Their supporters might be celebrating, but Democrats have little to be happy about as the fallout from the 2020 elections continues. Joe Biden may have won the White House – although that is far from certain as yet – but the Democrats actually went backwards everywhere else. Trump also increased his voter base over his 2016 numbers.
However the battle for the presidency falls out, the message of 2020 is clear:
U.S. President Donald Trump lost. But Trumpism did not.
At root, Trumpism is a repudiation of “politics as usual” and the “presidential normalcy” that so many commentators, even in so-called conservative media, clearly hanker for. Sopping-wet Australian columnist Troy Bramston gloated that “the US can return to a more normal presidency”. Trump voters in the rust belt and rural heartland would rightly object that “normal presidency” gave them Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama.
“Normal presidency” gave them the Global Financial Crisis, the rusting-away of American industry and twenty years of hopeless, bloody foreign wars that achieved nothing but the death and dismemberment of thousands of their sons and daughters.
Trumpism repudiated such “normal presidency”. Trumpism was a revolution; Biden is the Establishment counter-attack.
Joe Biden defeated Trump to win the presidency, and is on pace to win up to 306 electoral votes, a total that would match what Trump exaggerated as a “landslide” four years ago. In a typical election year, such a victory would mean Biden would have carried other Democrats along with him. Instead, several promising Democratic Senate and House of Representatives candidates, including incumbents, lost.
For Trump, the situation was the inverse. His popularity among his base voters helped protect incumbent Republicans but was not enough to save him. He won more votes for president than any other candidate. Except Biden. The rejection of Trump was personal.
This has been the defining characteristic of the left’s unhinged Trump Derangement. Policy was a distant afterthought: it was all purely personal. For their part, Trump’s supporters looked past the personality to the achievements.
The election did little to suggest that the country was suddenly less polarized[…]The outcome didn’t change the fact that much of the country is still speaking two different political languages.
One half is speaking a language that the media and political class refuse to listen to, let alone understand.
At their peril.
“This defied everyone’s expectations. Everyone said if Joe Biden wins, Democrats win the Senate. If Trump wins, Republicans win the Senate,” said Rahm Emanuel, the former mayor of Chicago and chief of staff to President Barack Obama. “That’s not what happened[…]
When an incumbent loses, the challenger’s party often gains. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan defeated President Jimmy Carter, Republicans took 12 Senate seats from Democrats. In 1992, Bill Clinton’s victory over President George H.W. Bush also came with three Democratic Senate victories over incumbent Republicans. When Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated President Herbert Hoover in 1932, Democrats gained nearly 100 House seats and a dozen in the Senate.
None of which happened in 2020. If anything, the reverse. The Democrats may have mustered slightly more revulsion within their own base than Republicans could amp up enthusiasm (the voting numbers for both sides are at record highs), but that’s also their Achilles heel.
If Trump ends up losing the White House, the Democrats will lose their sole edge. Bereft of Trump Derangement to sustain them, they’ll be left nakedly exposed on the policy front.
Aside from the weeks of lawsuits and fire and fury ahead, the contest to watch now will be the mid-term elections. Without anti-Trump sentiment to campaign on, the Democrats are in danger of a brutal reckoning in 2022.
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