen.
But feeling so emotional and so happy, today. So grateful.
Lots of you – lots! – have tweeted, texted and called me to say how upset you are about Trump’s statement tonight. You are very upset – but I’m actually not. So, let me try and explain why. Let me try and make you feel better.
When you talk to American voters – and this writer recently has, hundreds of times, from New Hampshire to Florida to California – you’ll be told three things, a lot.
Young to old, East to West, Right to Left, three themes emerge. It’s pretty consistent.
One, they voted early.
We Democratic Party volunteers made lots of calls to lots Americans who had picked up an absentee ballot down at the town hall, or who had voted early. Many, many Americans chose to vote this way.
By the final weekend, more than 90 million Americans had voted in advance. That’s 70 per cent of the total number of all voters in 2016. And that doesn’t merely break records – it is extraordinary. It is unprecedented.
And that kind of early turnout is never, ever good for the incumbent.
In the so-called battleground states – the ones whose electoral college votes will determine who gets to be president, and which party controls Congress – more than half of the number who voted in 2016 did so early in 2020. Those states include Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Florida, Arizona, Colorado, Wisconsin, Maine, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and Nebraska.
States that Donald Trump dominated in last time. States he desperately needs to keep to win re-election.
Democratic Party volunteers weren’t trained to inquire why people voted early. But the subject would sometimes come up. Some would tell us they were anxious about catching the virus, and early voting seemed a lot safer.
But some would say they feared that Donald Trump would try and prevent Democrats from voting. That he’d scheme to suppress the vote.
“I already voted Democrat up and down the ticket,” one New Hampshire man said to me. “No dirty tricks. We need to get rid of Trump.”
And that points to another thing we discovered when talking to American voters: very, very few were undecided.
They had their minds made up, and long ago, too. The undecided vote – the “gettable” vote, which is really all that matters in most elections, in the United States or any other Western democracy – was smaller in 2020 than ever before.
Some political scientists call this group “volatile voters” – electors whose allegiance moves around, and who tend to be unenthusiastic about their political choices in every election. In 2016, about 20 per cent of likely voters were undecided (or volatile).
In 2020, it’s less than half that number. In some states, it’s has been as little as five per cent.
Why so small? Because these voters aren’t undecided anymore. They’ve made their mind up: a New York Times/Siena poll released this week found that 54 per cent of volatile/undecided voters had an unfavorable view of Trump. He has become the ballot question.
It’s pretty hard to win re-election in 2020 when, like Trump, you’ve lost the undecideds – the ones who overwhelmingly broke your way in 2016. Because Trump was considered the lesser of two evils last time.
Not this time. On the phone, over and over, those we contacted rarely said they were undecided. When they were prepared to say how they voted, or how they would vote, they were clear: they were going Democrat, up and down the ticket.
They were doing that, they said, because they wanted Trump out, period. Not because they were seized with a burning love for Joe Biden.
“Go get Trump, honey,” Bessie, a Florida voter, said to me. “Keep doing what you’re doing and get him out!”
And, by any objective measurement, Donald Trump should be thrown out. In poll after poll, in every electoral college analysis – in every phone call we Democratic volunteers made to every eligible voter we could find – we found highly-motivated, clearly-decided voters who want Trump gone.
That, then, is the third and final reason he should lose: Americans are sick of him. They are sick of his face.
He used Twitter to be on their devices, 24/7. He used the White House as a reality-show stage. He used the presidency as a prop. He was ubiquitous – the most-seen, most-read, most-discussed President in the history of the United States of America.
And, somewhere along the way, Americans – including lots of undecideds and not a few Republicans – just got fed up. He had exhausted them. He had been a psychodrama without end.
So, now, they want it to end. That was the third thing we learned: American voters have had their lives disrupted quite enough, thank you very much.
Economically, socially, culturally, the pandemic has disrupted everything. They don’t need a disruptor in the White House, too.
That’s the third thing, the determining factor. They want things to calm down, a bit. They want normal again. They want their lives back. They want Joe Biden is selling: peace and quiet.
Unless he figures out some way to cheat his way back into office – aided and abetted by the courts he’s stacked for four years – Donald Trump is a goner. He’s toast.
And that’s not just because the polls and the pundits say so.
That’s what Americans are saying. You just have to pick up the phone and call them.
