No, Biden’s win wasn’t "statistically impossible"

The gulf between people who did and didn’t like Trump (groups which often don’t overlap) was also apparent in Trump’s next presentation of the “impossibility” of Biden’s win: that the president-elect “didn’t demonstrate coattails [in] down-ballot races.”

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Trump’s made this claim before, arguing on multiple occasions that statistics prevented him from having lost when Republican House and Senate candidates won. Except, of course, that there are a lot of reasons that might have happened.

One is that not every House and Senate Republican candidate won. Those who did win in swing districts may have benefited from the increased turnout of voters coming out to support Trump. But those candidates may also have enjoyed the support of more of those independent and Republican voters who are skeptical of Trump.

Imagine a swing House district in the suburbs with a relatively moderate pool of White voters. Trump’s presence on the ballot brings out a chunk of people who didn’t vote in 2018, hurting Republican House candidates. But some of those more-moderate voters might have decided not to vote for Trump even while they supported the Republican running for Congress. Just like that you have a split ticket — precisely as appears to have happened in a number of jurisdictions.

That entirely conceivable scenario explains a lot of the “impossibilities” Trump raises.

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