It is time, after all these many hours of anxious vote counting, to revise the snap judgments that constitute The Political Lessons of the 2020 Election.
Among the many mirages of the last four years, few seemed so lifelike and so tangible as the notion that Donald Trump might just be on to something.
It was repeated so loudly, so many times, by so many people, that it was surely plausible. Trump appeared to understand something about the people that the rest of the political class could never fathom. His populism was such a force of nature that nothing – not his impeachment, not his abuse of migrant children, not his disregard for a pandemic – would get in the way.
In the immediate hours after the polls closed on Tuesday, that storyline was turbocharged because the instant result didn’t match Democratic expectations.
But when you lose a presidential election by around four points and maybe 5m votes, you have definitively lost the debate about connecting with voters.
The 2020 election should bury this – the biggest lie of the lie-plagued Trump era – along with the electoral reputation of Trumpism.
There’s no demagogue quite like a sad, defeated demagogue. There’s no strongman quite like a weakman. And there’s no populism without popular appeal.
Many progressives watched Tuesday’s results in dismay, believing that anything short of a Biden blowout was the equivalent of a Trump victory. But unseating an incumbent president is not easy: only four sitting presidents lost their bids for a second term in the last 120 years.
Defeat is defeat, not just for Trump but for his politics. Biden is heading for a final victory of the same kind of margins by which Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney in 2012, and Bill Clinton beat George HW Bush in 1992. Nobody called those narrow results in an evenly divided nation.
Biden has already won more votes than any other presidential candidate in American history.
Trumpism was never popular. It never won the popular vote. It didn’t lead to a wave of populist extreme-right victories across the world. Like Brexit, it served as an object lesson for others tempted to follow a fact-free journey into fantasy politics. Flirting with fascism and scorning the constitution did not, in fact, spark a movement of lunatic leaders doing the same.
Trump was a disastrous president and a worse candidate. He fanned the grievances of an older, whiter, more male, less educated minority. That’s not a winning coalition. He underperformed his own party on Tuesday, which is exceptional in presidential politics.
He couldn’t speak to how he would heal the nation figuratively or literally. He couldn’t show basic empathy towards the families of more than 220,000 victims of Covid. He couldn’t control himself in his first debate against Joe Biden. He couldn’t come up with an agenda for a second term in office.
He couldn’t even stop blabbing his mouth about how he wanted to steal the election. Maybe, just maybe, he could have squeaked another victory by challenging all those mail-in ballots from Democrats trying to avoid a pandemic. Instead, he drove record numbers of Democrats to vote early in person. Trump was always his own worst enemy.
Worse, he knew what was coming and was cackhanded in dealing with it, just like the pandemic. The suburbs, and especially suburban women, turned against Trump and his fellow Republicans in the congressional elections two years ago. That led to a blue wave that swept Nancy Pelosi into the House speaker’s office, effectively ending Trump’s chance to pass any meaningful legislation for half his presidency.
Looking at these awful numbers, Trump took the political shift literally but not seriously. “So can I ask you to do me a favor, suburban women,” he asked voters in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, last month. “Will you please like me? Please. Please. I saved your damn neighborhood, OK?”
What’s not to like? After six months of scare tactics about the destruction of their homes, the suburbs soundly rejected the entire heap of political manure.
If the voters in swing states truly loved Trumpism, why didn’t they vote for Trump? Perhaps they split their votes between a Democratic president and Republican congressional candidates because they were simply Republicans for Biden and wanted a check on Democratic power.
Still, Trumpism will survive the loss of Trump. Even in defeat, there are Republicans who believe there are enough Trumpers out there, and their modest wins in the House – combined with a deadlocked Senate – will lead them to stay the course.
The relatively close nature of election night – because of the delay in counting votes – reinforced the feeling of greatness that comes with the white supremacist dream of Making America Great Again. Like Peronism in Argentina, the magic formula of fascism is a taste that is never fully forgotten.
There’s a reason why Primo Levi wrote about surviving Auschwitz as a warning to future generations about hating foreigners. Fascism, he said, was a “latent infection” waiting to re-emerge. With Donald Trump, it has infected large parts of America and the world, and it will re-infect us again.
But not for the next four years, even as President-elect Biden battles against a real infection and a Senate whose balance of power probably won’t be known until Georgia decides in January. That will lead to mounting frustration for voters on all sides, but especially the wave of young voters expecting structural change from a Biden presidency.
Before we get to the primary contests of 2024, we need to admit our mistakes in this cycle as the chattering class of supposedly smart and connected political brains. Yes, the polls were extraordinarily wrong, but our understanding of the candidates was also fatally flawed.
Four years ago we were colossally wrong about Trump’s ability to fluke a win in the electoral college. But just 12 months ago we were vastly more wrong about Joe Biden’s abilities as a presidential candidate who could not just win the nomination, but run a supremely successful campaign in the most challenging circumstances since the second world war.
Biden was disciplined in a way that was never visible in his previous presidential campaigns, or even the vice-presidency. For a candidate who could ramble on stage endlessly about everything from Irish poets to the cold war, there was no expectation that he could distill a winning message and stick to it.
Yet that’s what Biden did. He crafted an entirely Bidenesque frame about battling for the soul of the nation. He chose not to respond to every crazy tweet that passed through Trump’s thumbs. He avoided the traditional campaign strategy of big rallies and door-knocking canvassers to stop the spread of Covid – at considerable cost to his election-day tallies.
But his so-called basement strategy worked. And his sense of politics in the rust belt states was far sharper than the supposedly populist president who said he would magically bring back manufacturing jobs.
Early on election day, Joe Biden visited his childhood home in Scranton and wrote on the living room wall: “From this house to the White House by the Grace of God.”
As the polls closed on Tuesday, CNN’s reporters admitted they didn’t know if Trump had written anything on the walls of the White House. Let’s hope he doesn’t smear the walls of the White House any more than he has already defaced the institution.
That’s what the next several days look like, as the election results are officially tabulated and Trump continues to dump on the democratic process of counting the votes. That’s also the kind of transition you can expect from a president who didn’t even take part in the official transition when he won the contest four years ago.
Trump leaves the White House as he entered it: determined to destroy our democratic norms. The triumph of the 2020 election is not just Joe Biden’s. It’s the survival of our weakened democracy, and the hope that it can be rebuilt as rapidly as it was corrupted. More
