Category Archives: 2020 General Election

2020 General Election, Democracy, Democrats

Did Kevin Drum have it right all along?

This week a friend sent me a link to Steven Teles’s New York Times op-ed (“Our Political System Is Unfair. Liberals Need to Just Deal With It.”). I found it hard to disagree with Teles, in contrast to the tact I had taken in response to Kevin Drum on November 1 (‘Is democracy alive and well in the U.S. and unthreatened by a “bugnut insane” GOP?’)

Professor Teles:

… As Ezra Klein has argued, our constitution “forces Democrats to win voters ranging from the far left to the center right, but Republicans can win with only right-of-center votes.” As a consequence, liberals can’t have nice things.

The argument is logical, but it is also a strategic dead end. The United States is and in almost any plausible scenario will continue to be a federal republic. We are constituted as a nation of states, not as a single unitary community, a fact that is hard-wired into our constitutional structure. Liberals may not like this, just as a man standing outside in a rainstorm does not like the fact he is getting soaked. But instead of cursing the rain, it makes a lot more sense for him to find an umbrella.

Liberals need to adjust their political strategy and ideological ambitions to the country and political system we actually have, and make the most of it, rather than cursing that which they cannot change. 

I accept this argument, while I dissented from Drum’s view opposing Ezra Klein. As I summarized at the time:

An off the rails Republican Party threatens democratic governance. Political scientists and other observers have made a strong case for this judgment. Kevin Drum’s appeals to previous eras of American politics, to past partisan skirmishes with wins and losses for each side, and to old school leadership fail to undermine this conclusion.

What gives? The short answer is: what a difference a day makes — in this case, November 3.

When Drum made his case (on October 23 and again on October 24), we didn’t know the results of the election. In particular, we didn’t know that Democrats would fail to retake the Senate and to increase their majority in the House. Barring a double victory in Georgia on January 5 (which I do not rule out!), Democrats will be in no position to advance a pro-majoritarian agenda (including judicial reform and admission of new states).

I agree with Teles because, at this stage (with a Biden victory and down ballot disappointment), we’re stuck (at least prior to January 5). Thus, we “can’t have nice things.”

Drum’s argument — regardless of whether or not Democrats were heading toward a landslide — flatly rejected the pro-majoritarian agenda as misguided, unlike Teles, who begins his op-ed with a reality check:

The American voters chose to give the Democrats the White House, but denied them a mandate. Even if Democrats somehow squeak out wins in both Georgia Senate races, the Senate will then pivot on Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

Not only does this take much of the liberal wish list off the table, it also makes deep structural reform of federal institutions impossible.

This is the world we live in. We have to take stock, trim our agenda, and then move forward. Such is life at least until we regain a working majority. Teles agrees with this assessment (at least regarding D.C. statehood): “If Democrats at some point get a chance to get full representation for Washington, D.C., they should take it.”

Editor’s note: I began my November 1 post by noting that Kevin Drum and I do not think alike, nor do we agree on “nearly everything.” We do, though, agree (or very nearly agree) sometimes. On November 7, he posted how he voted on each of the dozen California state ballot initiatives. As it happens, I voted — with one exception — exactly as he did. I too was disappointed in how often I found myself in the minority (though this is nothing new).

The exception: I voted No on Prop 25, which would have ended cash bail. After some consideration, I bought the argument of some civil rights advocates, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California: “NO on Prop 25 that would eliminate money bail, but replace it with risk assessment tools that are racially and socioeconomically biased. “

Who knows whether this was the right call.

(Image: voters lined up to cast ballots in California’s March 2020 primary.)

2020 General Election, Democrats

Reflections on the 2020 election and reaching more voters

  1. Words of wisdom from Michelle Goldberg:

Left-wing populists often believe that there’s a silent majority who agree with them, if only they can be organized to go to the polls. If that were true, though, an election with record high turnout should have been much better for progressives. Instead, 2020 was a reminder of something most older liberals long ago had to come to terms with: The voters who live in the places that determine political control in this country tend to be more conservative than we are.

