The networks haven’t called the race yet, but it’s clear that Joe Biden has won the presidential election while Democrats have kept the House (albeit with fewer seats) and gained a seat in the Senate, which still leaves them at a 48-50 disadvantage with two seats in Georgia going to a special election in January. While this is obviously a win for Democrats, many are less than celebratory due to pre-election polls showing a Democratic landslide, with Nate Silver giving them at 75% chance to take the Senate and some projections giving them up to 54 seats. While there is still an outside chance of the Democrats winning both Georgia special elections and getting to a 50-50 tie (which would allow Kamala Harris to serve as the tiebreaking vote), such an outcome is unlikely given that Georgia is usually a reliable Republican state.
The Party of No
So assuming that the Republicans keep the Senate, what does this mean for the country? Mostly it means partisan gridlock. Since the 1990’s, Republicans have seen their job during Democratic presidential administrations as blocking basically all legislation. They correctly understand that the passage of any bill will look like a “win” for the president which will aid his reelection chances. Historically, their response has been total obstructionism.
There is a slim hope in that Biden can get a little bit done. Throughout the campaign, he seemed convinced that he would be able to get Republican support for his agenda. He’s been in the Senate for 3,000 years and has personal relationships with many Republican senators, so if anyone can do it, it’s Biden. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Most likely, we’ll see a repeat of the final two Obama years where Democrats can’t pass anything and Republicans threaten to shut down the government or destroy America’s credit rating if they don’t get what they want. Trump set the precedent that cabinet appointments don’t need Congressional approval by appointing numerous “acting” secretaries, so I imagine that Mitch McConnell won’t see much upside in trying to block his cabinet appointments, but I doubt Biden will be able to get many judges confirmed, especially not if a Supreme Court seat becomes vacant. Overall, don’t expect much to get done.
Don’t Trust the Polls
Pre-election polls shows a Democratic landslide. Actual results have varied, but have been much closer than predicted. The largest polling error was in Florida, which was also the first swing state to report results, so there has been a huge focus on the polling error. In reality, nobody really knows how bad the pre-election polls were off, and won’t until all votes are counted and are able to be analyzed, which can take months.
There is also a lot being written about the shifting demographics of Trump voters. A lot of sources are reporting that Trump increased his margins with every demographic other than white men, include black, Latino, and queer voters. However, those numbers are based on exit poll data. Exit polls are usually a reliable indicator because they can get a random sample of actual voters as they leave polling places. However, this year exit polls are skewed heavily toward Trump voters. Largely due to Trump’s demagoguery over what he claimed was “fraudulent” mail-in voting, Republican voters were vastly more likley to vote in person than Democratic voters, which leads to a strongly biased data pool. Pollsters attempt to correct for this, but as the pre-election polls show, these corrections are not always accurate. Some pollsters have attempted to poll early voters, but there is no indication that such polls are reliable. So it’s possible that Trump’s margins increase with nonwhite voters, but it could also be a mirage.
Demographics Are Not Destiny
Even if Trump did increase his margins with nonwhite voters, that shouldn’t come as a shock. Nonwhite voters are a diverse group. In 2016, black voters went overwhelmingly for Clinton by a margin of 81%. They captured Hispanic and Asian voters each by 38%. Those kind of lopsided numbers are unsustainable. Preliminary exit polls (which again, may be inaccurate) indicate that the black vote still went ovewhelmingly for Democrats by a margin of 75%, which is in line with the pre-Obama margin of 77% from the 2004 election. The current margin could simply be regression to the mean after the Obama “first black president” effect wore off. The Hispanic and Asian vote margins were only 9% and 13% respectively in 2004, so there’s no reason to believe that the 2020 margins (34% and 32%) are abnormally low.
Further, we should be hoping that these vote margins narrow. The idea that you accurately predict a person’s vote by their racial category does not say good things about our country. It shows we are still largely segregated along racial lines, with different racial groups living in separate communities, facing separate challenges, and having separate cultures. If our country becomes more equal, we can expect that racial categories will be less predictive of voting behavior, and each racial group’s voting pattern will look more like the country as a whole.
