All right, so this took a few days longer than usual (I didn't want to write this article until we had a better idea of the direction this election was headed), but with yesterday's announcement that Joe Biden & Kamala Harris had won the presidential election, I thought it was appropriate to finally put a capper on this year's election articles. Today through Tuesday I'll be doing three articles about the races, ranging from commentary to some trivia about the candidates and what these results might foretell of the future, with those three articles being a capper of sorts on the (very) long election cycle, one that isn't entirely over as we'll discuss below. We'll start this trio of articles as we usually do with a "5 Thoughts" article about Tuesday's elections.
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| Vice President-Elect Harris and President-Elect Biden |
It took longer than some had expected, but on Saturday Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ascended to the White House (or at least they will in 73 days, and yes I am counting). Biden/Harris's win was not the landslide that many expected. Polling was, at my most charitable, off, and in some cases dangerously so. We won't be able to tell exactly why this was until we get more data, but it seems clear that the Democrats did not so much fix their issues with the electoral college, but out-run them, and as we see where congressional seats land post the 2022 reapportionment, it's possible this issue becomes worse, not better, in the 2024 election. While we won't know who controls Congress until January 5th, the Democrats would be wise to consider making the Wyoming Rule (where we would increase the number of seats in the House), as well as statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, a more mainstream platform conversation to ease red/purple-state senators into backing the reforms if/when the Democrats win back control of both houses of Congress. That's all I'm going to do in trying to postulate the next two years for now-not since George HW Bush in 1988 has a president gone into the White House without control of both houses of Congress (it is possible very little passes through Mitch McConnell's Senate under a President Biden), and so we don't know in the modern era what a first-term president's life will be like without the ability to unilaterally move his agenda through Congress for his first term.
What I will say about this election, though, is that the Democrats made a wise choice in Joe Biden. While we don't know the margins in the swing states, I'm going to say something potentially divisive but that I feel is accurate-it's entirely possible that Joe Biden was the only Democrat who could've possibly won this race. We'll get into the why in the coming days (particularly tomorrow), but I think the media & the Democrats underestimated just how difficult it is to beat an incumbent president (there's a reason seasoned politicians like Bob Dole, John Kerry, & Mitt Romney couldn't do it even with vulnerable challengers), and once again underestimated President Trump. Trump's biggest flaw in campaign strategy is that he was not prepared for Biden-his entire attack ad system, trying to peel off voters who "didn't like either candidate" like he did in 2016 was predicated on the Democrats picking someone far to the left of the center of the country like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. Trump never recalculated to a more Biden-specific attack, and trying to level those labels on a man the American public has known (and liked) for decades didn't work in the way it might have against a less well-known moderate like Pete Buttigieg or Amy Klobuchar. Honestly-of the contenders who actually got votes in the primary, Biden was the only one who could've won a race like we just saw play out, and whether by prescience or sheer luck, the Democratic Party selected the best candidate in a way they didn't in 2016.
A few historical notes on this ticket. Joe Biden will become the oldest person to ever take the Oath of Office on January 20th, and the first (likely only) president born during the "Silent Generation" to be president; his wife Jill will be the oldest person to assume the title of First Lady. Biden will be the first vice president to win the White House since George HW Bush, and the first non-incumbent vice president to do since Richard Nixon. He is the second Catholic to win the White House, and the second person to do so without winning Ohio/Florida since they both became states (in both cases, the other president was John F. Kennedy). Joe Biden is the first president since Harry Truman to have held county-level office, and will continue the streak of presidents having daughters (he has two, one now deceased) that has continued since John F. Kennedy.
Kamala Harris is the first woman, first African-American, and first person of South Asian descent to become vice president (despite what you might have heard, she is not the first biracial person to hold the vice presidency-that would be Charles Curtis, who was of both European and Native American descent). Her husband Doug Emhoff will be the first man to be married to a Vice President, as well as the first Jewish person to be married to a vice president. Harris will be the first Vice President since Thomas Marshall to not have any biological children, though Emhoff has two children from a previous relationship.
Donald Trump is the first president to lose the White House since George HW Bush in 1992, and only the fifth in the last century to do so. In doing so, he ends a streak of incumbent presidents winning reelection successfully-had he won, it would've been the first time in American history that four presidents successfully won reelection (with this, Clinton/Bush/Obama ties Jefferson/Madison/Monroe). His loss also means that the Republican Party has lost 7 of the last 8 popular votes for president.