I’m an older liberal. I live in Los Angeles County, where Joe Biden romped with more than 71% of the vote to Donald Trump’s not quite 27%; Congressman Adam Schiff was reelected with more than 72% of the vote; an advocate for criminal justice reform defeated the incumbent (an African American woman and a Democrat) for District Attorney; and my city councilman (a progressive Democrat in a nonpartisan office, with a slew of mainstream endorsements, including Mayor Eric Garcetti and Speaker Nancy Pelosi) became the first City Council incumbent defeated in 17 years, by a candidate running to his left.

I’m fine with those results (though I voted for my councilman, whom I had no reason to be mad at, but won’t miss). But I know that Los Angeles is hardly representative of the rest of the country — and I want Democrats to win there too.

2. I was convinced that 2020 was the year that Susan Collins would go down. (A more reasonable prospect than daydreams about the defeat of South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham or Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell.) Mainers disappointed me again.

Today’s New York Times provides perspective on that senate race, which suggests that so much money poured into the state that much of the spending misfired:

Maine’s mill towns were reliably Democratic until they flipped red for Mr. Trump in 2016. Once wealthy communities, they have steadily lost population, and remain dotted with relics of their old prosperity, like Rumford’s elegant, neoclassical Hotel Harris. The paper industry began a long decline in the 1980s, and Rumford’s mill work force contracted from a high point of 3,000, in the 1960s, to around 650 today.

“They’re fed up with politics, politicians in general, Democrats and Republicans,” said Kerri Arsenault, whose memoir, “Mill Town,” traced the industry’s decline.

“There’s a lot of angry Trump people who work in that mill,” said Deano Gilbert, 57, a union official at the mill. “I deal with guys that have had union jobs for decades that are superstrong Trump supporters. In the 1970s, everyone would be trying to vote their jobs, but now that’s all over.”

Asked how Democrats could better reach voters in towns like Rumford, he said, “Know your audience.”

3. Did I mention Lindsey Graham? Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger — under fierce attack by many Republicans who don’t like the state’s election results — alleges that Senator Graham called with questions about Raffensperger’s handling of signature-matching laws and the oblique suggestion that Raffensperger throw out legally cast ballots. Graham made the call on the same day a Trump supporter filed a lawsuit in Georgia to do just that and Trump tweeted, “Georgia Secretary of State, a so-called Republican (RINO), won’t let the people checking the ballots see the signatures for fraud.”

Graham denies Raffensperger’s account, but when asked earlier by Sean Hannity — at a time when the South Carolinian was raising bogus charges of electoral fraud — whether the Republican-controlled state legislature in Pennsylvania should consider rejecting the majority vote for Biden and selecting Trump electors by fiat, responded: “I think everything should be on the table.”

He said “everything” on Fox News Channel and endorsed the possibility of throwing out the ballots from Pennsylvania, but we’re supposed to believe he balked at making a discrete call to a Republican Secretary of State in Georgia to suggest more limited sabotage? This is hardly a credible denial from a hardly credible Senator, someone who has been all-in with Trump’s efforts to delegitimize the election results and the incoming presidency of Joe Biden.

4. When he arrives at the White House on January 20, Biden’s first order of business will be defeating the coronavirus, which Trump has refused to take on. It will be a tall order — especially in light of how the Republican Party has created yet another wedge issue to divide us by opposing wearing a mask and social distancing to stop the spread of infection.

Democrat Joe Biden may have won the presidency pledging a national mask mandate and a science-based approach to controlling the pandemic. But in the states where the virus is spiking highest — particularly in the Upper Midwest — Republicans made substantial gains down-ballot. Often they did so by railing against the very tool that scientists say could best help arrest the virus’s spread.

