It may just be a function of the circles I travel in, but very few people I know are happy with the election results. Republicans are unhappy that Donald Trump has lost his reelection battle with Joe Biden and will become a one-term president. Democrats are unhappy that the predicted blue wave did not materialize, which means that Republicans will likely maintain control of the Senate and Mitch McConnell can thwart any ambitious Democratic legislation. And my Never-Trump friends are unhappy that the outcome did not deliver the complete repudiation of Trumpism, and the subsequent reformation of a chastened Republican party, that they had hoped for.Like many people, I am guilty of having placed too much trust in the pollsters. But I really didn’t think a progressive tsunami was about to crash over the national landscape. The last time there was a genuine Democratic wave election, in 2008, its enabling condition was deep Republican demoralization over the George W Bush administration’s economic and foreign policy failures. Trump’s supporters, by contrast, are more fired-up than ever, despite his administration’s inability to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic and its accompanying economic dislocations.One lesson to be drawn from this election is that US politics nowadays is more about tribal, identity-based divisions than policy disagreements. But it’s hard to know what other definitive lessons to draw, because in a narrowly decided election all explanations are plausible.My own belief, for what it’s worth, is that Trump would have won re-election handily if not for the pandemic and his botched response to it. He had the advantages of incumbency that helped his three presidential predecessors win second terms. His base considers him infallible and enough voters outside his base were sufficiently satisfied with the pre-coronavirus economy that they tolerated all the ways in which he was unfit for the presidency. But character is destiny, and the same qualities that allowed Trump to win the presidency – his rejection of advice and experts, his unerring preference for personal advantage over the national good – ensured that he would lose it through his mishandling of the pandemic.And while the Democrats clearly are the majoritarian party, now that they have won the popular vote for an unprecedented seven of the past eight presidential elections, the country on some basic level continues to reject progressivism.I don’t for a second buy the leftwing argument that if Senator Bernie Sanders had been the Democratic nominee, he would have won a smashing victory against Trump and swept in a Senate majority. Given the Senate results and the fact that nearly half of the electorate voted for Trump, I find it hard to credit the argument that the country as a whole yearned for the kind of radical change that didn’t even command a majority in the Democratic party.It’s true that the Republicans’ entire election strategy was based on the expectation that Trump would run against Sanders. When that didn’t happen, they had to fall back on the charge that Biden, despite his decades-long reputation as a centrist, was somehow the puppet of those who would impose terrifying socialist tyranny upon the land.The implausibility of this claim allowed Biden to flip the Midwestern states that had decided the election in 2016, mobilizing more Black voters than Hillary Clinton did in 2016 while peeling away just enough working-class whites and conservative suburbanites to win narrow majorities. Sanders, who didn’t win a single primary victory in the Midwest, could not have built such a coalition.One lesson to be drawn from this election is that US politics nowadays is more about tribal, identity-based divisions than policy disagreementsThe more economically populist and libertarian-ish aspects of progressivism have considerable electoral appeal, as was evident in the states (including some red states) that passed ballot measures liberalizing drug laws and, in Florida, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. But in California, perhaps the leading progressive state, voters rejected initiatives to reinstate affirmative action, impose rent controls, and classify rideshare and delivery workers as employees.But while Republicans’ dire warnings of an impending socialist dystopia didn’t work against Biden, this line of attack succeeded in allowing them to retake many of the House seats the Democrats flipped in 2018. Republicans tied these most moderate and vulnerable Democrats to far-left ideas such as the Green New Deal, free college, Medicare for All, and defunding the police. Angry centrist Democrats blamed their progressive colleagues, during a private post-election conference call, for costing the party critical seats and reducing the Democrats’ House majority to a thread. The Washington Post reported that moderate representative Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat from Virginia, heatedly insisted that “we need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again”, or else “we will get fucking torn apart in 2022”.The claim that the Democratic party has become a Trojan Horse for socialism also seems to have resounded with large numbers of Hispanics, particularly in states such as Florida and Texas where the Biden campaign performed much worse with these voters than Clinton did in 2016. Republican ads warning that Democrats would turn America into a socialist country may have succeeded in scaring Hispanics whose families fled dictators such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.More generally, it’s becoming clear that while most minorities vote Democratic, many don’t share white progressives’ views on issues like the need to cut police spending, the desirability of open immigration, and the nature of systemic racism. The writer Matthew Yglesias notes that progressives’ preferred term to refer to people of Latino origin – Latinx – is used by only 3% of US Hispanics, and that this divergence is symptomatic of white progressives’ “tendency to privilege academic concepts and linguistic innovations in addressing social justice concerns.” White progressive researchers also are shocked to find that minorities often support Trump’s racist rhetoric or policies – particularly when directed against other minority groups whom they also dislike.Then again, there are a host of other reasons why at least some fraction of Hispanics and other minorities may be breaking away from the Democratic coalition. These could include the appeal of Trump’s brand of swaggering masculinity, immigrants’ attraction to conservative ideas of individualism and upward mobility, and the growing tendency of non-college-educated minorities to see the world in similar terms as Trump’s base of non-college-educated whites. Or it could mainly be that, under the unique circumstances of this pandemic-year election, Republicans did a better job of engaging with minority voters, while the Democrats’ choice to suspend door-to-door canvassing, rallies, and other in-person means of voter mobilization was a critical error.A Biden presidency is likely to operate under both the external constraint of the Republican Senate majority and the internal constraint of the need to balance between its moderate and progressive wings. While this all but rules out big, ambitious reforms, it is possible that a Biden administration might succeed in passing more pragmatic measures like an economic stimulus, increased state aid for Covid-19 relief, and incremental criminal justice reforms. It’s even possible that there may be bipartisan action to combat climate change; two-thirds of Americans think the federal government should do more on climate, with particularly high levels of concern among coastal residents. But will progressives revolt against what they will see as too little, too late?If the Democratic party succeeds in realigning the college-educated, suburban middle class away from the Republican party while still holding onto its minority supporters and at least some fraction of the white working class, we might finally enter the long-predicted era of Democratic dominance. But the 2020 election showed that these constituencies, as well as the party’s moderate and progressive factions, have interests and priorities that are in high tension with each other. If a President Biden can keep the party together, history may remember him as the Great Balancer.Geoffrey Kabaservice is the director of political studies at the Niskanen Center in Washington, as well as the author of Rule and Ruin: the Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party More
