What surprised you most about 2020?

[ElectionsGuy]

The difference between Georgia and Florida. I thought were going to be close to each other (GA: Trump +3 and FL: Trump +2). Didn't expect Georgia would go so much more D than Florida.

[Schiff for Senate]

Option 9 (massive Hispanic swings towards Trump). Option 8 was kind of surprising but it shouldn't have been given 2016. I'm surprised the FL Trump+4 result is winning a plurality of votes since it's really just a small part of the massive Hispanic swings to Trump - the massive Hispanic swings to Trump is basically that, as well as South Texas's gigantic rightward swing and the results in Nevada and Southern Colorado (Southern Colorado didn't really shift that much to the right but Alamosa County did flip to the GOP). Also, I think you should add an option for the results in NYC - congressional districts in NYC like Torres' swung hard rightward (I think Torres' shifted like 20 points rightward from 2012 to 2020, more than most other districts).

[pbrower2a]

That Donald Trump, arguably the worst President since James Buchanan, came so close to winning.

Don't fool yourself about him. His foreign policy was erratic in the extreme, He bungled the response to COVID-19 badly, even if the people hit hardest early were voters leaning D. The only political competence that I saw was that he opened the spigots on farm subsidies to offset the Chinese response to American tariffs.  At some points I saw disapproval numbers around 60% for Trump in Ohio and Iowa, and those states swung back for him. 

Maybe we do not know the full effect of COVID-19 upon demographics. Polarized as the American electorate is, demographics are everything. Polling errors may reflect that pollsters did not know the effects of COVID-19 upon the electorate. COVID-19 hit blacks hard in Michigan.

[ملكة كرينجيتوك]

Voted for Florida.

Specifically election results related:
- Miami-Dade (FL), Santa Clara (CA), Hudson (NJ), and Los Angeles (CA) for bigger-than-expected R county swings from 2016. Also lack of D swing in Clark (NV) and Harris (TX).
- MN, ME, NH, and GA for Biden overperformance at the state level.
- GOP winning almost all of the close non GA-SEN Congressional races (at least the ones I was paying close attention to).
- Biden's narrow victory in GA and both GA-SEN seats going to a runoff.

Background stuff:
- Low observed salience of climate change on swings/trends outside of the PNW.
- Lower than expected boost to Dems from COVID-19.
- Relatively high levels of Trump support (compared to other non-Southern states) among Asians in CA and HI per the SurveyMonkey crosstabs.
- The degree to which the GOP at-large rebounded with Vietnamese Americans post-2016.
- "Silent majority" effect in the Dem primaries and in the general election where the least/less "progressive" candidate outperformed polls and expectations. Although this might just be a consequence of me getting most of my election cycle info from here and 538.
- Social/institutional trust polarization, especially with QAnon and non-English disinformation. [Politicization of masks was worse but a little more predictable]

[TPIG]

I did not think it was possible for Trump to win Florida by such a large margin and lose Georgia.