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| (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik via AP News) |
It's over—the election, the agonizing waiting period and the Trump presidency itself (minus the last couple of lame duck months). As of my writing, the Associated Press has projected that Biden will take 290 electoral votes, a number that may well still increase given his narrow lead in Georgia. Trump will go down in history as a one-termer, one of the hapless rejects in the list of American presidents along with guys like Jimmy Carter, Herbert Hoover and Martin van Buren.* He has been branded a loser—the last thing in life he ever wanted to be. But if he can recover from that psychological wound, he will probably find his post-presidency far more fun than any but the best days of his presidency: none of the responsibility, but with the same massive following he's had since he started running in 2015. We will not see the last of Donald Trump when he leaves (or is dragged from) the White House next January.
Or of "Trumpism," for that matter, to whatever extent such a thing can be separated from conservatism as it's existed for the past few decades. If exit polls are to be believed, Republican voters' support for Trump may well have increased in 2020 compared to 2016. This should come as no surprise: Gallup's most recent survey on the matter found near-unanimous approval for Trump among Republicans. While Trump himself may have outlived his usefulness to the GOP—at least in the role of president—we're certainly not about to see them repudiate the soon-to-be-former standard-bearer or his legacy.
Nor did we quite see the nation repudiate the Republican Party. The widespread glee at getting rid of Trump is understandable, but the results of this election are nothing to feel triumphant over—whether you're a committed socialist or just a liberal hoping for the Democratic Party's long-term success. Regardless of how the remaining states are called, Biden's victory in the Electoral College will be the narrowest of any Democrat since Jimmy Carter. In 2016, Trump managed to flip three until-then-reliably Democratic states: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Biden managed to flip all three back, but with nearly all of the vote counted, his leads in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania stand at less than one percent and his lead in Michigan is less than three percent; in 2012 Obama carried the three states handily, by margins of better than five percent in each. Possible victories in Arizona** and Georgia—states no Democrat had carried since the '90s—may provide something of a bright spot for Biden, but on the other hand (former?) swing states like Ohio and Florida (both of which Obama won twice) remained safely in the Republican column. All of this becomes even more alarming when one considers who Biden was running against: a consistently unpopular incumbent presiding over massive unemployment, who has completely failed to adequately handle a pandemic as it killed hundreds of thousands of Americans this year. If the pandemic and ensuing economic disruption hadn't come along, it's hard to see how Biden could have won at all.
Down ballot, the results look even uglier for the Democrats. While they were widely expected to take control of the Senate, it now looks likely that they'll need to win two runoff races in Georgia to even achieve a 50-50 split (with new VP Kamala Harris' tie-breaking vote offering them an effective majority). It had also seemed probable that the Democrats would expand their majority in the House, but instead it was the GOP that found itself making unexpected gains.
Things get still more dismaying when we break the results down by demographic. As Osita Nwavenu writes for the The New Republic, "Democrats have seen a shocking amount of erosion among Latino voters, as well as potential gains for Republicans among Black voters, although a final verdict on the latter shouldn’t be rendered before we’ve had a look at postelection surveys that are traditionally more reliable than exit polls." In Texas, Trump increased his share of the vote in the counties that were the least white and most Hispanic. In Starr County for instance, where 96.4% of the residents are Latino or Hispanic, Biden won by just five percent, compared to Hillary Clinton's massive 60% margin of victory four years ago.
Democrats and Democratic Party loyalists have responded to this underwhelming result in predictable fashion. MSNBC contributor Jason Johnson proposes that "just maybe about half of America actually wants a racist incompetent proto dictator" and that leftists won't admit this because it "would mean acknowledging race over phony economic theory[.]" Even if this is true, it raises some pretty major questions about how we got to that point. One of the biggest landslides in American history came in 1964, when Lyndon B. Johnson, who had just pushed major civil rights legislation through Congress, defeated Barry Goldwater, who had voted against that same legislation. How did we go from an era when an election like that was possible to one in which a "racist incompetent proto dictator" is (supposedly) guaranteed almost half of the vote? And how was Barack Obama able to score a considerably more impressive victory than Joe Biden if racism is the dominant factor in all of this?
When not indulging in this sort of fatalism—that no better result was really possible, because of America itself—Democrats and their allies have been eager to lay blame in all of the wrong places. Former Senator Claire McCaskill, who continues to get air time on MSNBC despite being a literal loser with no conceivable credibility on issues like these, seemed to blame excessive focus on cultural issues like abortion and "rights for transsexuals" for the Democrats' losses. Biden surrogate and former (Republican) governor John Kasich wasted no time in blaming the "far-left" for "almost cost[ing Biden] this election." In a three hour-long conference call this past Thursday, centrist House Democrats "blast[ed] their liberal colleagues...for pushing far-left views that cost the party seats," according to The Washington Post, with Representative Abigail Spanberger reportedly arguing that "We need to not ever use the word 'socialist' or 'socialism' ever again...We lost good members because of that." This sentiment was echoed by Minority Whip James Clyburn, who warned that if "we are going to run on Medicare for All, defund the police, socialized medicine, we're not going to win," apropos the upcoming Georgia runoffs. All this when a Fox News exit poll showed 70% of voters favor "[c]hanging the health care system so that any American can buy into a government-run health care plan" and Florida voters approved a $15 minimum wage by a 60% supermajority even as Biden failed to carry the state.
So what's the correct takeaway from all of this? That Bernie (or someone else) would have won by more? Who knows—but it's hard not to note how stupid the arguments against nominating him (He could never win Florida! He'd be a disaster for Democrats in down-ballot races!) look after this. And one can't help but note, when considering the Democrats' erosion of support from Latinos, that they were one of the groups most represented in Sanders' base. But the counterfactual does not interest me very much. Whatever the case is, this election deserves to be viewed as a remarkable shortfall on the part of the Democratic Party, and the analyses they're offering for why it happened this way are transparently self-serving lies. Perhaps it really wasn't possible for them to do much better than they did, but if so that only speaks to the political reality they helped create: a country where partisan polarization is rampant and politics has just become one more outgrowth of mass culture, where the concept of reviving the New Deal (or creating some modern equivalent) must strike many as either unrealistic or just shallow sloganeering because the foundations for such a project (a vibrant labor movement and participatory political culture) do not exist anymore.
None of this is to say that I'm not relieved Donald Trump's days as president are numbered. I do think it will be good to get him out of office, both because I expect Biden to be somewhat less destructive (in the short term, at least) and because I'm incredibly sick of Trump completely dominating the political discourse; of every issue from NATO to trade to North Korea getting turned into a question of being pro- or anti-Trump. But, especially given the way this election panned out, removing Trump seems far more like a temporary relief than it does any sort of promising shift in the course the nation—or the world—is taking. The idea of pushing Biden left—a bad joke to begin with—is even more absurd now that the Senate appears likely to remain in Republican hands. I don't expect much positive good to come out of Biden's presidency, and I dread what future elections may bring. Something major needs to change quickly, and whatever it is wasn't on the ballot in this election.
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*That is, assuming he doesn't run again and win in 2024—but this seems more than a bit unlikely if for no other reason than his age and health.
**As of my writing, AP and Fox have called Arizona for Biden, but other networks such as CNN and CBS have yet to make a projection.
