Why are President-elect Joe Biden’s margins so narrow in the states that won his victory? And why did the president’s facilitators thrive in the turbulent and plague-ravaged conditions they helped create?
Democrats, struggling to make sense of it all, are caught in another round of mutual recrimination: They were too progressive for swing voters, too socialist or aggressive with ambitious policies like the Green New Deal, or not progressive enough to inspire potential Democrats. that voters show up or cross.
But they should understand that there really was no way to avoid disappointment. Three factors: the logic of party polarization, which obscured inaccurate polls; the strength of the economy squeezed prior to Covid-19; And the success of Trump’s denial and outspoken lack of response to the pandemic mainly explains why Democrats fared no better.
This shocking strategy worked for Republicans, even if it didn’t work for the president himself. In addition, he set a trap that Democrats entered, something that they should understand and adapt to, as best they can, as they look to the future.
How could a president responsible for one of the most serious government failures in American history, yet maintain rock-solid support? The bum feedback mechanism of democracy breaks down when the electorate disagrees about the identity of the bums, what happened and what did not happen under their command, and who deserves what part of the credit or blame.
When party affiliation becomes a central source of meaning and self-definition, reality itself is challenged and verifiable facts become heated controversies. Elections cannot render an authoritative verdict on the performance of rulers when supporters from a narrowly divided electorate tell wildly inconsistent stories with each other and the world they share.
Trump has the ability to harness the animosities of polarized partisanship to separate his supporters from credible sources of information and inflame them with denigrating lies. This time, it wasn’t enough to save their bacon, suggesting that polarization hasn’t completely destroyed our democracy’s ability to self-correct – sweeping the value of dead Americans from a midsize city turned out to be too high. order.
Yet Trump’s relentless campaign to put the chicken on the economy by cutting taxes, running up huge deficits and debts, and intimidating the Fed from raising rates was working for millions of Americans. We tend to notice when we are personally more prosperous than we were a few years before.
But the president’s catastrophic response to Covid-19 sent the economy into a tailspin. That’s where it gets interesting, and the Democrats feel uncomfortable.
Trump abdicated responsibility, shifting the burden to states and municipalities with broken budgets. He then waged a war of words against governors and mayors, especially Democrats, who refused to risk the lives of their citizens by allowing economic and social activity to resume.
He spurred his supporters to take the danger of infection lightly, turned the rude refusal to wear masks into an emblem of emancipation from the despotism of experts, and turned public health restrictions on businesses, schools, and social gatherings into a tyrannical conspiracy. to steal power by damaging the economy and his reelection prospects.
He managed to put Democrats on the defensive about economic restrictions and school closings. As the months passed and with no fresh relief from Washington, economically harassed Democratic states and cities had no choice but to ease restrictions on businesses just to keep the lights on. That seemed to acknowledge the economic wisdom of the more permissive approach in Republican-majority states and fueled Trump’s false narrative of victory over the virus and a triumphant return to normalcy.
But Democrats weren’t meant to get as entangled in Trump’s trap as they did. They had no way of avoiding it, but it could have hurt them less. They allowed Republicans to define the contrast between parties’ approaches to the pandemic in terms of freedom versus grueling and indefinite shutdowns.
Democrats needed to come up with a compelling and competitive strategy to counter Republican messages. Troubled workers and businesses never clearly heard exactly what they would get if Democrats ran the show, and Democrats never rallied to shout a bloody murder that Republicans refused to give them. Democrats needed to underscore the depth of Republican failure by forcefully communicating what other countries had done to successfully control the virus. And they had to promise to do the same through something like Operation Warp Speed for testing and PPE to get America back up and running safely.
Instead, they complained that Trump’s negligence and incompetence were to blame for America’s economic woes and complained that Mitch McConnell wouldn’t even consider the House’s big aid bill. They weren’t wrong, but correctly assigning guilt didn’t help the working-class family winners who can’t haul tables, process chickens, sell smoothies or clean hotel rooms at Zoom.
The Republican message could not have been clearer: Workers should be able to show up, sign in, earn a normal salary, pay rent and feed their children. Democrats were telling workers themselves that we must listen to science, the reopening is premature and the economy cannot be fully restored until we defeat the virus. Right! But how does that help when the rent was due last week?
Make no mistake, it was unforgivably cruel on the part of Republicans to force manual and service workers to risk dying for grocery money. Yet his disinformation campaign persuaded many millions of Americans that the risk was minimal and that Democrats were keeping their workplaces and schools, their customers and children at home, their empty wallets and closets bare for false reasons.
The president’s mendacious push to reopen everything in a hurry was less compelling for college-educated suburbanites, who tend to trust experts and can work from home, babysit and reserve a kindergarten laptop online. Trump lost the election primarily because he lost enough of these voters, including some moderate Republicans who otherwise voted directly for Republicans.
Democrats need to rethink the idea that these voters would have put Democratic candidates for the House and Senate on top if only Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were less radiantly socialist. They must accept that they took a hit on the economy by failing to escape the trap the Republicans set by stubbornly refusing to do anything to prevent irrepressible contagion from destroying it.
And they need to understand how Trump saved his party by arming polarization. The Conservatives needed a way not to be fooled by the president’s destabilizing act of disloyalty, so they stabilized by reasserting their loyalty for the remainder of the vote. They were voting against a personal identity crisis, not the Green New Deal.
Democrats could have done better if sunny polls and their own biased partisan perceptions hadn’t fooled them into believing that a backlash to the indisputably damning Republican failure would provide an easy Senate majority, but not much better. Until the mind-blowing spell of polarization is broken, everything that matters will be fiercely contested and even the most egregious failures will go unpunished.
Will Wilkinson is the vice president for research at the Niskanen Center.
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