Trump may have lost to Biden, but Democrats don’t have much to celebrate
True to its unpredictable form, 2020’s Election Day became Election Night and then Election Week and likely Election Month. Maybe more.
True to his litigious form, President Donald Trump disputes select results, as is his right. Attentive online readers can easily find supportive anecdotal evidence of vote-counting funny business in some Democratic areas that neatly fit today’s public fondness for suspicious conspiracies. At some point, Trump’s campaign will have to produce actual evidence of his fraud allegations.
Barring some major surprise and given the small changes that vote recounts historically provide, it seems likely that Joe Biden will officially become president-elect later this month around the birthday that will make him at 78 the oldest man ever to become president of these United States.
But what does that really mean? News flash for euphoric Biden supporters: much less than meets the eye.
Yes, they finally got Trump’s scalp, which no doubt feels quite satisfying after five years of trying with manufactured scandals and doomed impeachment attempts. But even if he does become the third incumbent president to lose a reelection bid in 40 years, Donald J. Trump is not going away.
Take a peek at his personal history the last half-century and discover a predictable proclivity for comebacks that’s frustrated so many of his opponents. In 2024, Trump may indeed attempt to repeat Grover Cleveland’s unique trick of losing reelection, sitting out four years and returning to win a second term in 1893. In terms of maintaining political influence, Trump’s likely at least to keep open that possibility, if only to influence his successor nominee. Trump would just be Biden’s current age then.
With the chronic myopia that caused their 2016 disaster, Biden, his party and supportive media had counted on a landslide repudiation of Trumpism. That would vault him into the Oval Office with a mandate for masks, a fracking ban and his tax-hiking, Pentagon-cutting, climate-changing progressive policies, expanding his party’s House majority and finally taking over the Republican Senate that’s confirmed so many conservative Trump judicial appointments.
That didn’t happen. The GOP scored double-digit seat gains in the House. With the clarity of her partisan mind, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed a mandate, pronouncing herself “officially pleased.”
But such results could cause a disappointed Democratic caucus to give the speaker at least some symbolic trouble keeping her gavel. Left-leaning members will likely grow frustrated when their favored policies become stalled, much like rebellious tea party adherents grew unhappy under a GOP speaker several years ago.
Georgia’s twin Senate runoffs in January will likely decide which party gains a narrow advantage there. The GOP needs only one win to keep Mitch McConnell as majority leader. If, as seems most likely, that occurs and Biden prevails, he will become the rare incoming Democratic president without complete party control of Congress.
Keeping a GOP firewall in the Senate reflects a discerning caution by American voters this time who split their tickets despite a veritable avalanche of Democratic donations. In the 10 most expensive Senate races, Democrats outraised Republicans sometimes by nearly twice as much, a total of $614 million to $373 million. Yet, only three of them won.
Not controlling Congress can be crippling, especially going into midterms in two years, which become referenda on a new president’s first 24 months. In 2010, for instance, halfway through President Barack Obama’s first term, Republicans scored historic net gains — winning 63 House seats, seven Senate seats, six governor’s chairs and flipping party control of 20 state legislatures.
A decade later, Democrats have yet to fully recover from that disaster. Biden’s low-energy campaign, in contrast to Trump’s high-profile, serial rallies that sometimes numbered five in a day, proved free of political coattails and failed to advance repairs. “The president ran a heck of a race,” McConnell said. “It helped in our Senate races.”
As one result, in a year favorable to them, Democrats did not reclaim a single state legislative chamber. So, the Republican Party will exercise dominant control once again in next year’s mandated nationwide congressional redistricting.
As another result, the policies, results and tireless campaigning of the 74-year-old Trump created a surprisingly unified GOP, even in likely White House defeat. It also produced an enlarged, younger Republican electorate with a reach and diversity unseen in decades. Preliminary figures indicate national turnout was 66.5%, the largest in 120 years. Trump trailed with about 48% of the popular vote, up from 46 four years ago.
Additional losers in the 2020 balloting were pollsters and seemingly wishful Washington news media, which consistently and in near unanimity foresaw a large Biden victory margin. For example, the Washington Post, which has proven incapable of detecting anything positive about this president, published a late poll that showed Biden enjoying a 17-point lead in the crucial battleground state of Wisconsin.
Instead, nearly final actual vote results reveal Biden winning there by about 20,000 votes out of 3.24 million cast. That works out to a victory margin of six-tenths of one percent, close enough to allow a recount and further shatter confidence in those once-respected institutions.
This is the 232nd and last of my weekly national politics columns here. Deep thanks to McClatchy, its editors and readers for hosting them. Archived here: (https://www.mcclatchydc.com/opinion/andrew-malcolm/)
This story was originally published November 10, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Trump may have lost to Biden, but Democrats don’t have much to celebrate."