By Jim Geraghty
Thursday, November 12, 2020
Just about everybody hates losing. Just about everybody really hates losing and knowing it was a genuine, earned defeat, and that the outcome didn’t just come down to a lucky bounce at the last second. Just about everybody really, really hates losing and realizing all too late that they ignored warnings, misjudged key criteria, made the wrong decisions, and didn’t see the oncoming brick wall until it was too late. One of the hardest ideas to confront in life is that we failed when our destiny was in our own hands. It is much, much easier to hunt for scapegoats.
At press time, it appears Joe Biden has won Pennsylvania, and he leads in Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia. Those final four states are enough to put him comfortably over the 270-vote threshold to win the Electoral College, and with it the presidency. But Trump came agonizingly close to being the victor instead. He won a bunch of the swing states he needed — Florida, Ohio, and Iowa, and appears to have won North Carolina — and came within 20,000 votes of winning Wisconsin. In the final four states, he is on pace to finish within two percentage points of Biden.
Was it Never Trump Republicans who cost Trump the election? If you define that group as the Lincoln Project, The Bulwark, and Max Boot, then no, not in the slightest. If you define it more broadly as normally Republican-leaning voters who found Trump unacceptable, then there is some evidence to suggest that they may have cost Trump a handful of electoral votes — but not enough to make up the gap between him and Biden.
Perhaps the most glaring example of Trump’s losing an electoral vote because he wasn’t as popular as other Republicans on the ballot came in Nebraska. Trump won the state overall but, because he lost in the state’s second congressional district, will receive only four of Nebraska’s five electoral votes. The second district is not a Democratic stronghold, and Trump held a rally there, in Omaha, in late October. Yet Biden’s victory in the district was not especially close: 52 percent to 45 percent. Probably 6 percent of voters split their ticket; in the second district’s House race, Republican Donald Bacon beat Democrat Kara Eastman, 50.8 percent to 46.1 percent. This was something of a surprise: The Omaha World-Herald noted that “as Election Day approached, Bacon was considered the most vulnerable GOP incumbent in the country.”
Some number of voters preferred the Republican in a Senate race but did not vote for Trump. In only a handful of cases, though, were there enough such voters to have flipped electoral votes to Trump if they had supported him. In Maine (totals here and below as of press time), Trump won 340,512 votes — enough to win the state’s second congressional district and grab one of its electoral votes (Maine is the only state besides Nebraska that splits its electoral votes). This offset his lost vote in Nebraska. But Senator Susan Collins won reelection with 383,227 votes statewide, outpacing Trump by more than 42,000 votes. We probably shouldn’t be that surprised, given that Collins and Trump are about as temperamentally and rhetorically different as two Republicans — or two human beings — can be. Maine is a quirky, heavily independent state — almost 32 percent of registered voters have no party affiliation — that probably can’t be simplistically labeled as “Never Trump.” But Collins demonstrates that Maine voters statewide are willing to vote for a Republican, just not one like Trump.
Other states showed gaps in support between the president and the Republican Senate candidate, but not enough to make a difference in the outcome. In North Carolina, Trump was ahead by 75,407 votes. Senator Thom Tillis was leading in his race by 95,721, outpacing Trump by 20,000 votes. (Trump won more votes overall, but Tillis won by a wider margin.)
In Colorado, where both Trump and Senator Cory Gardner lost, Trump won 1,335,253 votes and Gardner won 1,399,030 votes. The senator outpaced the president by more than 63,000 votes, but neither Republican came all that close to victory.
In Texas, Trump won 5,872,348 votes; Senator John Cornyn won 5,944,601 votes. Cornyn outpaced Trump by about 72,000 votes, but this gap made no difference, as both Republicans won handily.
In Georgia, where the result remains uncertain and Biden leads narrowly, Trump appears to have won almost as many votes as Senator David Perdue. So far, the president has won 2,455,305 votes; Perdue has won 2,456,211 votes. But Biden’s current vote total, at 2,465,450, suggests that if all Biden-Perdue voters had been Trump-Perdue voters instead, it wouldn’t have put Trump over the top.
There were also states where Trump outpaced the Republican Senate candidate. In Montana, Trump won 341,763 votes, and Senator Steve Daines won 332,824 votes; both Republicans won comfortably. In Arizona, Trump won 1,612,585 votes, and Senator Martha McSally won 1,590,114 votes; both trailed their opponents narrowly. In Michigan, Trump won 2,644,528 votes, and John James, trying to unseat the incumbent, Democrat Gary Peters, won 2,636,895. Both Trump and James lost narrowly. In Iowa, Trump won 896,100 votes, and Senator Joni Ernst won 863,476 votes; Trump had about 32,000 more votes than Ernst, but both won relatively comfortably. In West Virginia, Trump won 589,848 votes . . . and Senator Shelley Moore Capito, in an uncompetitive reelection bid, won 541,605 votes. If there were Never Trump Republican voters in these states, they were narrowly offset by Only Trump voters across the spectrum.
Both senators and governors usually fit their state’s electorate better, because they’re focused relentlessly on winning support from that one particular group of voters, as opposed to a president or presidential candidate trying to appeal to voters nationwide. But at least senators are voting on federal legislation in Washington and dealing with the same national issues. If we use governors’ races as a comparison, the case for a substantial Never Trump vote is stronger. But it’s an imperfect comparison, given that governors are usually addressing a more localized set of issues in their state capitals.
With that in mind, we can note that a pair of GOP governors ran way ahead of Trump. In New Hampshire, Trump won 363,469 votes and lost badly. Governor Chris Sununu, with 504,133 votes, won reelection by a landslide. In neighboring Vermont, Trump won 111,131 votes; GOP governor Phil Scott, with 248,185 votes, won reelection in a similar landslide.
The story these numbers tell is nonetheless that Never Trump Republicans — broadly defined as voters who cast ballots for down-ticket Republicans but did not cast a ballot for Trump — don’t exist in numbers that would have flipped many states. If every voter who voted for Bacon, Collins, Sununu, and Scott had voted for Trump, Trump would have picked up . . . eleven electoral votes. That wouldn’t have been enough to get him another term.
Besides, if Never Trump Republicans did cost Trump a handful of electoral votes, just whose fault is that? Should those Republicans who voted for Biden be berated for not recognizing the dire consequences of electing a Democratic president? Or does some of the responsibility fall at Trump’s feet?
Despite the evident polling errors, the existence of anti-Trump or Trump-skeptical Republicans cannot be seriously disputed. You didn’t have to look hard to find Republicans who liked Trump’s policies but found his erraticism, raging Twitter tirades, juvenile name-calling, and lack of respect for — or even interest in — the Constitution and the rule of law infuriating.
Is it Never Trump voters’ fault that Trump decided to heckle and shout his way through the first debate and then refuse to participate in the second one? Did Never Trump voters make Trump declare throughout the ongoing pandemic that the virus was going to disappear as if by miracle? Whose job is it to articulate a second-term agenda in interviews and speeches? Trump spent the morning of Election Day on Fox & Friends complaining that Fox News hadn’t been loyal enough to him.
The problem wasn’t that Trump failed to win over Never Trump or Trump-skeptical voters. The problem is that he never even tried.
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