Democrats on the left, convinced that messaging that’s effective in California or New York or other solidly blue states and metro regions, will be well-received in areas with a redder tinge, should pause to reconsider. Reflect on the opposition to taking simple steps — recommended by scientists, doctors, and public health authorities — to save American lives. This is the same audience that accepts election fraud nonsense.

Most of these folks — among the 73 million voters who embraced Donald Trump’s reelection — may be out of reach. But Democrats have to figure out a way to pry apart this bloc, to bring a portion of these Americans over to our side — enough to form a working majority.

Right now, they’re not talking our language, not accepting our facts, not seeing what we’re seeing. Expecting that an effective message in blue America will resonate in red America is wishful thinking. It’s going to be a harder lift than that.

(Image: Susan Collins via wikipedia.)

2020 General Election, Democracy

Trump, whether he accepts it or not, is on the way out. What’s next for him and for a polarized nation?

Jonathan Bernstein notes the speculation about how long Donald Trump’s domination of the Republican Party will last:

You can’t shake a stick right now without hitting someone who thinks that outgoing President Donald Trump will dominate Republican politics while President-elect Joe Biden is in office, and will surely be nominated again in 2024. . . .

On one hand … sure, it’s plausible. . . .

On the other hand? I’m with Josh Chafetz, who says that it’s “equally plausible that he really fades.”

Both Bernstein and Chafetz look to Fox News as a key indicator. I agree that keeping Fox on board could be decisive in extending Trump’s influence. But I found this insight regarding a run for the 2024 Republican nomination from an insider — within the extended family, not a political source — to be altogether convincing: Trump will not run again in 2024. Because, as Mary Trump told Chris Cuomo: “He will never put himself in a position where he can lose like this again.“

Meanwhile, Amy Walter surveys the election results — where the Republican Party (aside from Trump) did very well — and sees continuing polarization, mistrust, and disillusionment as precluding any bipartisan cooperation in our future.

In the past, when I was asked what it would take to break the partisanship and gridlock in Washington, I said I thought it was going to take something truly horrible happening. Like a war. Or a Great Depression type of economic collapse. But, here we are, almost a year into the worst pandemic this country has seen in 100 years, and this crisis, instead of bringing us together, has become yet another one which divides us. And, even as we flirt with a dangerous descent into a deadly third wave of the virus this winter, those divisions are likely to remain. This is one time when I hope that I will be proven wrong. But, I fear that I won’t be. 

So do I.

Going back many months, watching the pandemic rage throughout the country on Trump’s watch, even as I realized we live in a deeply polarized country, I was convinced that Trump would pay a price with his base for his disastrous mismanagement of the coronavirus.

Headline after headline, day after day revealed his callous indifference — which continues apace. A report from today’s Washington Post (“More than 130 Secret Service officers are said to be infected with coronavirus or quarantining in wake of Trump’s campaign travel”) illustrates his ongoing failure to defeat the virus, with Trump’s rallies and White House events serving as superspreader events.

Masks and social distancing have been rejected — never mind the consequences. And contract tracing? The White House doesn’t even inform vulnerable staff members of outbreaks: “People present at Wednesday night’s campaign party in the East Room who were around Meadows, Lewandowski and other now-sick staffers say they have not been contacted by the White House.”

Yet the base stuck with him — 71 million strong. Isn’t that a testament to polarization?

Ezra Klein, who wrote a book about polarization, sees the problem as a lack of small-d democratic accountability. He observes that the traditional model of politics has gone belly-up:

The fundamental feedback loop of politics — parties compete for public support, and if they fail the public, they are electorally punished, and so they change — is broken. But it’s only broken for the Republican Party.

Because — in an era when Democrats are concentrated in densely populated urban areas, and Republicans dominate rural areas — the Electoral College, the U.S. Senate, gerrymandered House and state legislative districts, and a conservative judiciary, have given the GOP an electoral advantage. “As a result, Democrats and Republicans are operating in what are, functionally, different electoral systems, with very different incentives.”

