In 2008, Barack Obama’s campaign was gifted an election-night surprise on its way to 365 electoral votes: It won Indiana. The state hadn’t voted for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson’s landslide, and just four years earlier, George W. Bush crushed John Kerry in Indiana by 21 points. But in the wake of the economic crash, Democrats were surfing a wave, and Obama eked out a narrow 28,391-vote win over John McCain in the Hoosier State. It was a holy-shit moment, both for the national media and Obama high command, neither of which had identified Indiana as a key battleground heading into Election Day. The win didn’t come out of nowhere, exactly: Obama had plowed resources into registering new voters there during his primary fight with Hillary Clinton; the polls were always close; and corners of Indiana shared media markets with the more competitive states of Michigan and Ohio. But the polling was also spotty, and McCain led by a final average of 1.4 points.
The Obama campaign looked to other states, like North Carolina and Virginia, to carve a new path to 270. When Indiana landed in its column, it was an unexpected treat, a crisp $20 bill found in its pocket. The state decisively tipped back to Republicans in a big way four years later. But there’s a lesson in that fluke Indiana win, too, as Democrats head into the final two weeks of an election in which Joe Biden continues to gain strength against a stalled-out Donald Trump: Even as the two campaigns and the political media focus their attention on certain core battleground states, weird things tend to happen at the margins in wave elections, outside the agreed-upon field of view. And 2020 is shaping up to be a wave of seismic proportions. As veteran election handicapper Stuart Rothenberg told me back in 2018, “The thing about wave elections is that they manifest themselves in places you didn’t think were competitive.”
A slew of political fundamentals—fundraising, explosive early-vote numbers, late-spending decisions, candidate travel, surging downballot Democrats, the Republican rush to confirm a new Supreme Court justice, and the ugly fact that Trump is dueling with George H. W. Bush for the title of most unpopular incumbent since World War II—point to what’s coming. If the polls are correct, the president is about to get schlonged, bigly. “Trump right now is just so vulnerable to a complete collapse,” said one respected Democratic number-cruncher working with a variety of outside groups. “He is so close to the edge in all of these states, if there is another tick down, it’s a total bloodbath.” Trump only narrowly won the 2016 race, within the margin of error in a handful of swing states. Since then the president’s support among his strongest demographics, including working-class white women, white men, and even white evangelicals, has deteriorated. Every election since 2017, every swing state poll and every fundraising quarter have favored Democrats, with independents and college-educated women rejecting Trump by powerful margins. Trump was already on thin ice. But if there’s a blue wave, it won’t just be because the coalition that powered Democrats in 2018 showed up again in a big way. It’s also that seniors have abandoned Trump for Biden during the coronavirus pandemic, a well-reported phenomenon but one that still seems curiously underplayed in the preelection narrative. By building a coalition of suburbanites, college-educated voters, and seniors—voters who actually vote— Biden isn’t just on the cusp of denying Trump a second term. He’s obliterating the voting base that’s undergirded the Republican Party for the last 30 years. “If you were going to concoct a Molotov cocktail to toss and blow apart a party’s key coalitions, right now the GOP is dealing with it,” said Ohio-based Republican consultant Nick Everhart.
Recent polls from CNN and NBC showed Biden with a more-than-20-point lead among voters over the age of 65. Democrats haven’t won that age group since the 2000 election, and seniors became a reliable voting bloc for Republicans during the Obama era. Trump won seniors by nine points over Clinton in 2016. Today Biden is winning seniors in the aging upper Midwest—Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—by healthy margins. In the Sunbelt states—Georgia, Texas, and Arizona—Trump is still winning the olds, but his edge has diminished since 2016. Biden, his fellow senior citizen, is chewing into Republican margins. In Florida, where the old vote is crucial, Trump defeated Clinton by 17 points among seniors last time. Today, thanks to COVID-19 and the president’s hapless response to it, Biden is either winning or tied with Trump among Florida seniors, depending on the poll.
“Seniors are a good strength to have because they’re big in terms of expansion,” Biden pollster John Anzalone told me. “The six core battleground states are older than people realize. Certainly people think of Arizona and Florida as having big senior populations, but so does the upper Midwest. Even when you expand into Iowa, you‘re still looking at a lot of senior voters.” The shift among seniors is not just an interesting cross-tab—it’s a wholesale realignment of the Democratic electorate. It puts Iowa and Ohio firmly back on the electoral map, diminishes Trump’s support everywhere else, and even makes states like Kansas and Missouri—which have only been lightly polled but have plenty of suburbanites and aging voters—look like tempting flips for optimists tinkering with the 270toWin map.
In most years the lament on the left is that Republicans vote and Democrats don’t. But Biden and the pandemic have collided to form a coalition of voters who actually return ballots and show up to the polls. “You have the 2018 loss of college-educated and suburban female support that has further eroded, coupled now with a pandemic-driven drop not in just seniors but white seniors across the country, in emerging battleground states like Iowa, Ohio, Georgia, and Arizona,” Everhart told me. “It’s having a devastating impact on the electoral math. And not just Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida, which were already swing states. This isn’t isolated to the presidential race. It’s tearing apart crucial coalitions and putting races in play from South Carolina to Kansas to Alaska.” Iowa and Ohio, now competitive, were left for dead by Democrats four years ago. The very fact that Texas and Georgia are competitive presidential contests is a huge tell about the state of the race and the mood of the country. Houston’s Harris County has already cast more than 50% of the total number of votes in the 2016 election, and Biden is currently polling better in Texas than Beto O’Rourke was in 2018, when he lost statewide to Ted Cruz by only 2.6 points. There are 38 electoral votes at stake there, second only to California. Unlike other states, because it counts absentee ballots ahead of time, Texas will report its results on election night itself. If Trump loses Texas, he has lost the election. The possibility of Biden winning more than 400 electoral votes is not out of the question.