The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy

by John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, Lynn Vavreck

What an intensely divisive election means for American politics

The year 2020 was a tumultuous time in American politics. It brought a global pandemic, protests for racial justice, and a razor-thin presidential election outcome. It culminated in an attack on the U.S. Capitol that attempted to deny Joe Biden’s victory. The Bitter End explores the long-term trends and short-term shocks that shaped this dramatic year and what these changes could mean for the future.

John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck demonstrate that Trump’s presidency intensified the partisan politics of the previous decades and the identity politics of the 2016 election. Presidential elections have become calcified, with less chance of big swings in either party’s favor. Republicans remained loyal to Trump and kept the election close, despite Trump’s many scandals, a recession, and the pandemic. But in a narrowly divided electorate even small changes can have big consequences. The pandemic was a case in when Trump pushed to reopen the country even as infections mounted, support for Biden increased. The authors explain that, paradoxically, even as Biden’s win came at a time of heightened party loyalty, there remained room for shifts that shaped the election’s outcome. Ultimately, the events of 2020 showed that instead of the country coming together to face national challenges―the pandemic, George Floyd’s murder, and the Capitol riot―these challenges only reinforced divisions.

Expertly chronicling the tensions of an election that came to an explosive finish, The Bitter End presents a detailed account of a year of crises and the dangerous direction in which the country is headed.

Genres: Politics, History, Nonfiction, Political Science, American History

400 pages, Hardcover

Published September 20, 2022

Reviews

[Raymond · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Bitter End tells the story of the 2020 US Presidential election using political science. It is a great follow-up to their last book Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America. The authors introduce a new term called "calcified politics", where voters' views are more rigid which causes them to be less likely to move away from their views or vote for a candidate in the other party. The author's primary data source is the Nationscape survey which interviewed 500,000 Americans from 2019-2021. The data from this survey was used to show issue support and priority. It was also used to show how voters felt about COVID and the racial justice protest initially and how they polarized after elites took sides. Later chapters cover the Fall campaign and examines which dynamics were helpful, hurtful, or did not matter at all to the Trump and Biden campaigns.

What I like the most about this book is how it challenges the conventional wisdom that external shocks (COVID, racial justice protests, etc.) caused Trump to lose his reelection. There was a much more simpler answer, he was unpopular (based on his approval ratings).

This is the type of analysis that the media, pundits, and voters need to read.

[lauren]

poli sci nerds rise up this book has so much good data in it and was overall just super interesting

[Bridget · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book for my American Democracy class and loved reading it. It made an excellent analytical argument on the basis of partisan polarization and calcification. It was weird to read a book analyzing a “historical” even that I lived though and was actively involved in. The book did a good job of using data in a way that was approachable and I’d recommend this book even to non-political science majors as an explanation of the 2020 election.

[Claudia Jarry · Rating 4 out of 5]

lots to learn et bcp bcp bcp de stats

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a student of political science, and a lover of data, this book was amazing. The polls that are drawn upon for this analysis are amazing: huge n’s, longitudinal samples, etc. That being said, the stories and conclusions are the same and I was hoping for something new. I wish this would have been the first 2020 campaign book I would have read.

[Karel Baloun · Rating 4 out of 5]