The Republican Party has become increasingly extreme, yet even as it loses majority support, it flourishes. Klein concludes:

In politics, as in any competition, the teams adopt the strategies the rules demand. America’s political parties are adopting the strategies that their very different electoral positions demand. That has made the Democratic Party a big-tent, center-left coalition that puts an emphasis on pluralistic outreach. And it has let the Republican Party adopt more extreme candidates, dangerous strategies, and unpopular agendas, because it can win most elections even while it’s losing most voters.

(Image: Donald J. Trump on Twitter.)

2020 General Election, Donald Trump, Off the Rails, Republicans

Are Trump’s shocking, reckless outbursts not “the tirades of a tyrant, but the tantrums of a toddler”?

Eli Lake offers a commentary on Trump’s firing Secretary of Defense Mark Esper (who publicly disagreed with Trump about the wisdom of using the nation’s military to scatter peaceful demonstrators so the President could stroll to Lafayette Square for a photo op). Lake criticizes Donald Trump’s score-settling as “shocking, but predictable.” He suggests that, if Trump fires CIA Director Gina Haspel and FBI Director Christopher Wrey, this “would again be shocking, but not surprising.”

It appears now that he will leave office in the manner in which he has governed: recklessly. The difference is that, now that he has lost his bid for re-election, his outbursts are not the tirades of a tyrant, but the tantrums of a toddler. Trump could have accepted defeat and focused on the fact that his presidency has remade both the Republican Party and the American political map. If he wished to run in 2024, he could start making that argument now.

By pronouncing Trump’s eruptions this week as “the tantrums of a toddler,” rather than “the tirades of a tyrant,” Lake diminishes their significance. A reckless president is capable of doing ample damage in the next two months. Furthermore, this is unconvincing:

… Trump did not prove himself to be the authoritarian menace that his opposition claims. Trump could have fired Esper then and there. Instead he waited and seethed, sounding like a dictator but not acting like one. Only now, when he actually is a lame duck, is Trump choosing to settle scores.

A tyrant isn’t defanged simply because he chooses when to retaliate.

Moreover, something more consequential goes unmentioned: the compliance — whether eager or reluctant, over four years of erratic “outbursts” — of the Republican Party with the wannabe autocrat. That compliance, coming again and again, has ensured that the ongoing damage to our national interests and security is altogether predictable. If not for their willingness to countenance Trump’s off the rails words and deeds, Republican leaders might have kept him in check.

Instead, Republicans have folded. While Trump is still subject in some measure to institutional constraints, we can expect to see more unsurprising, reckless conduct over the next two months because Republicans are content to play along.

The elephant in the room

“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” asked a Republican about playacting while Trump refuses to admit that he lost the election. This is identical to the calculation Republicans have made regarding the bluster, bullying, and incoherence throughout Trump’s entire term in office.

Today in Washington, Republican officials — in particular those who foresee a possible Republican primary in their future — are rallying around Trump. They’re either all-in with the nonsense about voting irregularities and fraud, or they pretend that his lies, delusions, complaints, and resistance are standard procedure after a presidential election. What they won’t do is push back. With this refusal, they enable.

Eli Lake credits Donald Trump with these accomplishments: “his presidency has remade both the Republican Party and the American political map.”

Lake doesn’t acknowledge that Trump’s remaking of the Republican Party has placed the United States in peril. The most significant threat to a wise, prudent foreign policy (as well as to wise, prudent domestic policies) from January 2016 through January 2021 is the servility of the Republican Party to an insecure, vengeful president and a base willing to do his bidding. It is disappointing that Lake hasn’t noticed this pattern.

(Photograph by Doug Mills of the New York Times.)

2020 General Election, Donald Trump, Republicans

News Quiz: Which Washington Post headline isn’t like the others?

