As widely predicted, Biden appears to have won. Once we get past all the legal maneuvering (would you expect Trump to go away without a fight if there was any legal justification?), I suspect the current president-elect will remain. My expectation is that Trump will exhaust his legal options, and then pursue a dignified transition. Many of you are laughing at that – but let’s see what happens; Trump has been the law and order guy – let’s see how this goes. Obama gave him almost zero transition. Let’s hope dignity rises above disdain.
What I noted out of the election, and most reasonable analysts have agreed, are the following: Trump supporters were most favorable over his policies, and they were all over the map on his character. Some loved his tough, often bullying stance. Most tolerated but weren’t thrilled with his lack of dignity and class on social media and in person. But his supporters were, in fact, disproportionately skewed toward the little guys – the “forgotten” that were an unusually heavily weighted toward lower and middle class. You saw it in his donations – averaging $23. Joe averaged $46 – and that was removing his 800+ donors of greater than $100,000 from the calculation list.
What I noticed from Biden supporters was a massive desire to remove the great orange one. Although I asked in this forum on multiple occasions, I never once heard anyone say “yes – I want policy X, Y, or Z from Joe” – not once. What I heard was an overwhelming “Trump is an ass and we hate him”. Okay – I agree with the ass part – and I think most of us do. The democrats were wise to put up the least extreme candidate of the group – but in the last 6 months his policies were slanted toward more extreme, to help appease the farther left side of the party (recall “Bernie bros” largely went away from Hillary in 2016).
Conclusion: Trump lost on character, not policy. Is anyone surprised?
Further evidence to support that conclusion:
The election was far closer than the pollsters predicted. Actually, I watched polls on 8 networks and papers and the scary truth for many of my friends: Fox and Trafalgar were by far the most accurate, as they were in 2016. They didn’t say “Trump was going to win” – and they were the only ones to call Arizona for Biden on Tuesday – it took 3 days for other outlets to do the same. Fox took huge heat for that from the right, but they stuck to their opinion based on analytics, and they were correct. Trafalgar had the race at a 3-point spread for Biden, which Fox supported. The night before the election Lester Holt from NBC announced a “17-point spread” for Biden. Guess what – the final popular vote spread (as of today) is 2.9%.
But looking beyond the polls, look at what else happened: Democrat leadership predicted a 5-15 seat gain in the House. That reversed to a 5 seat loss, as of today. They predicted a sweep in the Senate; they net gained 1 seat, as of today. That tells me the man lost, not the policies he put in place. Net is that Nancy Pelosi may be at risk in her Speaker job, as House Democrats are not thrilled with the outcome. The Democrat post-election call this last week had Abigail Spanberger (D-Va) telling members that this election was a failure for them in the House, and to never use the words “socialism” or “defund the police” ever again, saying that those strategies hurt members that previously flipped GOP seats in 2018. This was, of course, met by AOC criticism on social media, and called “racist”. Spanberger also predicted that they will get “f—ing torn apart in 2022” if they don’t get their act together on these radical ideas. Her race isn’t called yet – she was also a 2018 GOP seat-flipper herself, and she is a moderate.
So, if Joe wins, he is my president, too. I will never take the stand of “he’s not my president” – as many of my friends did with Trump. I may not like what he plans to do, but if he is the guy, then he’s the guy. I took the same stance with Obama. Conversation on the outcome is over. Now the conversation turns to what he does.
This will be interesting. Note when Obama campaigned hard against Bush policies, in most cases once he got in he KEPT most of them, and expanded several. Remember troop surges in Iraq? Increased and expanded to Afghanistan under Obama. Remember the auto industry bailouts under Bush? Expanded under Obama (and Biden now says he did it all himself – okay…). Remember the TARP program for banks at risk? Expanded under Obama. The list goes one – all campaigned as bad, all continued once he won. Will Biden do the same? I hope so in some cases, and I do not ever want to see another cluster of a World Apology Tour that did not produce the Iranian and other results that were promised.
Joe’s transition team is already signaling that we will rejoin the Paris accords (we will start paying them billions again), stop the travel ban from certain countries that were high-risk (what dems called the “Muslim” ban, but not noting that attacks in the US are currently at a multi-year low while Europe is surging), reinstate the Dreamers order, rejoin the WHO (which means start sending them big money again), and will reinstate over a 100 Obama-era orders for public health and environment (read: Oil and Gas in many of those cases). He will also sign an executive order that will ban the White House from interfering with Justice Department investigations, which should be an interesting twist if the GOP holds the Senate and continues its investigation into Joe, his brother, Hunter, and the China money laundering.
Let’s see what happens. Can Joe heal us? If these policies start as crazy as they are predicting, then 2022 will again swing GOP in both houses.
And I am starting the platform work for the Moderate Majority / American Center Fielder movement. I think we’ll need it.
