With businesses still shuttered in many parts of the country due to COVID-19, majorities in both groups (84% of Trump voters and 66% of Biden voters) said in October that the economy would be a top voting issue for them. That’s not to say that there are no areas of agreement between the two coalitions. But for Trump voters, climate change ranked last in importance out of 12 issues asked about, with only 11% saying it would be a key factor in their vote. Around two-thirds of Biden voters (68%) said in the summer that climate change would be very important to their vote this year. Indeed, Biden and Trump voters were far more divided over these questions than Hillary Clinton and Trump voters were in 2016.Ĭlimate change marks another area where political compromise may be challenging because Biden and Trump supporters disagree over the importance of the issue itself. And while 59% of Biden voters said White people benefit a “great deal” from advantages in society that Black people do not have, only 5% of Trump voters agreed. In a summer survey, 74% of Biden voters said “it is a lot more difficult” to be a Black person in this country than to be a White person – a view shared by only 9% of Trump voters. The two sides are miles apart when it comes to more general questions about race, too. Conversely, around three-quarters of Trump voters (74%) said the issue of violent crime was very important to them, compared with fewer than half of Biden voters (46%). Around three-quarters of registered voters who support Biden (76%) said in the summer that racial and ethnic inequality would be very important to their vote just 24% of Trump supporters agreed. The Biden and Trump coalitions also fundamentally differ over racial inequality and law enforcement – key issues in a year that saw nationwide protests following the killing of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis. had controlled the outbreak as much as it could have – positions rejected by most Democrats. Before the election, most Republicans said the pandemic had been exaggerated and that the U.S. Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents have consistently expressed far more concern over the virus than Republicans and GOP leaners. The enormous gulf over the importance of COVID-19 as a voting issue is just one of many ways, large and small, in which the virus has divided the partisan camps throughout 2020. Only 24% of registered voters who support Trump said the same. to date and the election itself disrupted because of the virus, 82% of registered voters who support Biden said in October that the outbreak would be “very important” to their vote. With more than 235,000 deaths in the U.S. No issue seems to exemplify this divide more than the coronavirus pandemic. The elected officials who take the oath of office in January will be representing two broad coalitions of voters who are deeply distrustful of one another and who fundamentally disagree over policies, plans and even the very problems that face the country today. It isn’t just Washington that will be divided.
Democrats and Republicans both could walk away from the election with cause for disappointment, and divided government in Washington is a distinct possibility.
history.īut if one early takeaway from the election is historic voter participation, another may be the continuing political polarization that has come to define the United States. 6, while Republican Donald Trump has received nearly 70 million – already the most and second-most in U.S. Democrat Joe Biden has amassed more than 74 million votes as of Nov. (David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)Įven before all the ballots are tallied, Americans appear to have voted in the 2020 presidential election at their highest rate in 120 years. People gather in Times Square as they await election results on Nov.
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