We did it. We actually did it! I keep having to remind myself that it actually happened, that Donald Trump was defeated, and the threat he posed has — temporarily — been defused. It helped to be in New York City when the networks called it: cheers and whoops erupted, people danced in the streets, and the mood turned to jubilation. I was surrounded by the images the world saw of Central Park, of Chuck Schumer screaming into the sky like Kevin Garnett after the ’08 Finals. The relief comes in waves, just as the grief did four years ago, but as I write this the feeling is most akin to the moments following a near-death experience. I will surely have more to say in the coming weeks, but I thought I would break my writing drought with a few thoughts and points of analysis that have been top of mind since we started getting a clearer picture of the results.
First, Joe Biden ran an incredible campaign. And to be clear, it was his campaign, despite the Weekend at Bernie’s imagery that the right and far-left have been pushing since his bid experienced public stumbles at the end of last year. And if that wasn’t obvious from the style employed — which bore none of the markings of ideological consultants that could be seen in Hillary for America — one of his inner circle, Anita Dunn, made sure to say as much to the New York Times for their Sunday postmortem. “It was his campaign,” Ms. Dunn said. “It was less consultant-driven than any presidential campaign in modern history.”
They recognized that the election was an up-or-down vote on the incumbent, relentlessly focused on healthcare and the economy despite a plethora of potential distractions, and deftly navigated the threats that rioting in major cities posed to their image. On that former point, they were deeply criticized from all sides for their decision to lay low during the months of lockdown, and generally to allow Trump to shoot himself in the limelight. That now looks like a brilliant move. Because of the nature of the vote counting, it will appear to most like they barely squeaked it out, but in truth they will likely finish with the highest popular vote margin of any candidate (save Obama in ’08) since 1988, win the three “blue wall” states by substantially more than Trump did in 2016, and finally expand the Democratic map to the Deep South and Southwest. All of this suggests something that the punditry considered impossible: Joe Biden ran an incredibly disciplined and successful campaign.
He was probably the only candidate in the Democratic field who could have won. Trump ran up the score in 2016 with white voters in the Upper Midwest, despite Hillary winning near-Obama margins with minority voters in urban centers. Biden cut into the margin with white voters and underperformed with Black and Latino voters, and that trade-off was enough to win the White House. Progressives argued in the aftermath of ’16 and throughout the primary process this cycle that it was foolish to go after the Obama-Trump voters, and that the party instead needed to give minorities a reason to turn out at Obama levels; in their eyes, the path of least resistance to the roughly 80,000 votes in the “Blue Wall” states that were Trump’s margin of victory. What they ignored was that the vast majority of high-propensity voters who stayed home in 2016 were not unenthusiastic minority voters, but in fact were the same non-college educated whites who voted for Trump.
They also ignored the fact that the coalition that delivered the House to Democrats in 2018 was made up mostly of suburban white voters who had swung away from the Republican party. This election was a high-turnout affair in which, despite the incredible efforts of Stacey Abrams and other organizers, the Black and Latino share of the electorate both declined and swung towards Trump. Had the Democratic nominee pursued a strategy of maximizing minority turnout, it seems likely that they would have fallen short even before accounting for a potential backlash to those appeals. The obvious rebuttal that the shrink is due to an uninspiring candidate at the top of the ticket does not track with the fact that these trends have been going on for decades, and merely continued in this election. Because of the demographic makeup and geographic distribution of Democrats, we don’t have the luxury of winning with a pure base play. We really did have to convince swing voters to come back to us, and Biden was the only real contender for the nomination who was even trying to do so.
