Post-Election Thoughts

I breathed a sigh of relief yesterday when Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election. For four years, we felt the oppressive weight of Donald Trump’s malice and incompetence. His mishandling of the coronavirus, pervasive corruption, and disastrous policy decisions all burdened us like ankle weights. His constant gaslighting discolored our view of reality, and his incessant lying made a mockery of a position we are supposed to rely on as safe and authoritative.

I am glad that “we” won. Like many who voted for him, I am not a Joe Biden fan. He embodies neoliberalism, and carries with him all the evil that ideology is responsible for, along with the progress it has halted. But neoliberalism, despite its faults, is objectively better than right-wing authoritarianism. In a purely utilitarian sense, I am happy with the election’s results.

Donald Trump’s deliberate belittling of mail-in ballots was the latest iteration of his relentless attacks on our institutions. He delegitimized the ballots at every turn, implored his base ignore them, and preemptively branded them as fraudulent. This behavior is scary enough in a vacuum, but even more terrifying in context.

Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the electoral college are a few of the mechanisms that maintain Republican’s electoral viability. The Grand Ole Party has won one popular vote since 1988. Their ideology is losing its share in America’s marketplace of ideas, and this trend is bound to continue.

As the GOP’s probability of legitimately winning elections diminishes, their effort to cheat the system will correlatively rise . This is not conjecture; we see this trajectory already, and it’d be foolish to think the Republicans have an arbitrary stopping point where they will suddenly decide it is immoral to bend the rules. The mischaracterizing of the mail-in ballots is the most recent attempt to make this happen, and one of the most transparent.

Don’t accept their framing. If rigging an election is so easy, why didn’t the Dems do in 2016? If rigging an election is so easy, why didn’t the Dems give themselves the Senate instead of leaving Biden potentially powerless at the hands of Mitch McConnell? Don’t let the Republicans, whose electoral viability hangs precariously on manipulative systems, place the burden of proof on you. The Democrats are the party who has historically tried to raise voter turnout; this is the reality. Fair elections benefit Democrats; they have no reason to cheat. If there is legal legitimacy to these claims of fraud, the “truth” will come out. Spoiler-alert: there isn’t, and this is why you see misinformation flooding Facebook instead of robust, substantial legal challenges that will actually turn history’s tide.

For now, we have evaded what would have been a calamitous additional four years of Trump. But we have no time to celebrate. The Democrats need to run a post-mortem analysis of this election, and dig deep to discover why Donald J. Trump won his first election, had a disastrous first term, and then nearly eeked out a reelection amid a pandemic.

Few truly asked why Donald Trump won in 2016. The answers often given are racism and sexism, and those two certainly played a part. Would a male “Hillary Clinton” have won? Definitely possible. But simplifying his victory to those two factors undermines the complex reality of what happened in 2016.

Donald Trump ran an excellent campaign in 2016, capitalizing on the establishment’s failures to improve society’s material conditions. He “read the room” perfectly, hammering Hillary Clinton as a career politician who would only deliver America the status quo. I don’t think Democrats realized how effective this strategy would be; “Obama was amazing, how could anyone not sign up for an extension of his legacy?” But the reality is this: not enough Americans were impressed with Obama’s presidency to deliver Hillary the Oval Office. They were desperate enough to roll the dice on a reality TV star and bad businessman.

Hillary Clinton made it abundantly clear that she was the natural extension of Obama-era politics. Obama himself attached his legacy to the 2016 election right before the vote, stating that everything he fought hard for during his presidency was “on the ballot.” But Clinton fell short, and some voters in the rust belt, who voted for Obama twice, fell in love with Trump’s populist messaging.

If neoliberalism was an actual winning ideology, it would be enough to win elections on its own, not reliant on a once-in-a-generation, uber-charismatic political rock star like Barack Obama to pull off victory.

However, in 2020, the Democrats leaned even further into status quo politics. The DNC tilted the battlefield of the DNC primary in a way that stifled the true progressive challengers. The sudden collapse of the primary field before Super Tuesday devastated Bernie Sanders’ chance of the nomination, and Joe Biden, a candidate even more conservative than Hillary, was soon flying towards the General Election as the barrier between us and a potential escalation to outright fascism.

Once Biden was nominated, the Democrats offered little to the party’s left-wing. They instead associated with ghouls like The Lincoln Project and John Kasich, prioritizing the “responsible Republican” — the theoretical voting bloc of disaffected conservatives who wanted to move on from Trump.

Despite Biden’s victory, this strategy was a massive failure. A higher percentage of Republicans voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016, and the battleground states that were supposed to be “blowouts” with this strategy ended up with terrifyingly narrow margins. Biden largely underperformed his polling, and his electoral victory, while significant, is misleading when considering the relatively few votes separating him from Donald in the pivotal Rust Belt. The notion of “responsible Republicans” was ultimately mythological, a misplaced hope by those who wanted to win without the young, working-class coalition that actually did show up on Election Day.

Meanwhile, progressive policies dominated opinion polls and ballot measures. These agenda items, ones largely considered radical within America’s Overton Window, receive more bipartisan support than the “safe” neoliberal policies of Joe Biden and other centrists. It may be intuitive that playing the “middle” is how you win over Republicans from the left, but the reverse is true: politicians must present radical, progressive changes that will actually improve people’s material conditions, not hollowly virtue signal about social issues and safeguard corporate America from political changes that threaten its dominance.

What will we see in 2024? My hope is that both the DNC and the voters work together to present a bold, progressive vision to the country. Neoliberalism and the status quo is not enough. It worked against Donald Trump in the midst of COVID, but it will not work against whatever far-right populist the GOP chooses to represent them next, whether that be Tucker Carlson, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, or someone else. Trump is a forest fire we put out, but if the conditions that started the fire remain, we shouldn’t be surprised if another one comes roaring back, stronger, scarier, and deadlier than the last.