There used to be an old medical school joke: “Always decline to give your friends a complete physical, but offer to do the them free of charge for your enemies.”
It’s only really funny if you know that you have to be dead to get one - a complete physical is an autopsy.
In presidential campaigns, political autopsies are fairly common. Sometimes they are written from the perspective of the winner (e.g. Theodore White’s “The Making of the President 1960”), sometimes the losers (e.g. “Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars” by Germond & Witcover), and other times by candidates themselves (e.g. Hillary Clinton’s “What Happened”).
In a short career as a political consultant, I encountered dozens of campaign professionals, Democratic party strategists, and political consultants and to a person books on political campaigns, national, state, and local, littered their bookshelves. Dissecting the American electorate and trying the glean a political edge is mark of the political professional.
The 2020 Election, by now, should have produced a plethora meaty tomes of political analyses, campaign anecdotes, and profiles of the people that defined that election. Unfortunately, the refusal of Donald Trump to concede or at a minimum to declare the election over has put political authors in a quandary of how to write a concluding chapter. Donald Trump, the undead corporeal revenant, and his zombie-like followers may refuse to surrender, but political realists on the Right would do well to start dissecting the loss, before Trump puts them into a likely reboot of Trumps’ failed franchise in 2024.
The election numbers for 2020 should have been a source of political argument at Trump’s second Impeachment Trial. A conviction and disqualification from public office would have fit any of Tiffany Stone’s suggested means for killing zombies. Trump is a loser politically and a proper verdict and punishment would have ended his apocalyptic reign over the GOP.
Donald Trump has had no true coattails, his endorsements were and largely still are meaningless, and for a person who extolled his brand acumen savvy in business Trump has shown no ability to do so in politics. Trumpism is not a shared political platform. If you are unconvinced, ask why his PAC does virtually nothing for GOP candidates.
The breakdown of the the last two elections reveals Trump’s political limits as a candidate.
The Democratic and Republican tickets gained in real numbers and raw percentages in 2020 from the 2016 election whereas other the political parties and their candidates lost. But who got what?
It is reasonable to conclude that Evan McMullin voters in 2016 gravitated to Donald Trump’s campaign in 2020. A similar conclusion can be made the Green Party drop off over 76% of its 2016 performance in 2020 - the Jill Stein voters went for Joe Biden.
The question is not did Joe Biden win the the 2.1 point drop-off from Gary Johnson’s campaign to Jo Jorgenson’s 2020 for the Libertarian Party.
He did.
The real question is how did the Libertarian Party which won nearly 1% of the vote in 2012 and got 1.18% in 2020 do more than 3 times as well in 2016?
Part II of the 2020 Autopsy tomorrow.