It’s now clear that Joe Biden will be America’s next president. While Democrats will undoubtedly celebrate this fact, the overall election results should give little comfort to them, given their failure to re-establish the party’s historically successful New Deal coalition, especially the working-class component. If any election was ripe to reconstitute this coalition that sustained the Democrats electorally for decades, it was this one. But the most striking takeaway from the 2020 election is how much it mirrors the results of the 2016 election, literally give or take the shift of a hundred thousand votes or so in a few key Rust Belt and Sun Belt states. Another thing that should give Democrats pause is that despite Trump’s direct appeals to racist fears, more than a quarter of his votes came from nonwhite Americans, the highest percentage for a GOP presidential candidate since 1960.
It wasn’t supposed to be this close. Against the backdrop of a pandemic, depression-like levels of unemployment, and a president whose approval rating never rose beyond 50% during his entire time in the White House, 2020 created what should have been the ideal conditions for a so-called “blue wave”, both nationally and in the state houses. But the coattail effect has been minimal (ironic, considering that this was one of the ostensible rationales for Democrats selecting a moderate like the former Vice President, as opposed to a progressive, such as Bernie Sanders). By the same token, the GOP will likely retain control of the Senate, and while the Democrats will keep their majority in the House of Representatives, they have lost at least six seats, possible more. Nobody in the punditocracy saw that one coming.
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