Partisan division is growing, indeed. Yes, indeed, this is an existential concern for our democracy and institutions.
The authors run the NationScape Survey, which began in 2019. As such, this is a data and reality based analysis of several key stages of the 2020 campaign and election. Chapter one outlines the structure, and I suppose someone working in politics or deeply interested in the recent history of the details of this political event, would appreciate the objective, factual delivery.
I'm here mostly to feel hope that America's fever dreams have receded, and we can return to sanity as a nation. After all, "Trump was never able to lift his popularity about the 50% mark." I'm not confident that my needs will be met, because reality is likely more harsh. Chapter 1 specifically dashes my hopes, with the bitterness a likely ongoing pattern of "ends by any means" including violence, advocated specifically by losing Republicans.
In Chapter 1, the authors place substantial blame on the increasingly extreme politicians, who act to further radicalize their followers, which is true exactly as far as Trump for the MAGAts. The Democrats don't especially do this, specifically because they are trying to maintain a broad coalition. I would like to place much more blame on the out of control far right media echo chamber and the money that supports radical media.
"If you think their going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken" -Steve Bannon, 2017. (What a fucker). From Chapter 2, there is a lot of factual evidence that Trump was a unique horrible President for America, objectively. (but i knew that, because i am reality based)
Chapter 5 reveals that Trump killed hundreds of thousands of his base voters, during the covid 19 pandemic, for literally no reason. His popularity would have been higher had he been a competant and consistent manager of the disease response. These middle chapters are an important objective documentation of history, with real survey data.
Most presidents govern from the middle, for all Americans, or at least claim to do so. Trump was unique in that he willfully used his position to maximize divisions in America, toverning primariy for his MAGA base, and perhaps his financial sponsors foreign and domestic. This was most blatantly saliant at Charlottesville and Chapter 6 on Floyd's murder, where the issue alligns with Trump's innate shithole racism. "Trump thinks division helps him" - Biden, being obviously correct.
The fact-based postmortem (Chapters 7, 8) of the 2020 election is essential and sobering. Trump's fundraising led by Parscale was outladishly incompetant, and Biden's ad buys were double Trumps in the critical months, yet surprisingly this moved VERY few actual votes (table A8.4). Sigh, the election was oh so close in the 6 swingiest states, including famously Wisconsin and Georgia. Covid tanking the economy was the deciding factor, and I am astonished that it came down to that. The worst president in American History could have plausibly been electoral college re-elected (despite a 4pt loss in the national vote).. an insurrectionist, Putin's puppet, and a criminal mafioso.. just a horrible situation for the coutry. And the calcification suggests similarly small changes for 2024, as before 2020. Indeed the ideological polarization seems to be increasing, especially among southern Latinos.
"The insurrection was on election day. January 6th was the Protest." -the Mangofuhrer, trashing our bipartisan institutions of democracy. How delighted all authoritarians around the world must be.
Over a third of the book is comprised of technical survey appendices and source material end notes. That's a lot, and represents the scholarly level of professional research.
The repeated survey demonstrations of how strongly responsive republicans are to their "trusted leaders" and their "preferred media" gives me a bit of hope.. they could be turned and deradicalized, if only their leadership decided on this course.
I wanted more discussion of Russia, and it's associated treason. Is there not enough objective evidence? Not enough of a money trail yet. I believe there is.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a good sequel to Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck's 2018 book "Identity Crisis" about the 2016 election. In both books, a recurring theme is that voter choice has recently been very unsurprising. Simply ask people which party they voted for the last time and you can predict around 90% of voting in the next election. The authors label this stability in voter loyalty "calcification". Simply put, the answer to progressives' question "How could people vote for Trump?" is "because he is the Republican nominee." They are on team Republican, and they are not going to vote for a Democrat. End of story.

I'm always surprised by how much of recent history I have forgotten, and books like this one help to consolidate my understanding of the COVID pandemic, George Floyd's murder, and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. The discussion of Floyd's murder was surprising because of how sympathetic many prominent Republicans were about it in the days immediately following. It didn't take long for them to remember that they would get more political traction out of focusing attention on destructive demonstrators than actually grappling with the systematic mistreatment of non-White citizens by the police. It is still hard for me to accept that 2/3 of Republicans do not believe there is any systemic problem involving police violence and Black Americans. It was also helpful to rehearse the Jan 6 insurrection, which was even worse than I remembered, as well as its reconstruction by conservative pundits.

One of the most frightening points that the authors make is how narrowly Biden won the 2020 election. After considering and ruling out many alternative explanations using polling data, the authors conclude that the biggest explanation is the dip in Trump's popularity due to his bungling the response to the pandemic. Whereas leaders in nations that implemented more consistent and effective public safety measures saw their popularity rise, Trump's mixed messages and pandering to the paranoid fringe led to lower approval ratings. This point is frightening because with no examples of Trump's incompetence and general derangement in the immediate past, Republican voters may be more likely to support Trump in 2024 than they were in 2020.

Two interesting points regarding race and voting:

1. There were big changes in attitudes toward "racial resentment" as measured by the American National Election Survey (ANES) after 2011. In early years, voters were more likely to change party so that the party was more consistent with their attitudes. In more recent years, the parties are still changing (polarizing; becoming more different), but the change is caused by the people who were consistently Democratic or Republican intensifying their attitudes to become even more polarized. The authors present evidence that most of the change was by Democrats, who became more liberal on racial issues after 2011, while Republicans generally stayed the same.

