The coalition that fueled President Joe Biden’s victory over former President Donald Trump was both predictable and surprising, revealing strengths and weaknesses for Democrats and Republicans, according to a Pew Research Center poll of thousands of verified 2020 voters.
Biden’s ouster of Trump was predictable in that he won independents, typically the key to capturing the White House, 52% to 43%, erasing the former president’s advantage with this cohort from 2016. And Biden won suburban voters 54% to 43%, wiping out the 45th president’s edge with this group from four years earlier and continuing a trend that has seen suburbanites move toward the Democrats in the Trump era.
But even as Biden made Trump the first incumbent commander in chief ousted from the White House since 1992, the former president made unexpected gains with key demographics — women and Hispanics — that should give Democrats pause. In 2016, Trump lost women by 15 percentage points; four years later, he lost women by 11 points. Additionally, Trump garnered 38% of Hispanic voters in 2020, 10 points better than his first campaign.
The Pew Research Center post-election poll was based on interviews with 11,818 voters who participated in its American Trends Panel, Nov. 12–17 of last year, just days after the general election concluded. For comparisons with the results of the two previous elections, Pew also referred to interviews with 10,640 voters conducted on Nov. 7–16 of 2018 and 4,183 voters conducted Nov. 29 to Dec. 12 of 2016.
To verify that the respondents had, in fact, voted, Pew matched names against records from three separate commercially available voter files that contained registration information for the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections and the 2018 midterm elections. If an interviewee’s voting history could not be verified, Pew put him or her in the category of not having voted.
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Among the notable findings from Pew’s in-depth, post-2020 election survey:
- 2020 voters who voted in the two previous elections favored Biden over Trump 53% to 46%; 2020 voters who pulled the lever in 2016 but skipped the 2018 midterm elections favored Trump over Biden 53% to 45%; 2020 voters who skipped 2016 but showed up two years later backed Biden over Trump 62% to 36%; 2020 voters who did not participate in either 2016 or 2018 narrowly went for Biden 49% to 47%.
- Black voters supported Biden over Trump 92% to 8%, despite a major investment to improve its position with this cohort made by the Trump campaign.
- Among men, Trump saw his 52% to 41% advantage over Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 shrink to 50% to 48% over Biden in 2020. Related, Biden also ate into Trump’s big advantage among white men, garnering 40% of their support, compared to Clinton’s 32%. There was no data available from 2016 for black men and Hispanic men. But Trump received the backing of 12% and 40% of these demographics, respectively, compared to the 6% and 27% Republican candidates received from them in the 2018 midterm elections.
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Mail-in and absentee voting was way up last year compared to past elections, a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic. Forty-six percent of voters said they voted this way; nearly half, 43%, saying they did so for the first time. Meanwhile, 27% of voters said they voted in person on Election Day, with another 27% saying they voted in person early. The starkest differences in how voters chose to participate were evident in the comparison between Biden voters and Trump voters. Among those who supported the current president, 58% voted by mail or absentee, with just 18% voting in person on Election Day. Among those who backed the former president, only 32% voted by mail or absentee, with 38% voting in person on Election Day.
The 2020 presidential election also saw partisan differences related to education level continue to harden. College graduates backed Biden 56% to 42%, improving on Clinton’s 11-point advantage with this group four years earlier. Meanwhile, Trump’s lead with voters with a high school diploma or less increased from plus-7 points to plus-15 points.
