The 2020 Presidential Election Was a Little Different This Year

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Matthias Holzman, Editor-in-Chief

In the history of this country, there has never been a presidential election quite like this. For one, both candidates got more votes than any other candidate in the history of America, and a record number of those were mail-in ballots due to the pandemic. And two, the results have been contested more heavily than possibly any other presidential election in the country.

In the days and weeks following Election Night, most media outlets called a decisive win for Joe Biden over Donald Trump, with approximately six million more votes going to Biden.

Despite some polls prior to the election showing a victory for Joe Biden by a large margin, the actual results were much closer than anticipated. “I think they rely too much on calling people and haven’t adjusted their methods to include new voters, specifically new Trump voters,” senior Collin Jendrzejek speculated. “Combine this with the fact that Trump voters are generally nervous about telling anyone they support Trump, let alone pollsters from mainstream news outlets, and you get polls that are extremely skewed.”

Senior Evan Smazal has a similar skepticism of the polls. “Of course, polls don’t always show who people will vote for, and this is one of the problems with polls,” he said. “Elections can be predicted, yes. However, these predictions don’t guarantee a winner.”

Over three weeks since election night, at the time of publication, President Trump is pushing back against his loss. He and many Republican supporters are working to secure a second term through legal challenges and other various methods in hopes of changing the electoral college voting system.

While attaining the office in 2020 seems unlikely for Trump, he might run against Biden, assuming Biden goes for a second term, once again in 2024. 

However, his appeal then may not be as strong as it was four years ago. I think that the GOP is ultimately going to be the deciding factor in a possible second term for Trump in 2024,” senior Alex Dobbs said. “On one hand, Trump was a massively successful Republican and he ran on the ticket of being anti establishment, which appealed to a lot of fringe voters who were mad at the way modern politics works. 

On the other hand, Trump pushed away a lot of middle-ground voters because of things like his handling of the coronavirus, his nationalism, and his rhetoric against LGBT movements and Black Lives Matter.”

Smazal agrees. “In the 2016 election, many people supported Trump because he was going to drain the swamp of all of the rich and greedy politicians. It was something new and many people liked that. We tried him as our president and with many failures under his administration, some of the worst with human rights, he doesn’t make a good enough runner,” he said.

Despite the legal pushback, Trump is currently conceding, little by little, and giving the Biden team access to the documents and communications they need to transition to the White House smoothly.

Though it’s been a rocky road leading up to the next presidency, it could have gone worse. “The most worrisome thing this country could have seen is a really close election and, say, one state being the deciding factor, then things could’ve gotten worse and we’d have seen more rioting and possibly greater accusations of election interference,” Dobbs said. “The results showed who the people wanted, and the candidate who won the popular vote also won the election, so this is a rather good result.”