2. Why did some Black and Hispanic voters move from Clinton in 2016 to Trump in 2020? This was definitely one of those "What am I missing?" moments for me after I first heard about it. The authors present evidence that these voters were attracted to Trump because of their own conservatism, which was stronger than any antipathy Trump may have created through his own racist, nationalist, and xenophobic comments. From 2016 to 2020, Trump became increasingly associated with conservatism, and those voters cared more about ideology than about race.

Last point: over and over again, the authors report that around 2/3 of Republicans were in favor of some Trump policy: border wall, family separation, voter fraud, etc. I kept wondering about the remaining 1/3. I know, they're not always the same 1/3. Still, is there some fraction of the Trump coalition who could somehow be peeled away? Some group that doesn't believe the US should model itself after Putin's Russia? I can hope.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

The authors of the premier work on the 2016 election, "Identity Crisis," are back with another exemplary work of approachable political science. This book, like their previous works on elections, are excellent pieces of political science - grounded in the literature and historical trends, based on high quality surveys with breadth and depth, and show where the conventional wisdom, which is largely pundit-driven rather than from the academy, is refuted by available data.

The authors clearly have access to an uncommon level of institutional support and have used it to conduct longitudinal surveys that can measure change over time and in relation to events. They use ANES data intelligently to complement their own surveys, and gain the benefits of both. They use these, and other survey data, to look for theorized changes in different ways and derive conclusions as a result of all these approaches. Through chapters on Trump's sticky approval rating, the Democratic primary, the impacts of the pandemic, the impact of the murder of George Floyd, and the general election campaign, readers see real-life events impact polling, issue salience, and candidates changing their views or not and how that impacted their performance.

This work isn't particularly ground breaking, but it is competent and exhaustive and follows the data. The only things I'd like to see would be more contextualization of American politics compared to other Western democracies in the 21st Century, as the polarization and calcification of electorates appears to be a phenomenon that stretches beyond our borders.

[Janet Fu · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars
After being recommended this book by Mrs. Pinter as a litmus test for being a political science major, I think I won’t be majoring in polisci… I liked the thorough analysis of data and the broad polling/sentiment research done behind the conclusions and how the book is honest about how the impact of some issues such as racial protests is inconclusive. Overall a good deep dive into Biden’s election and why he won, but also a largely scathing commentary on Trump and his identity politics. Certainly a book that is liberal leaning and doesn’t leave much room for other perspectives. If you read this book, be prepared to spend a minute staring at the graphs to understand them (you can’t really blow past them because it’s so hard to visualize the in-text descriptions)

[John Paschold · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sides and co. have been doing these analysis books on presidential elections since 2012 - and it is hard to find a more data driven explanation of why things turned out the way they did than this series. They paint a broad stroke of the events and outcome of the 2020 election, then nailing down claims with surveys (there are hundreds of polls and surveys in this book). It is a gold mine for researchers and work of a high standard. I can’t wait to get my hands on their analysis for 2024 in a couple years.

[Dexter Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book suffers from a both sidesism tone. The book never comes out and says “both sides,” but the insinuation is there. One such example: toward the end of the book “There’s a growing incentive for partisans to subvert elections.” Partisans imply that both democrats and republicans are stepping toward election subversion when that is not the case, which the book itself knows.

[Anthony Friscia · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great read if you like to get into the weeds on data about politics. The amount of info that they pull together is impressive and they manage to frame it all well. I particularly appreciated the chapter about how bad Trump was at garnering support while he was president. It's a lib talking point that he was bad at his job, but now there's data to back it up.

[Michael Linton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book provided some good insights on 2020 election. The only thing I didn't like was it relied too much one particular survey. There were so many factors in 2020 the book covered it made it same it was "all over the place" in terms of how Biden won but it could have just as easily been Trump who won.

[Oksana R-H · Rating 3 out of 5]

How dare this book drag my soul back through the rough coals of the 2020 election. This is one event I have trouble facing, especially given the world's current state. Nevertheless, it was a solid read. Loved the charts, loved the evidence. I'll never get the terms "calcification" and "polarization" out of my head.

[Keith LaFountaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Given the rampant misinformation in the past few election cycles -- particularly 2020 and 2022 -- I've found this trilogy by John Sides to be a tonic of sorts.

Excellent statistics and details, laying out the facts of what happened and how (and why) Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020.

[Liz · Rating 2 out of 5]

No doubt this book contains valuable information, but it was utterly soporific.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

read for PSCI3893: Conflict and Compromise in American Democracy w/ Jon Meacham and John Geer