Bracing for a Biden Presidency

Here are some various thoughts on the Presidential election, as Trump is Sieg Heil-ing himself as the winner. Although at this moment on Thursday, it looks like Biden will be the winner.



The class-vs-other-identities debate will go on. But the Democrats need to build the party infrastructure - and by that I mean get people involved at the grassroots level - and Biden as President needs to support that effort. Repeating the 2009-2017 approach is not acceptable: Mara Liasson, The Democratic Party Got Crushed During The Obama Presidency. Here's Why NPR 03/04/2016; Stanley Greenberg and Anna Greenberg, Was Barack Obama Bad for Democrats? New York Times 12/23/2016.

The Democrats need leaders who will fight Republicans. Nancy Pelosi is no longer one of them: Alexander Sammon writes (It’s Time for an Overhaul of House Democratic Leadership The American Prospect 11/05/2020):

Votes are still being tallied, but we already know for certain that election night was a disaster for House Democrats. As it stands, on a night where Democrats were forecast to pick up as many as 20 seats in the chamber, not a single GOP incumbent has been defeated. The only two Democratic pickups thus far can be chalked up to court-mandated changes to congressional district maps in North Carolina. While Democrats will likely keep the House majority, it’s possible they will lose between 7 and 12 seats in total, underperforming optimistic projections by 30 seats or more. The final count, whenever it comes in, will merely tell us how bad the bleeding is.

That result is stunning, after House leadership spent the summer all but assuring an expansion of the considerable mandate they won in 2018, when they flipped 40 seats in the House. Many of those freshmen who flipped those seats two years ago now find themselves on the ropes, struggling to hold on for the possibility of a second term. The vaunted rise of the suburbs, touted by moderate pundits as the surest path to Democratic victory, ran aground... [my emphasis]

The post-election moment is weird enough that the man Digby Parton refers to as Little Tommy Friedman, Age 6, manages to make sense. An additional case of the Rick Perry Principle: Even a stopped clock is right once a day.

I mean, it's Friedman, so he can't resist tossing in a dig at those scary leftist colleges and their Political Correctness. But this part isn't bad (There Was a Loser Last Night. It Was America. New York Times 11/04/2020)

... Democrats have a lot to rethink, said Michael Sandel, a professor at Harvard and author of “The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good.”

“Even though Joe Biden emphasized his working-class roots and sympathies,” Sandel told me, “the Democratic Party continues to be more identified with professional elites and college-educated voters than with the blue-collar voters who once constituted its base. Even so epochal an event a sa pandemic, bungled by Trump, did not change this.

“Democrats need to ask themselves: Why do many working people embrace a plutocrat-populist whose policies do little to help them? Democrats need to address the sense of humiliation felt by working people who feel the economy has left them behind and that credentialed elites look down on them.”

Again, while Biden made small inroads with working-class voters, there seems to be no huge shift.

The invisible elves and sprites known to establishment Democrats as "moderate Republicsns" still stubbornly fail to reveal their presence. Charlie Pierce goes to town on their most prominent advocates (The Lincoln Project Didn't Move 10 Votes in This Election Esquire Politics Blog 11/04/2020):

Can we talk about Never Trump for a minute?

Its various iterations — The Lincoln Project, Republicans Against Trump — made some fine commercials and a lot of noise. They raised a lot of money, especially TLP, which is now going to morph into a multi-platform media network that likely will become a permanent (and very conservative) factor in elections going forward. Starting from scratch, TLP raised $60 million. Republicans Against Trump got started late, but they hoovered up $10 million. This is nice work if you can get it.

The problem is that, despite their fat bank accounts and some terrific publicity, these people didn't materially affect the presidential race at all. Their entertaining commercials got great run, but they didn't move 10 votes. They certainly didn't materially affect the Republican side. What data we have at the moment indicates that the president* got more of the Republican vote this time than he did in 2016. He certainly got more votes generally than he did four years ago. Take them all in all, and Never Trump is about as relevant to the actual election results this year as are the Whigs or the Free Soil Party. The problem for all the rest of us is that they should be.

Never Trump should have been a haven for Republicans and conservatives revolted by the notion that their party and the government had been appropriated by a vulgar talking yam. As should be obvious, there just aren't that many people like that. Most of the Never Trump movement is on salary to the Never Trump movement. Everybody else is completely With The Program. The president* has utterly subsumed American conservatism in general and the Republican Party in particular and, win or lose, he's not going to go anywhere. [my emphasis in bold]

On that last thought, I also assume that Trump will style himself as the American Juan Guaidó, President-in-exile who doesn't actually have to go into exile. Although if justice is allowed to run its course, Trump make seek asylum in a country with no extradition treaty with the US.