A new analysis uncovers the demographic shifts that led to Joe Biden’s victory
Suburban whites moved left; young and non-white voters showed up
May 14, 2021
MUCH ATTENTION has been paid to Donald Trump’s surprise performance in last year’s presidential election. The former president performed much better than the pre-election polls expected, especially in states with high concentrations of Hispanics or white voters without college degrees. But given that he won in spite of the misses, what did Mr Biden’s winning coalition actually look like?
A new analysis by Catalist, a firm that examines political data, reveals many different angles to Mr Biden’s victory. Catalist generates its estimates of how groups voted by combining polling interviews with tens of thousands of voters with administrative records of who turned out in the previous election. Pollsters call their cumulative databases storing these records the “voter file”. Because Catalist knows who American voters are—most importantly where they live, their demographics (such as age and race) and what their political partisanship is likely to be—it can generate estimates of whom they voted for.