The party is trying to lure college-educated suburbanites while holding minorities and the white working class. It’s a tough task
It may just be a function of the circles I travel in, but very few people I know are happy with the election results. Republicans are unhappy that Donald Trump has lost his reelection battle with Joe Biden and will become a one-term president. Democrats are unhappy that the predicted blue wave did not materialize, which means that Republicans will likely maintain control of the Senate and Mitch McConnell can thwart any ambitious Democratic legislation. And my Never-Trump friends are unhappy that the outcome did not deliver the complete repudiation of Trumpism, and the subsequent reformation of a chastened Republican party, that they had hoped for.
Like many people, I am guilty of having placed too much trust in the pollsters. But I really didn’t think a progressive tsunami was about to crash over the national landscape. The last time there was a genuine Democratic wave election, in 2008, its enabling condition was deep Republican demoralization over the George W Bush administration’s economic and foreign policy failures. Trump’s supporters, by contrast, are more fired-up than ever, despite his administration’s inability to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic and its accompanying economic dislocations.
One lesson to be drawn from this election is that US politics nowadays is more about tribal, identity-based divisions than policy disagreements
Geoffrey Kabaservice is the director of political studies at the Niskanen Center in Washington, as well as the author of Rule and Ruin: the Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party