Analysis | The remarkable party loyalty that propelled Joe Biden to the White House - The Washington Post

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It was very clear by about the middle of 2019 that the candidate who had the best shot at winning the Democratic presidential nomination was named “whoever is most likely to defeat Donald Trump.” Over and over, both polling and conversations made clear that this was a critical priority for Democratic voters and, over and over, polling and conversations revealed that Joe Biden was believed to be that candidate. Lots of Democrats preferred people like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), but they were generally both comfortable with Biden and focused on booting Trump from office.

This is the point made in detail by the University of Denver’s Seth Masket in an essay published by The Washington Post on Wednesday. He is responding to a new book that describes Biden’s success as “lucky.” Masket argues that luck was only a minor factor in an election featuring a Democratic electorate that was urgently focused on replacing a president it loathed.

Masket’s argument convincingly walks through how that motivation powered Biden’s ascent to the nomination. But it’s worth recognizing that the election results themselves showed an unusual level of Democratic loyalty for their party’s nominee.

One of the trends that has been observed in presidential election results over the past few cycles is an increasing loyalty from partisans for the candidate of their party. In 1980 and 1984, for example, only about 70 percent of Democrats voted for the Democratic presidential candidate, helping power Ronald Reagan’s success. A decade later, Republicans were less likely to robustly support the Republican candidates facing Bill Clinton.

Starting in 2000, Republican support for the Republican candidate passed the 90 percent mark, where it stayed until 2016, when it dropped to 88 percent. (All of this is according to exit polls, meaning that some margin of error is at play.) Only twice since 1972 have Democrats supported the Democratic presidential candidate with at least 90 percent of the vote: in 2012 and in 2020.

The graphs above show a lot more than simply party loyalty. You can see, for example, that even when Republicans were less likely to back the Republican, it was often because they backed a third-party candidate (specifically, Ross Perot). You can also see two recent blips when Republicans were more likely to back the Democratic candidate than normal: when Barack Obama ran in 2008 and when Trump ran in 2016.

But the important point here is that only once has there been an election since 1976 in which Democratic support for the Democratic candidate was both over 90 percent and matched Republican loyalty to the Republican. That occurred in 2020.

That’s not the party loyalty that Masket was specifically talking about, but it’s derivative of the same motivation. Democrats surged to the polls and voted more heavily for the Democratic candidate than at any point on record.

And Biden won.

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Analysis | The remarkable party loyalty that propelled Joe Biden to the White House - The Washington Post
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