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| Jon Ossoff & Raphael Warnock, the Democrats' final hope for the Senate |
The elections this year are not over quite yet. While there are still several states (namely Georgia & Arizona) who haven't finalized their winners, and there are a number of House seats still being decided, the big contest now goes to Georgia, where an elections quirk ensures that control of the Senate majority is in play. In Georgia, if no candidate exceeds 50% of the vote, the top two candidates advance to a runoff. This was assumed to happen in the special election (where incumbent-Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R) and Rev. Raphael Warnock (D)) are advancing, but it was an open question in the regular election. However, Sen. David Perdue (R) just barely missed going above 50% thanks to a third-party Libertarian candidate, and as a result his race with Jon Ossoff (D) will also extend into January. While Senate races in Alaska & North Carolina are technically not called yet, they are expected to go to the Republicans, and so that will mean a 50R-48D majority. Since Vice President-Elect Harris would cast the decisive vote in a tied Senate, if the Democrats were to win these two runoffs, they would take the slimmest of majorities. I personally think it's unlikely that the Democrats take either of these seats (Georgia Democrats usually slack off with runoffs, and people tend to split their tickets to avoid unilateral partisan control in DC when they can), but since Biden is probably going to win Georgia, it can't be ruled out. One question that I have here is, while Biden & Harris will do virtually everything in their power to help Ossoff/Warnock (frequent campaign stops are a given, and if Stacey Abrams is destined to a cabinet position, I wonder if they'll announce her early to see if McConnell would try to put a kibosh on the nomination, in the process ginning up base voters in Georgia since the Senate races will decide on the popular Democrats' confirmation), I wonder how/if Trump will react here. With the race definitely decided, it's probable that Trump's efforts to extend the race will become unpopular quickly, and if he forces Perdue/Loeffler to take on unpopular positions to support him (or risk alienating their base), that could help Ossoff/Warnock. But I'd put these races as Likely R for now.
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| Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) |
We're going to get more into this tomorrow, but I wanted to make sure to mention that the Democrats did not have a uniformly good night on Tuesday. I'm going to wait until we have more finalized data on the popular vote & the final counts in some of the still-counting races in Georgia, Nevada, or Arizona before discussing what the electoral college means going forward, but down-ballot was a huge problem for the Democrats. While the Democrats won the House, they didn't take the Senate outright as most expected them to, and it wasn't just split-ticket voting that was a problem. Sen. Susan Collins, for example, was able to peel off a healthy number of Biden voters to win in a state he won, and many other candidates underperformed Biden on the ballot. The Democrats also lost a number of down-ballot House races, even if they won the majority, in an election where they were expected to make gains, and the Republicans netted a governor's mansion in Montana. Worst of all was the performance in the state legislatures, which had a number of opportunities for Democrats to end trifectas in Iowa, Arizona, & Texas go nowhere, and the ability to gain a trifecta in Minnesota was also a failure. This could have horrendous ramifications with Republicans once again controlling a decade's worth of redistricting, and is a clear indictment that the Democratic leaders in Congress never successfully linked Donald Trump's failures to the Republican Party.
It's also an indication that the polling industry is fundamentally broken. I spend a lot of time following/watching elections Twitter, but despite their protestations that polling wasn't that bad this cycle...it was. The occasional successes (Georgia, for one, was called almost perfectly) do not overshadow that for the third straight election cycle, the country's pollsters totally failed to catch support for Republicans, and in a similar fashion to 2016 & 2018, that was most apparent in the race for the US Senate. Republicans won "competitive" races in Texas, South Carolina, Montana and Kansas by over ten-points, a pathetic showing for candidates who vastly out-raised their Republican opponents in the third quarter, and Susan Collins (who was assumed DOA after having led in virtually no polls all year) will end up winning by about 9-points in Maine.
It's possible that Biden's win will provide some cover to congressional Democrats who otherwise would receive a public shaming from small-dollar donors who gave their money (during a recession!) to candidates that seemed destined to lose based on faulty polling, but the polling industry won't escape such criticism. This was a complete and total failure of the polling industry to capture Republican voters, and I don't know how they fix it. Modern politics would be impossible to comprehend without a polling apparatus, but polls missed so many trends from Election Night that they were bordering on useless outside of select places like Georgia.
This...was one of the longest weeks of my life, in what has become the longest year of my life. I love politics, I love discussing elections, and I am very passionate about politics...but this cycle broke me. There was a moment on Tuesday night (after Florida was clearly headed to Trump but before Arizona started to come in) where the despair of a second Trump term became real, and...I just couldn't handle it. I was ready to just become one of those people who only care about elections on election day. Even though that turned into hope & then elation yesterday, I need a break from politics, and we'll be taking one on Tuesday. I kind of had sworn to myself that if Biden didn't win, I'd consider not writing about politics anymore period as Trump's presidency had made it feel like an anxious chore rather than something to be passionate or curious about, but Biden's win restores that faith for the time-being. However, after the next two days of articles, we'll be taking a hiatus on political writing on the blog. I will chime in if there's anything of note happening (likely the Harris' Senate replacement, any developments in Georgia & congressional leadership races, or anything unexpected in the transition, including cabinet secretaries of note) and there's two articles in my drafts folder I've wanted to get to that could be published, but otherwise we'll likely be very sporadic with political articles until the new Congress, when I am hoping to have a long-gestating project out (so don't leave entirely if you love politics as that should be pretty cool). Until then, the neglected cinematic side of this blog will be getting some love, and I'm going to be getting some sleep.
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