Democrats are kidding themselves if they believe that the elections of 2020–21 have given them a mandate for sweeping change.
Democrats are kidding themselves if they believe that the elections of 2020–21 have given them a mandate for sweeping change.
E very time the Democrats manage to pick the country’s various electoral locks and find themselves in control of the White House and both houses of Congress, they tell themselves it’s 1932. The People have spoken and they want Profound and Lasting Change!
No, they don’t. They didn’t in 2008, when Americans were angry and frustrated about the Iraq War, terrified about the economy, and inclined to inflict severe punishment on anyone with an (R) after his name for his role in both calamities. Almost immediately after Barack Obama took office, however, the reasons he won ceased to resonate: By the time he learned how to work his phone, the recession was over, and the war became a distant memory. So Mr. Never-Let-a-Crisis-Go-to-Waste began shoving through a massive new entitlement/health-care reform that the people didn’t want, Congress turned sharply against him in response, and he spent the next six years caviling about Republican “obstructionism,” as though the Republicans blocking his agenda were not elected specifically and clearly to thwart him.
The question that subsumed all others in the 2020 (and 2021) election cycle was: Are you, or are you not, part of Team Donald? The only message Joe Biden had, and as it turns out the only one he needed, was, “I’m not Trump.” Every time he spoke of “decency” or “grown-ups being in charge” or “listening to the science,” it was simply rephrasing the point: “I’m not Trump.” Trump’s fantastically awful behavior after he lost the election cost Republicans two Senate seats they should have won — in the case of outgoing Senator David Perdue, a seat they did win, in the sense that Perdue got more votes than anyone else in his race last November.
Democrats will be shoving their faces into a buzzsaw if they interpret an election season that delivered them 50 percent of the Senate, 4.5 seats (at this moment) more than 50 percent of the House, and an incoming president who reached 270 electoral votes by a margin of only 43,000 votes spread across three states, as a decisive mandate for sweeping change. Or even as a quiet mandate for major change. Or even as a whispered suggestion of substantial change. The people don’t want anything more complicated than to turn the page on the Trump era.
Americans have decided, albeit by a much narrower margin than almost anyone expected, that they have had enough of Trump’s shenanigans. No other message took any particular hold in the public imagination. Even the devastation of the coronavirus was not strongly tied to Trump in the voters’ minds. If it had been, the electorate would have handed Biden a landslide comparable to Obama’s in 2008. The voters grasp that the virus would have played out in much the same way even if Democrats had been in charge. Given that the virus hit hardest in New York and New Jersey, where the various actions and inactions of Democratic officials had obviously catastrophic results, the public is wise enough to understand that simply being “the party of caring” is not enough to endow Democrats with magical virus-management powers. Today, New York governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City mayor Bill de Blasio are blaming each other for being unable to get the vaccines injected into people, many of whom will simply die waiting as these inept Democrats bicker and bungle.
Much of what drives people’s voting psychology is: not that. Barack Obama won primarily because he was not George W. Bush (whom he successfully argued had a clone in John McCain). He won again because he was not Mitt Romney, who reminded too many people of the management consultant who eliminated Dad’s job. Donald Trump, who was elected president in 2016 at a moment when he had an approval rating of 37 percent, won mainly because he was not Hillary Clinton. And Joe Biden very obviously won by not being Trump.
The Republican Party famously has no agenda besides tax cuts. So what? Another way of phrasing that is that the Republican Party thinks the country is fundamentally fine, and in no need of being remade into a European social democracy. The Democrats fall asleep each night fantasizing about reengineering the energy sector, redistributing wealth, and rebuilding every institution with “social justice” and racial preferences foremost in mind. They will win America’s support for all of this only in their dreams.