The Parties Go Toe-to-Toe

This chapter analyzes the results of the presidential election, showing how these partisan strategies paid off. We empirically demonstrate that the state legislative initiatives undertaken by the controlling party typically shaped the partisan distribution of the electorate. The party with the most registered voters won every state except Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Those exceptions, though, all fell on Republican home turf, where Trump wound up losing to Biden in all of them, despite holding a partisan advantage that other Republicans on the ticket exploited. In each case, we show that Trump’s Covid policies turned off just enough Republicans to give Biden the electoral votes necessary to win the presidency.