The first six headlines as I scrolled the Washington Post on my phone this evening (the evening of November 11 in California, but already November 12 in D.C.) all appear on the webpage:

  • “More Republicans back legal push to contest Biden’s victory”
  • “Despite lack of evidence, GOP forms ranks around Trump”
  • “Barr clears Justice Dept. to investigate alleged voting irregularities as  Trump makes unfounded fraud claims”
  • “Biden behaves as the incoming president, even as Trump balks at giving up power”
  • “White House, escalating tensions, orders agencies to rebuff Biden transition team”
  • “Long-standing ties between Biden and McConnell could shape early agenda”

Here’s a hint: Five headlines share a theme — that the outcome of the election is in doubt. Voting irregularities and fraud render the results illegitimate, which explains lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign and investigations launched by the Justice Department, and make ushering in a democratic transition of power out of the question.

As Republicans rally ’round an angry president in denial, recall Donald Trump’s leadership role in promulgating the birther theory, which sought to delegitimize the Obama presidency. With the cries of fraud in 2020, Republicans seek to delegitimze the Biden presidency before the transition has begun.

Oh, yeah, and then there’s the headline that suggests that because Biden and McConnell have long-standing ties, perhaps they’ll have a smooth working relationship beginning on January 20, 2021.

But, hold on! If you were, say, the Majority Leader of the United States Senate, would you be willing to work with a man put into office illegitimately, a usurper who cheated his way into the White House? Wouldn’t you be justified in obstructing that man at every turn? Wouldn’t your base expect that? (That’s what McConnell and Graham and Cruz and Barr and McCarthy and others are signalling to the base now, isn’t it? That they shouldn’t expect to see cooperation because the other side is illegitimate.)

2020 General Election, Democracy

Cause for celebration: Joe Biden defeats Donald Trump

The Biden-Harris victory is an unalloyed good thing.

A clear majority of Americans — well apportioned among key battleground states — rejected Donald Trump at their first opportunity following his Electoral College victory in defiance of a popular vote majority in 2016. Joe Biden — a decent, caring, well-qualified man, who will genuinely seek to represent the whole country — will replace him.

No, the Democrats didn’t win the Senate (though there will be another go-round in Georgia in January), they lost seats in the House, and upwards of 70 million Americans voted to reelect a man monumentally unfit for the presidency. Mitch McConnell will relish obstructing Joe Biden at every turn. Republicans in most states will control redistricting for the next decade. Enacting a progressive agenda is not yet on the horizon.

The next four years will be highly challenging. But I’m too much of an optimist to presuppose that the Biden presidency is doomed to failure, that the 2022 elections will mark a further setback, or that 2024 will return Republicans to the White House.

From the January 2017 Women’s March through the 2020 voting that concluded on Tuesday, Americans have organized in opposition to Trump and the GOP. The political struggle is hardly over. But it brought an extraordinarily significant victory this week.

That’s cause for celebration.

(Photo of the President-elect from Wikimedia Commons.)

2020 General Election, Democrats, Republicans

Fox News reveals that most Americans have liberal views on the issues. That’s not Fox’s problem.

Folks on the left had fun on Tuesday night posting images on Twitter of the results of polling by Fox News Channel. Most Americans, the survey found, are decidedly liberal on a host of issues.

Changing to a government-run health care plan: 39% strongly favor; 33% somewhat favor; 14% somewhat oppose; 15% strongly oppose.

Supreme Court action on Roe v. Wade: 71% leave as is; 29% overturn it.

U.S. gun laws should be: 55% more strict; 12% less strict; 33% kept as is.

What should happen to illegal immigrants in the U.S.? 72% pathway to citizenship; 28% deportation.

Increasing government spending on green & renewable energy: 37% strongly favor; 33% somewhat favor; 16% somewhat oppose; 15% strongly oppose.

Donald Trump’s approach to Russia: 4% too tough; 58% not tough enough; 38% about right.