The point here is that people should not be reading too much into the slight shift in the nonwhite vote. It might not be real, and even if it is, it might not mean anything other than nonwhite voters basing their voting decisions on the same things white voters are basing their decision on. Equality! It also means, however, that the Democrats should not be counting on America’s demographic shift to deliver them an enduring majority. In a more equal world, both parties can compete for nonwhite voters.
Your Trump is not My Trump and That’s OK?
Donald Trump was a bad president. He had no real policy agenda. He horribly mishandled the one crisis he was faced with, resulting in huge amounts of American deaths. He passed a standard Republican tax cut which, predictably, cut taxes overwhelmingly on the rich. He started a counterproductive trade war with China. His administration’s behavior on immigration was monstrous, even apart from the family separation policy. He treated the U.S. Government as his own personal ATM, funneling millions of dollars to his businesses and hotels. His level of personal corruption was staggering, and he set numerous precedents which will make Presidential accountability more difficult in the future. The Republican Party enabled him at every turn, stole a Supreme Court seat, and is so ideologically bankrupt that they didn’t even bother making a policy platform this year.
As a Coastal Elite,™ I’ve been seeing a lot of bewilderment and anger from liberals about how anyone could vote Republican after the last four years. I’ll admit that it’s not as easy question for me. When I look at Trump, I see exactly what I described above, but when other people look at him, they see a desperate hero doing everything he can to hold back the tsunami of liberalism that threatens to destroy them.
In America, liberals are winning the culture war. Racism isn’t legal and gay marriage is. There is growing acceptance for transgender people. Church has long since fallen out of fashion, and the number of nonreligious Americans increases every year. Small towns are losing population and cities are growing. Movies and TV tend to showcase diversity, sexual freedom, and other liberal values while conservatives are only featured as antagonists. And expressing anything but the most liberal opinions on the internet gets you excoriated as a racist, misogynist, homophobic, ableist shitlord. Contrast this to 20 years ago where homosexuality was taboo (“fag” was the most popular insult among my peer group), abstinence-only sex education was dominant, antiracism meant treating people the same, and Harry Potter was the world’s #1 movie instead of a target of online cancel culture. Conservative values have lost a lot of popularity in a relatively short time, and conservatives feels a deep sense of loss at that. It’s no wonder why conservatives feel their backs are up against a wall, and any concession to the forces of liberalism will only hasten their inevitable demise.
Added to that are our separate filter bubbles. The paragraph at the top of this section would read like mind-killed slander to a person who primarily gets their news from conservative sources and social media. To Fox News, et al., Trump was a hero besieged on all sides by a liberal media and a deep state who was committed to his failure. He was fighting for the little guy while everyone around him was making up scandal after scandal to drag him down, fabricating evidence, and interpreting everything in the worst possible light while his opponents’ misconduct was minimized and excused.
What Now?
I have no idea what to do about any of this, but I’m pretty sure the answer is not to call all Trump voters racists. Our electoral and governmental systems have some really deep structural flaws that I plan on addressing later, but for now those are the systems we’re stuck with, so we’ve got to find some way to form common knowledge about objective reality. I truly believe that there are supermajorities of Americans that agree on most issues, and that we only seem to divided because the most extreme voices are the loudest. I think if we allow ourselves to stop seeing arguments as soldiers, we can find a lot of common ground and focus our disagreements on our actual policy differences rather than cultural grievance. Getting rid of Donald Trump is a good first step, as he was one of the most polarizing figures in American history. Joe Biden is nobody’s radical, so hopefully his administration can turn the temperature down, especially if he makes good on his promises to find common ground with Republicans and pass bipartisan bills. My hope is that, culturally, we find a way to push back against the most extreme voices on both side and allow the less crazy people to acknowledge each other’s existence without childish name-calling. Here’s hoping!