Why did New England swing so much against Trump?
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  Why did New England swing so much against Trump?
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Author Topic: Why did New England swing so much against Trump?  (Read 1542 times)
TheElectoralBoobyPrize
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« on: February 08, 2021, 11:20:10 PM »

Of the ten states with the biggest swings against Trump, five are New England states. Only RI failed to make the top 10, but it still had a swing more than twice the national.
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Chips
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« Reply #1 on: February 09, 2021, 05:42:12 AM »

He was toxic in New England.
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Secretary of State Liberal Hack
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« Reply #2 on: February 09, 2021, 07:25:29 AM »

They thought trump as a moderate who while a loudmouth would break with the party line on issues like minimum wage and abortion. It's a very secular area and his evangelical panering went down terribly in the region.
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TheElectoralBoobyPrize
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« Reply #3 on: February 09, 2021, 10:43:20 AM »


Why so much more so than in 2016 though?
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Stranger in a strange land
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« Reply #4 on: February 09, 2021, 10:48:43 AM »

I saw someone mention that his hardcore confederate pandering (on things like the Condederate Flag and Condederate Base Names) might have had something to do with it because New England is basically the anti-South and proud of its Abolitionist and Civil War Union Heritage.
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ProgressiveModerate
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« Reply #5 on: February 09, 2021, 11:03:41 AM »

According to Trump, we're all a bunch of socialists who murder babies and hate freedom
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Secretary of State Liberal Hack
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« Reply #6 on: February 09, 2021, 11:05:49 AM »

Religious culture war bullsh**t, New England has an anti-immigration streak but they don't like christ being shoved down their throats. Red meat on abortion, and generally governing like a conservative republican didn't go down well there.

They like "Moderates" who can pretend to be bi-partisan and able to get stuff done. Trump had that image in 2016, but it basicaly vanished in 2020.
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DaleCooper
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« Reply #7 on: February 09, 2021, 11:44:45 AM »

I remember a lot of emphasis being placed on Trump's supposed secularism back in 2016, and most of the people I knew that bought into Trump or were agnostic on him the first time around were hoping that he would move the GOP more to the center on cultural issues, immigration aside. This turned out to be comically untrue as the GOP is still as Moral Majority as ever and Trump support is practically a quasi-religion. That's never going to fly in New England except for apparently ME-02.
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« Reply #8 on: February 09, 2021, 12:37:13 PM »

I saw someone mention that his hardcore confederate pandering (on things like the Condederate Flag and Condederate Base Names) might have had something to do with it because New England is basically the anti-South and proud of its Abolitionist and Civil War Union Heritage.

Definitely this, plus farming out social policy to the religious right while in office after campaigning in 2016 as more of a Scott Brownian culturally-conservative-but-not-socially-conservative candidate, something that does still play fairly well in much of the region. New Englanders are fine with a bit of immigrant-bashing and autarky but have very little time for Southern- and Lower Midwestern-style moral majoritarianism on drugs or sex.
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Skill and Chance
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« Reply #9 on: February 09, 2021, 12:44:39 PM »

Really high concentration of college grads vs. nationwide.  That's the bottom line.  New England being relatively secular could be a small part of the story, but with Trump improving in places like Las Vegas, L.A. and South Florida, I think it's very overrated.  
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Devils30
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« Reply #10 on: February 09, 2021, 08:42:25 PM »

Really high concentration of college grads vs. nationwide.  That's the bottom line.  New England being relatively secular could be a small part of the story, but with Trump improving in places like Las Vegas, L.A. and South Florida, I think it's very overrated.  

Nope, the variable those places have is a large Hispanic population while New England is still extremely white.
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progressive85
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« Reply #11 on: February 10, 2021, 12:10:20 AM »

I do know there were lots of elderly white men in fairly moderate towns in the Boston suburbs that really didn't like the guy at all.
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Alben Barkley
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« Reply #12 on: February 10, 2021, 12:20:20 AM »

I said it before the election and I'll say it again now: The only reason Trump did relatively well for a Republican in New England in 2016 was that people saw him as a "different" kind of Republican that was actually more moderate, especially compared to the Jesus Freaks like Cruz. Gotta remember that New England is the least religious and most highly educated area of the country, but it does have strong Republican roots (still evident today in their RINO governors), so seeing a Republican who (while clearly far from socially liberal in other respects, notably immigration) was not outwardly pious and zealous about evangelical Christianity may have been appealing to some people there. When it turned out he would be far worse in this regard than they expected (foolishly, given his open pandering to GOP social conservatism, including the selection of Pence as his running mate), they were naturally turned off and once again voted Democratic.

Reminder that religion is the single biggest predictor of how people vote, which is why even a region as white, rural, and wealthy as New England now votes Democratic. Maybe some thought Trump -- obviously not religious himself, and a Yankee (if not a New Englander) -- would be more aligned with their interests than the GOP has been in the past few decades. But again, obviously that turned out to not be the case.
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Alben Barkley
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« Reply #13 on: February 10, 2021, 12:24:08 AM »

Really high concentration of college grads vs. nationwide.  That's the bottom line.  New England being relatively secular could be a small part of the story, but with Trump improving in places like Las Vegas, L.A. and South Florida, I think it's very overrated.  