Trump really does have an incredibly powerful message to a certain part of this country. His hubris and almost Herculean dedication to self-sabotage (see: acting like a coked-out baboon in the first debate, publicly downplaying COVID, blowing up stimulus negotiations) cost him a second term, but the issues he chose to highlight and the way he talked about them again activated millions upon millions of voters, thwarting any chance of a landslide victory. The polls underestimated him again, and while the Trafalgar group theory remains bunk, the issue of low-social trust voters refusing to answer surveys is likely going to be a real challenge for pollsters going forward. Especially given the inbuilt structural advantages for a message that appeals to rural, non-college-educated white people, Trump probably did not need to expand his base — at least, not by much — in order to win again. And in fact, it looks like Biden failed to make any appreciable gains with those non-college white voters. On paper, all Trump needed to do was hold one out of three states, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, that are 2 to 3 points more Republican than the country as a whole. It was theoretically possible for him to get 6 million fewer votes and still keep the White House. Which makes his complaining about a rigged election all the more galling: he was literally playing on a field that was tilted in his favor.
The impact of the CARES Act also cannot be overstated. The number of voters that felt they were economically better off than they were four years ago and the Latino Trump voters who highlighted the importance of the economy demonstrate its significance. The CARES Act staved off a depression-like economic collapse and made millions of Americans whole, and Trump received credit for the legislation. Trump’s game was economic populism mixed with social conservatism. That he was not handcuffed to old school Republican austerity politics buoyed his approval on the economy, winning the vast majority of voters who listed it as their number one issue in exit polling.
I previously bought into a lot of the progressive rhetoric of the past four years that America is actually a left-wing country, brandishing polls that showed majority support for a bevy of Democratic policies, but I’ve grown skeptical that that’s the case. A lot of that polling fails when you include information about the details, some of it is misleading because of the framing of the question, and the clearest evidence that the surveys aren’t dispositive is the election results. We just had the highest turnout in any election ever, in which exit polling showed the same approval for left wing policies, and Republicans had a fairly decent showing outside of the Presidential election. As political data analyst David Shor (and the only person whose word on politics is gospel to me) mentions often, only about 8% of Americans identify as very liberal! We are not the majority, not even close. The pathway to passing progressive policy is laden with obstacles, and it is not the case that moderate Democrats who have done poorly in purple-to-red environments lost because they did not distinguish themselves enough to motivate some unactivated portion of potential voters to go to the polls.
I would like to see universal and affordable health coverage, a Green New Deal, and a total reconstruction of the system of policing, but the plain fact is that none of that is popular enough with people to win the elections and therefore the power needed to implement it. We need to find another way, and for now, avoiding the most salient issues for right-wing media and using the power of the bureaucratic state to implement our vision at the margins seems like the only plausible option that does not hand control to President Tucker Carlson in 2024. This is an anti-immigration, economically populist, and, yes, racist polity, made even more so by the system that decides control of Washington. Progressive politicians are incentivized to lie to you about that fundamental truth, and while that might be a good campaign and governing strategy for a minority coalition in the system, it is not smart for the party or the base writ large to forget it.
Finally, the outcome of the Georgia runoffs in January will write the story of the Biden first term. If by some miracle, Democrats flip both of those seats, there is a real chance that we could see a much more potent second round of COVID relief, a new Voting Rights Act built around the template of H.R. 1, and the beginning of the effort to cut into the remaking of the Federal judiciary that occurred under McConnell. If the Senate remains in Republican control, none of that is possible; Biden will be forced to rule by executive fiat. This still leaves room for him to reverse Trump’s decision to leave the Paris Climate Accord, reinstate the Clean Power Rules, and even relieve up to 50,000 dollars of personal student debt with the stroke of a pen. But in that low-productivity scenario, 2022 could be another down-ballot bloodbath, dooming his full four years to gridlock. And before you know it, we could be right back where we started.
I do not paint a rosy picture here. The structural disadvantage we face is serious, and Biden needs to hit the ground running in order to ensure that we do not have a repeat of 2010. But we beat Trump! We defeated the greatest threat to the republic since the Civil War, and that outcome was far from predetermined. Had Joe Biden not run the campaign he did — talking about things he did — we could be sitting here today asking if America’s democracy would remain intact. There is reason to celebrate, and I hope you did on Saturday, but on this sunny Tuesday morning, we must recognize that we won the battle, but the war continues.
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