Polarization and Democratic Accountability in the 2020 Presidential Election
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SYMPOSIUM: THE 2020 U.S. ELECTIONS
Polarization and Democratic Accountability in the 2020 Presidential Election Rachel Lynn Bitecofer 1,2
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract In a year marked by a global pandemic, economic collapse, and social unrest, the most striking feature of presidential polling thus far is its consistency. The hyperpartisanship of this polarized era of American politics has made most voters impervious to changing conditions. This raises serious questions about the utility of elections as means of democratic accountability. Keywords 2020 election . Presidential election . Trump . Biden . Hyperpartisanship . Negative partisanship . Polarization . White grievance politics
The 2020 presidential contest is the seventh to occur within this era of polarized politics. Nowadays, polarization and hyperpartisanship affect the electorate, not just elites, in part because voters identify the major political parties with particular ideologies and sort themselves accordingly. Most analyses of the 2020 election will treat it as an isolated event, but this is a mistake because polarization now ties our elections together into one collective story reflecting broader trends in American politics. In order to really understand election 2020, one must understand why America finds itself holding an election on the precipice of a mounting democratic crisis of a magnitude not seen here since the election of 1860, an event that sparked the American Civil War. This summer has been marked with social upheaval over racial injustice and police violence, while a once-a-century pandemic rages unabated through most of the country, disrupting normal life and schooling for most Americans. As of early September, 6.4 million Americans have become infected and 190,000 have died. - a death toll expected to rise significantly by year’s end. President Donald Trump’s pandemic response, driven by a desire to reopen the country quickly and avoid imposing mandates on states, made matters worse. The strategy was designed to achieve the goal
* Rachel Lynn Bitecofer [email protected] 1
Niskanen Center, Washington, DC, USA
2
Newport News, VA, USA
of limiting the amount of time the economy would be stagnated. However, the strategy backfired. In states that reopened without controlling the pandemic, infection rates skyrocketed, depressing demand and revealing the limits of self-regulated behavior. The severity of the pandemic has also been affected by President Trump’s politicization of mask-wearing. Widespread public cooperation with mask-wearing has been key for other countries’ ability to “crush their curves” and reopen without new waves. But in the United States, mask mandates became a “culture war.” The public’s widespread rejection of masking is highly conditioned on elite signaling. Voters received signals from a powerful elite, the President of the United States. Trump’s posture on masks, which ranged from dismissive to hostile, undermined the official efforts of his administ
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