Will Democrats not be able to tell the difference between winning and losing? (Say what?!)

Political scientist Reinhard Heinisch from the University of Salzburg has been giving notably good commentary on the US Presidential election and post-election on Austrian TV. But for some reason, in this Facebook commentary he falls back on clichés like American TV pundits use. 

[NOTE: At the time of this posting, it appears almost certain that Georgia and Pennsylvania have gone to Biden.] 

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But he's definitely right to say that Trump is trying to create a "Dolchstoss-Legende," referring to the post-First World War effort by German authoritarians to paint German democrats as being to blame for the loss of the war and to stigmatize the democratic Weimar Constitution as illegitimate.

"If Biden wins, the victory will feel more like a defeat." Uh, Democrats may sometimes be slow on the uptake. But in what alternative reality will Democrats see Biden winning the popular vote and the Electoral College and taking Donald Trump's place as President as feeling "more like a defeat"?!? No, they won't. Even the most timid Democrats can tell the difference between winning and losing!

Yes, Trump got more votes than in 2016, including some more black and Latino votes. Biden also got way more votes in 2020 than Clinton in 2016. (There's some simple math involved: the overall turnout was way larger than in 2016.) In fact, I believe Biden already has not only more votes than Hillary Clinton in 2016 but more than any other candidate ever of any party, including Obama in 2008. By current counts, Biden has about four million more votes than Trump, no matter how the final Electoral College count comes out.

Heinisch: "The GOP will stop any Biden agenda in the Senate and the Supreme Court, freeze nominations and court appointments." What? We won't know the composition of the Senate until after two runoff elections in Georgia in January. How successful the Republicans will be in blocking Biden nominations and legislation will depend in no small part on how aggressively Biden and the Democrats push back. For example, does Mitch McConnell want to block pandemic-related funding and make his self-selected nickname of "the Grim Reaper" even more literal? (The Democrats are way too often inclined to roll over and play dead, but it's not a foregone conclusion!)

He also indulges in a Both Sides Do It trope: "A frustrated Democratic base will further radicalize and push Biden from the left, which will frighten the suburbs on which Biden’s victory largely depended." The Republican base is going all in on loony QAnon conspiracy theories and brought out a white mob to try to stop the counting of votes in predominately black Detroit. The biggest push from the Democratic base - which I suppose is what he means by "the left" - will be over whether and how hard Biden and the Democrats in Congress fight for the platform they ran on.

Since Heinisch is fretting about Florida, it's worth noting that Florida on Tuesday passed by a large margin a ballot measure to raise the minimum wage to $15/hr., which is part of the Democratic platform, although Biden's campaign didn't stress it in Florida or anywhere else. That's one big indication that emphasizing popular parts of the actual Democratic platform rather than basically running only on "I'm Not Donald Trump" would have improved Biden's margins.