The Presidential Election saw a huge voter turnout in decades even as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to plague the country. The voter turnout rate (estimated) was around 66.4%, the highest since 1990 and much higher than that recorded in 2016 (60.1%). In fact, Biden received more than 75 million votes, which are higher than any other candidate in US electoral history. There was a huge surge in youth voter turnout of around 10% in the country.
As per the Exit Polls conducted by Edison Research for the National Election Pool (ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC), we will explore the changes in support for the Republican and Democratic party in 2020 as compared to 2016. When examining the support for both candidates by race, we observe that while Trump still had the support of 49% of white men, this was considerably lesser than in 2016. Trump’s base of core voters is white men (without college degrees), and while he won the group again, it was by a much smaller margin.
It should also be noted that many experts suggest that the reason Biden was unable to perform better than the President in several states is that he underperformed when compared to 2016 Democratic candidate, Hilary Clinton among voters of colour. While Biden was able to win their support, it was by smaller margins than Clinton.