And so on. What Fox (and viewers) discovered is a phenomenon that’s goes back decades. Here’s how Matthew Grossmann and David A. Hopkins described it in Asymmetric Politics:

The American electorate consistently holds collectively left-of-center views on most policy issues even as it leans to the right on more general measures of ideology—as Lloyd A. Free and Hadley Cantril observed nearly five decades ago, the public is simultaneously operationally liberal and symbolically conservative.

Operationally liberal: when asked their opinions about political issues, majorities consistently take the liberal side (as did the folks FNC polled). In other words, when confronted with specific issues, they approve of public policies that actively address or remedy the situation (and they do so even if, in the abstract, they embrace small government or rugged individualism — symbolically conservative positions).

Symbolically conservative: when asked to characterize their ideology or philosophical outlook, more Americans say they are ‘Conservative’ than ‘Liberal’ — that’s how they view themselves. They embrace traditional American values, which the GOP has branded as its own (and runs with year after year, rather than emphasizing its unpopular policies).

Huge numbers of Republican voters and Trump supporters are operationally liberal and symbolically conservative. They vote for the party that opposes their views and interests. There’s nothing new here. It’s the starting point of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?

Unfortunately for Democrats, adopting positions on a range of issues that most Americans are in agreement with hardly guarantees support at the polls. As Grossmann and Hopkins explain: the pendulum swings back and forth (with Democrats winning one cycle, Republicans another) with an electorate that sometimes makes a decision based on specific Democratic issues (in 2018 healthcare was critical), sometimes based on abstract Republican messaging (often, as negative polarization has increased, in broad strokes that demean their opponents: socialists, radicals, elitists).

The level of negative partisanship is so high now, it is harder than ever to break through to the other side to make ones case. That’s a huge problem for the Democratic Party, which Alex Pareene addresses with a question, ‘What if it barely matters what Democrats “talk about” or “campaign on”?‘ His answer isn’t encouraging:

It seems possible … that voters no longer believe that the Democratic Party represents a coalition that includes the working class, and that even if the party puts forward Democratic candidates who support pro-worker policy, it simply will not suffice to reach or convince voters.

It’s inevitable that the FNC mix of propaganda and actual news will clash from time to time. While amusing, that’s not really a problem for the network. What Tuesday night’s polling results show, however, is something that Democrats must grapple with, if the party is ever to regain the White House while enjoying majorities in both houses of Congress. With such a closely divided nation, a constitutional structure that advantages vast stretches of land rather than people, and an opposition party bent on obstruction and paralysis, Democrats have to figure out how to gain the support of folks from red states, who would actually benefit from Democratic policies.

2020 General Election, Donald Trump, Republicans

“Stop The Count! Stop The Count! Stop The Count!” “Count The Votes! Count The Votes! Count the Votes!”

Trump supporters crowded outside a voting center in Michigan were chanting to stop the count, while Trump supporters across the country in Arizona were chanting to count the votes.

The Trump strategy to steal the election, thus far, seems as well thought out as Trump’s plans to replace the ACA with something even better. More a favorite talking point than an actual plan.

As I noted on September 28, a successful effort to steal the election would rely on Republican operatives, with Trump simply giving signals: ‘The linchpin: “if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them.” ‘

Most Republicans aren’t playing along at this stage, in stark contrast to the successful effort to “Stop the count” in Florida in 2000. As Rachel Maddow observed in a 2009 look back at the Brooks Brothers riot to intimidate officials to stop counting ballots in Miami-Dade, the ruckus was well planned. New York State Chairman of the Republican Party, Brendan Quinn, and New York Republican Congressman John Sweeney organized the the effort.

As Maddow explained, “The mob that the GOP sent to stop that count in Miami was billed at the time as a spontaneous, grassroots uprising …,” but it consisted of national Republican operatives — none from Miami — at least a half dozen who were paid for their services. Maddow identifies several of them by name and position — 1 though 10 — in the photo above.

“Many of these Brooks Brothers rioters went on to pretty good jobs in the Bush-Cheney administration,” Maddow reports. “That mob scene they participated in became something that Republicans put on their resumes.”