The common thread between all those places is they have a very large number of Hispanics; New England does not. That was a whole separate issue, and it has nothing to do with the fact that secularism is the most likely reason New England so sharply shifted away from Trump (even relative to trends we saw in other educated white areas), or the proven fact that religion is the single most reliable demographic predictor of how people vote. More than race, even. Unlike the Hispanics in the areas you mentioned, New Englanders are largely not just "secular;" they are actively irreligious, while most Hispanics are at least culturally Catholic even if they do not practice it devoutly. And being irreligious is the single strongest predictor of voting Democratic.
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Pericles
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« Reply #14 on: February 10, 2021, 04:34:22 AM »

They thought trump as a moderate who while a loudmouth would break with the party line on issues like minimum wage and abortion. It's a very secular area and his evangelical panering went down terribly in the region.

Why weren't those kind of voters a factor in the rest of the nation, such as the Midwest?
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Secretary of State Liberal Hack
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« Reply #15 on: February 10, 2021, 04:44:53 AM »

They thought trump as a moderate who while a loudmouth would break with the party line on issues like minimum wage and abortion. It's a very secular area and his evangelical panering went down terribly in the region.

Why weren't those kind of voters a factor in the rest of the nation, such as the Midwest?
Biden got a large swing in Minnesota though whether that's from hipster Christians or secular voters is an open question. The rest of the midwest is fairly religious. Furthermore New England doesn't have the same kind of working-class rust belt blight, the area mostly bounced back from deindustrialization or was fairly unaffected so there was less trumpian "sticking it to the man" appele in this region compared to others. Places like Coons or the Maine-2nd that had been affected badly by job losses mostly stuck with trump.
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Oregon Eagle Politics
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« Reply #16 on: February 10, 2021, 10:01:56 AM »

HRC was despised in NE
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Pollster
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« Reply #17 on: February 10, 2021, 04:57:19 PM »

The region is is a highly concentrated area of mostly well-educated and very secular whites, two groups of voters that Trump hemorrhaged support among across the country.
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MT Treasurer
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« Reply #18 on: February 10, 2021, 07:27:01 PM »

The really interesting story here is that it swung so much against him while states like IA/OH barely budged.
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Mr. Smith
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« Reply #19 on: February 10, 2021, 07:32:15 PM »

Religious Right fe#@%$&on.

He was supposed to be more moderate with that stuff. Didn't happen.
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« Reply #20 on: February 10, 2021, 07:40:04 PM »

I don't have anything insightful to add that hasn't already said, but, one of my favorite #analytical takes was that NH, a state where people attributed all of Trump's 2016 success to opioid epidemic and which he immediately disparaged as a Smiley drug infested den Smiley as soon as he got into office, was maybe going to swing towards him in a race where most of the fundamentals were running against him.
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Joe McCarthy Was Right
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« Reply #21 on: February 10, 2021, 07:49:17 PM »
« Edited: February 10, 2021, 08:07:05 PM by Joe McCarthy Was Right »

I don't have anything insightful to add that hasn't already said, but, one of my favorite #analytical takes was that NH, a state where people attributed all of Trump's 2016 success to opioid epidemic and which he immediately disparaged as a Smiley drug infested den Smiley as soon as he got into office, was maybe going to swing towards him in a race where most of the fundamentals were running against him.
Even in that state, he got more total votes than last time.

Bernie Sanders might have depressed Democrat turnout or caused a lot of defections in 2016.

I also don't think "insulting" states has much of an impact. Trump said "how stupid are the people of Iowa?" but won it twice. Sinema called Arizona "the meth lab of democracy" and still won.
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Geoffrey Howe
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« Reply #22 on: February 24, 2021, 02:28:47 PM »

I don't have anything insightful to add that hasn't already said, but, one of my favorite #analytical takes was that NH, a state where people attributed all of Trump's 2016 success to opioid epidemic and which he immediately disparaged as a Smiley drug infested den Smiley as soon as he got into office, was maybe going to swing towards him in a race where most of the fundamentals were running against him.
Even in that state, he got more total votes than last time.

Bernie Sanders might have depressed Democrat turnout or caused a lot of defections in 2016.

I also don't think "insulting" states has much of an impact. Trump said "how stupid are the people of Iowa?" but won it twice. Sinema called Arizona "the meth lab of democracy" and still won.

Yes. It seems to me that certainly the most important thing was Bernie Sanders getting write-in votes or Sanders fans abstaining in 2016; all of this transferred to Biden in 2020. You can see this particularly in Vermont.
Also there are a lot of wealthy towns, e.g. southwest Connecticut, Boston suburbs like Dover - which were in fact very strong for Romney. Some of them swung nearly as much 2016-2020 as 2012-2016.
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Motorcity
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« Reply #23 on: February 28, 2021, 02:47:41 PM »

The really interesting story here is that it swung so much against him while states like IA/OH barely budged.
The 2020 election was basically a max turnout election

If you look at Iowa and Ohio, their raw votes didn’t change much. My thinking is that these states have been at max turnout for a couple election cycles (because they were swing states) so there wasn’t any room to grow for either Biden or Trump

Florida is different. Despite being at max turnout, they are still growing fast.
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