Martin Gelin: Biden Won Bittersweet Victory With Promises To Heal America

The presidential election was more fluid than many Democrats expected.

However, Joe Biden eventually won with the highest percentage of votes against a sitting president since 1932. Despite the shortcomings of American democracy, this year’s presidential election also had the highest turnout in 120 years.

At least 75 million voters have voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. More Americans have never voted for a presidential candidate.

That doesn’t mean Biden he becomes president with a very clear ideological mandate. Especially not when there were surprisingly many setbacks for Democrats in local elections and in Congress. But the majority of Americans have made a clear decision. They don’t necessarily adore Biden, but they wanted to remove Trump from the White House.

Unlike the 2016 elections, the majority of voters this time also have to name the president. Democrats have now won “the popular vote,” the total number of voters, in seven of the last eight presidential elections. No other party has been successful at this in American history.

But Biden’s victory is not a resounding triumph for the party or for American liberalism.

But Biden’s victory is unlikely a resounding triumph for the party, or for American liberalism.

Biden was successful in his two most important political missions. On the one hand, it recaptured the voters of the white workers in the rusty belt that gave the victory to Donald Trump in the previous elections. For one thing, it caused the party to grow in the Southwest, which could change America’s political geography for the foreseeable future.

It was symbolic that Joe Biden was named the winner exactly 160 years after Abraham Lincoln was proclaimed president. The mood in the United States before this year’s presidential election has often been compared to the deep contradictions that characterized the country before the civil war of 1860. Joe Biden just won by promising to heal these wounds, to return to a politically normal state.

But the election result reflects a deeply divided country, where it will be difficult for Biden to implement the reform program he promised to his main voters.

Republicans appear to be retaining their majority in the Senate. That forces Biden to work with Mitch McConnell, the hard-line Republican leading the Senate. During Biden’s eight years as Barack Obama’s vice president, McConnell was his most stubborn enemy. Despite an ongoing economic crisis, McConnell said his main political goal was to ensure that Obama lost the election. Doesn’t seem to be more cooperative this time.

Democrats expected Biden to guide the country through a historic wave of progressive reforms. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, described a vision comparable to Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” with large investments in welfare and infrastructure during the crisis of the 1930s.

The motto of Biden’s campaign was precisely “Rebuild better”, to build a better country after the crisis. In practice, this referred to large-scale investments in green conversion, infrastructure, and social safety nets.

Instead, it tends to allow you to fight bills in compromises with Republicans in Congress. During Trump’s four years as president, Republicans’ concerns about budget deficits and public debt were temporarily interrupted. We can count on them now to rediscover enthusiasm for austerity and austerity policies.

Instead, now he leans who can fight for bills in compromises with Republicans in Congress. During Trump’s four years as president, Republican concerns about budget deficits and public debt were temporarily interrupted. We can count on them now to rediscover enthusiasm for austerity and austerity policies.

Millions of American voters wanted an election result in which Biden controls the White House but Republicans control the Senate. In the state of Maine, about 15 percent of voters voted for Biden, but also for Susan Collins, who can save the Republican majority in the Senate.

This means that others are systematic The changes in the United States that Democrats hoped for will likely be impossible to implement. Biden will hardly succeed in expanding the Supreme Court with new justices, to tame the conservative majority established under Trump.

An attempt will be made to advance the attempts to proclaim the states of Washington DC and Puerto Rico, which would have changed the political map of the United States and the distribution of power in Congress. It’s going to be hard to get rid of the Senate filibusters, the secular brake on ambitious reforms. The abolition of the Electoral College, which clearly benefits Republicans in the current situation, is also unlikely to occur. McConnell is also said to have halted attempts to appoint left-wing Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders to key positions in the administration.

Biden is allowed to take charge of an America in deep crisis. It must heal a bankrupt country, change a collapsed economy, stop a derailed pandemic, and restore America’s global trust with its allies.

Biden can take over a United States in deep crisis. It must heal a bankrupt country, change a collapsed economy, stop a derailed pandemic, and restore America’s global trust with its allies.

But a clear priority for Democrats will likely be to protect American democracy from the offensive that took place before these elections. Many are surprised that the presidential elections were relatively even. But it’s worth remembering that Trump and Republicans at the state level carried out a historic crackdown on voting rights before the election, in which a dozen states introduced electoral laws precisely to make it logistically cumbersome to vote in Democratic strongholds in big cities and black neighborhoods.

Trump’s unfounded allegations of election fraud, nationwide demonstrations to stop counting legitimate votes, and Donald Trump Junior’s call for a “total war” against Democrats after the election were serious reminders of what was in store I play in these elections. The institutions of American democracy probably would not have survived another four years under Trump.

There was a poetic justice that it was precisely in Philadelphia, where American democracy was born, that Biden received the last votes that made it possible for the media to declare him the winner on Saturday.

Much of what is most significant about Biden’s victory is that it prevented Trump from staying.

We will not see a continuation of Trump’s climate policy. The United States is likely to become a more outward-oriented country, where relationships with key allies can be healed, where new climate agreements are concluded, and where the president no longer arbitrarily ends collaborations with key global institutions like the WHO, World Organization. Of the health.

Joe Biden was far from it a perfect candidate for the Democrats. We must remember how he fought in the party’s primaries, before the party establishment collectively panicked over Bernie Sanders’ success and nearly staged a coup to name Biden as its candidate. But the controversial move was motivated by the belief that Biden was in the best position to win back lost voters, especially in the rust belt. He succeeded. The industrial cities of the northern United States are no longer causing an existential crisis for Democrats.

It was also fortunate for Biden that so many Democrats did not trust opinion polls in the elections, giving Biden a gigantic advantage. Biden’s margin of victory in several crucial states appears to be a couple per thousand.

At a dark time for American democracy It should be considered a ray of light that the traditional groundwork was so important. Biden was carried away by a wave of sheer work from an invisible army of older women and ethnic minorities. Black suffrage activists like Stacey Abrams in Georgia, Latin American organizations in the Southwest, as well as moderate suburban voters, who had never voted for a Democrat before but simply couldn’t bear the thought of another four years with an overtly misogynistic president. They all played a key role in Biden’s Victoria.

Michelle Obama said before the election that everyone should vote “as if their lives are at stake.” Such a dramatic message, accompanied by Biden’s own slogan, “The Battle for the Nation’s Soul,” appears to have been necessary to get Democrats across the border in crucial states.

Many voters seem to have motivated their Biden voice that they want to return to a normal political state. It was an effective message for Biden. That was enough to topple a historically controversial president.

But as soon as Democrats finish celebrating this weekend, they will realize that it is also an impossible task for their president to triumph.

The most important promise, however, is achieved by Biden: not to be Donald Trump.