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WASHINGTON: Democrats arrived on Election Day hoping to win back the White House and majorities in both houses of Congress in a victory that would demonstrate an unmistakable repudiation of President Donald Trump and a Republican Party remade in his image.
It didn’t work out that way.
More than 12 hours after the polls closed, Biden had a small lead in some key states with hundreds of thousands of votes yet to be counted, and he has a comfortable lead in the national popular vote. But until noon Wednesday, there was no clear Democratic wave.
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Republicans had key Senate seats that Democrats hoped to shift, and ultimately the Republican Party may reduce the majority of the House of Democrats. And even if Trump did eventually lose, the proximity of the presidential race raised the possibility that a Biden presidency would struggle to enact progressive priorities or quickly overcome the divisive politics of the Trump era.
Democrats will advance “limping and bleeding with a huge warning about voters who are rejecting the party,” Meghan McCain, a Republican who criticized Trump, predicted on Twitter.
While Trump’s critics were deeply disappointed that the long-awaited blue wave never materialized, Biden’s allies encouraged the political world to step back and see the bigger picture. Dan Pfeiffer, a former aide to President Barack Obama, posted a message to Democrats on Medium titled: “Biden is Winning, Act Like One.”
“Republicans are already trying to neutralize his ability to govern by slandering how he won,” Pfeiffer wrote. “We cannot let them do that. The stakes are too high. “
In fact, if Trump loses, regardless of the margin, he would be the first incumbent president not to win reelection since 1992. Biden has already switched two states that Trump had four years ago, Arizona and Wisconsin, and held a modest lead in at minus one other, Michigan, as it moved toward rebuilding the Democrats’ so-called “Blue Wall.”
“Today, the vice president will get more votes than any presidential candidate in history,” Biden’s campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon told reporters on Wednesday. He added: “I feel like we had made it very clear that we think this could be a closing race.”
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Still, polls heading into Election Day suggested a much better pick for Democrats on the ballot, but a surge in support for Trump and Republicans with high turnout across the political spectrum was clearly missed.
Several of the party’s once promising Senate challengers fell short, despite a flood of national support for fundraising for headliners such as Jaime Harrison in South Carolina, Amy McGrath in Kentucky, and MJ Hegar in Texas.
Some House freshmen who helped give Democrats a majority in 2018 also lost, victims of stronger performances than expected for many Republican rivals. The gains of Democrats in metropolitan and suburban areas were equaled or offset in many battle states by an increase in Republicans in small towns and rural areas.
And in a warning sign for Democrats, Trump demonstrated increased support in some Black and Latino communities.
“Certainly there were a lot of Latinos voting for him in South Texas and following him on the ballot,” said Texas Democratic President Gilberto Hinojosa, who began Election Day hoping to change various congressional districts and gain control. of the Texas State House. It didn’t happen either.
“It’s very difficult to understand how there was such a big difference between what the polls showed and what finally came out,” he said. “To say it was a surprise is an understatement.”
The evolving landscape represents an enigma for a party that has a clearer claim to support from the national majority than the Republican Party. If trends continue, Democrats will have won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, with President George W. Bush in 2004 the only winner of the Republican popular vote since his father’s landslide victory in 1988.
One of Biden’s main arguments in a well-attended Democratic presidential primary campaign was that he could expand the Democratic coalition to include more older, independent and even moderate Republican voters. However, it appeared to underperform other key demographics, or at least not expand the alliance enough to override Trump’s base and remake the Capitol.
Without a doubt, Biden performed better than Hillary Clinton four years earlier in states like Iowa, Ohio and Texas. But neither of them could win. Democrats clung to the hope that Biden would score narrow victories in North Carolina and Georgia.
Veteran Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson said it would be shortsighted to call the Democrats’ performance a failure when they were on their way to resurrecting the “Blue Wall” – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – as he circled Arizona with a chance to reclaim Georgia, two states. they have not been Democrats in the presidential elections since the 1990s.
Ferguson noted that Biden was on track to do so while offering “the most progressive agenda of any Democratic candidate” in the modern era.
“The last time a sitting president was defeated was 28 years ago, 1,228 days ago,” Ferguson said. “Presidents in office do not usually lose, and this one is going to lose and lose outright.”
He added: “Elections are about where the votes end, not how you feel while the count is taking place.”
Ferguson and Hinojosa agreed that the mixed results suggest that Democrats do not have to consider fundamental reform. In Texas, Hinojosa said Trump could attract Latinos, which does not translate into long-term party loyalty. And he said Democrats were paralyzed by going months without polling in person due to the coronavirus pandemic, while the Republican Party’s field operation went directly to voters.
“I’m not saying it was a wrong decision given the situation, but it affected us,” he said. “We were bringing a knife to a shootout.”