The Brooks Brothers riot occurred in early December, a month after the election. So there’s plenty of time for mischief in 2020 — and well into January 2021 for that matter. But thus far, it appears that Trump is flailing away without much effective, organized support. And — as I wrote on Wednesday — many Washington Republicans (even those, I suggest, who — as reported today — believe that Trump’s campaign carried them to reelection this week) almost certainly welcome a Biden White House after four years of Trump. There are distinct advantages to escaping from Trump’s craziness, while gaining an unalloyed partisan enemy (whom I’m sure McConnell believes will likely serve a single term) at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

2020 General Election, Polls

“No matter what happens, I will find a way to say, ‘I told you so. That’s how probabilities work.'”

Last weekend I found myself asking: What am I supposed to make of Five Thirty Eight’s 10 out of 100 probability that Trump will win? A Trump victory is a possibility, right, just like the 30 out of 100 probability (or whatever it was) in 2016? The numbers suggest precision (a result of complicated behind the scenes modeling of data of uncertain reliability) and also that there’s a significant difference between the numbers (10 or 30 or something else). But what difference could this make for me? What’s the point?

Joshua Keating (“The Problem Isn’t That the Polls Were Wrong. It’s That They Were Useless”) addresses my befuddlement like so:

It’s not all that comforting to Democrats today to know that 9 out of 10 times this election happens in the greater multiverse, Biden will win it. As former FiveThirtyEight writer Mona Chalabi put it, assuming the voice of FiveThirtyEight’s much-derided Fivey Fox mascot, “No matter what happens, I will find a way to say ‘I told you so! That’s how probabilities work!’ ”

I see.

2020 General Election, Democracy, Republicans

The happiest man in America today may be Majority Leader Mitch McConnell

Assuming (at 11:00 a.m. PT) that when the votes are all counted Joe Biden is elected president and the Republican Senate majority is secure, what could be a better outcome for the senior senator from Kentucky?

The erratic, irrational, self-destructive leader of his party is about to be sidelined and there will be a clear, unambiguous villain in the White House. Republicans, and Fox News Channel, can give voice to lies and slander that will be more strategically calculated than the prodigious liar in the White House ever managed. And it’ll be easier for Republicans to keep the racial antagonism and xenophobia at a lower pitch than Trump has done. This won’t be a setback for any essential Republican policy objectives or campaign strategies.

McConnell, who has no interest in legislating, can go back to what he does best: obstruction. There will be no hurry to approve any Biden executive branch appointments. And, since the courts are packed full, perhaps we can have a pause for a couple of years.

Meanwhile, Republicans can let go of foreign policies that undermine our allies and give succor to Putin and other bad actors who wish ill of the U.S. Biden can be counted on to restore some normalcy to American foreign policy, which most Republicans — no matter what the lies and the party-line — will welcome, though not acknowledge. There will still be relentless attacks and investigations.

On Sunday I wrote, “Mitch McConnell (and the GOP caucuses in both the Senate and the House) often strategically opt for dysfunction, gridlock, and paralysis rather than cutting a deal, if they think they can shun accountability and win the next election — or the cycle or two after that.” His gamble paid off. The Senate ignored the pandemic and the economic crisis and McConnell didn’t even lose a cycle. And, if all goes well, Senate Republicans may be better positioned in the next off-year elections to increase their majority (which would be unlikely if Trump were in his second term).

This is not the country I thought (before November 2016) I was living in. Nor the one I thought (after November 2018) I was living in.

With November 2020 comes another reality check — and a discordant clash with nearly half the country. Even with a pandemic — with more than 200,000 dead and, by year’s end, perhaps 200,000 more — the Republican base voted heavily to return Trump to office along with red state senators. Fox News Channel, negative polarization, and fiercely partisan identities have profoundly shaped the reality that the Republican base perceives.

Yep. Mitch McConnell is sitting pretty.

(Image: Mitch McConnell 2016 official photo via wikipedia.)