Despite Joe Biden’s Victory in the Presidential Election, the Democrats Are in Full Doubt
By: Sylvain Saurel
Tags: Democratic Party, Politics, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump

Despite Joe Biden’s Victory in the Presidential Election, the Democrats Are in Full Doubt

Image: Associated Press

Donald Trump still hasn’t conceded his defeat to Joe Biden. The President of the United States thus continues his losing battle against the result of an election that he still considers to be rigged. Donald Trump cannot provide any proof.

Despite this, Donald Trump remains convinced that he is the real winner of the 2020 presidential election.

But the numbers say otherwise. The final results give more than 80 million votes to Joe Biden. Never before has a candidate in the U.S. presidential election received so many votes. The previous record was set by Barack Obama in 2008 with 69 million votes.

Joe Biden obtained 306 electors against 232 to Donald Trump. With the same score as Joe Biden, Donald Trump had not hesitated to talk about a landslide in 2016 when he won the presidential election against Hillary Clinton.

With such a victory, the Democrats would all have to close ranks behind the newly elected president. Morale should be high. That is not the case.

Dreams of a blue wave that would have reduced the outgoing president’s term to a parenthesis suddenly disappeared on election night. The few certainties that the Democratic Party thought it had had were swept away after losses in the House of Representatives.

The Democrats were considering increasing their majority. Quite the opposite happened, as the majority was halved. From 232, the number of Democratic representatives in the lower house of the U.S. Congress fell to 222.

The Democratic majority will be further eroded in the Midterms to be held in 2022. These elections are usually tricky for the party of the new president. The bitter defeats of 1994 and 2010 are there to remind the Democrats of this.

While the leadership will remain Democratic in the House of Representatives, with Nancy Pelosi as a speaker, Steny Hoyer as majority leader, and Jim Clyburn as majority whip, dissent within the Democratic Party is resurfacing.

The sacred union that had been decreed to support Joe Biden’s candidacy against Donald Trump is well and truly over.

Only two days after the presidential election, on November 5, it was Abigail Spanberger, the representative of Virginia, who opened hostilities. During a conference call, this former CIA veteran felt that many candidates had paid the price for the complacency of some Democrats towards the slogan “Defund the Police” hammered into the protests against police violence.

Abigail Spanberger’s 2018 victory in a Republican stronghold was a symbol of the Democrats’ new ability to attract voters in peri-urban areas.

The moderate Democrat emphasized that the slogan “Defund the Police” had been effectively used by the Republican Party against the Democrats. However, the Democrats had not even taken it up. The defeat of incumbent Max Rose in Rhode Island and the failure of Cameron Webb in Virginia can be explained by this devastating use.

Very upset against the strategy of her camp, Abigail Spanberger also questioned another semantic weakness according to her:

“We want to talk about funding social services, and ensuring good engagement in community policing, let’s talk about what we are for. And we need to not ever use the words ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again. Because while people think it doesn’t matter, it does matter. And we lost good members because of it.”

Among the Democrats, it is already time to take stock. Each one of the Democrats has his or her own personal criticism to make. In an interview with the New York Times, Conor Lamb, elected in a disputed Pennsylvania riding, added the slogan of the ban on hydraulic fracturing defended by the left-wing, which Joe Biden opposed:

“Because those things aren’t just unpopular, they’re completely unrealistic, and they aren’t going to happen. And they amount to false promises by the people that call for them.”

Conor Lamb calls on the Democratic Party to return to a pragmatic approach:

“The rhetoric and the policies and all that stuff — it has gone way too far. It needs to be dialed back. It needs to be rooted in common sense, in reality, and yes, politics. Because we need districts like mine to stay in the majority and get something done for the people that we care about the most.”

The defeats of Kendra Horn in Oklahoma and Xochitl Torres Small in New Mexico can be directly attributed to the Democratic Fossil Energy Exit Project.

The accusations of Abigail Spanberger and other moderate personalities naturally prompted the figures on the Democratic left wing to react. Foremost among these figures are Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who were elected from strong Democratic strongholds.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez began by saying that criticizing the other ideological currents of the Democratic Party was totally counterproductive:

“Pointing fingers and telling each other what to do, it deepens the division in the party. And it’s irresponsible. It’s irresponsible to pour gasoline on what is already very delicate tensions in the party.”

But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez quickly gave in to the easy way out by attacking the Democratic Party’s stewardship, which she considered far too weak. For her, the low resources devoted by moderate candidates to social networks during their campaigns had made them “easy targets” for Republicans.

The Democrats’ divisions between the center and the left-wing are not new. They are very old, but members of the Democratic Party were able to put them aside during the presidential election to avoid a second term for Donald Trump.

A useful voting reflex silenced the differences, but this short-term appeasement behind centrist Joe Biden prevented the Democratic Party from proactively defining itself, leaving the way open for Republican accusations.

The Democratic Party’s slowness to react in the summer of 2020 to occasional spillovers from demonstrations against police violence also weakened it.

In an interview for the Politico website, Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan representative who was also elected in the 2018 election, said the Democratic Party has a real strategic problem:

“The brand of the national Democratic Party is mushy. People don’t know what we stand for, what we’re about. So, every two years when the new flavor of attack comes out, it’s easy to convince a portion of the population that those attacks are true, because they still don’t know our brand.”

In 2002, political scientists John Judis and Ruy Teixeira defended a thesis in their book “The Emerging Democratic Majority” that the programmed disappearance of the white majority in the United States would mechanically open the way to a lasting Democratic hegemony.

This hegemony was to be based on a coalition of blue-collar workers, women, youth, and minorities.

The presidential election of 2016 had already denied what is in fact a political mirage. The presidential election of 2020 is the confirmation of this. In several key states, the losses among white non-graduate voters seduced by Trump’s ethnonationalism were not offset by the presumed Democratic appeal among African Americans or Hispanics.

Seeing President Donald Trump make significant inroads into this electorate despite his stigmatizing rhetoric about Latino immigration was a devastating blow to Democratic hopes.

The springs of this mechanism are complex, but they show that the Republicans have been far better than the Democrats from a strategic point of view. In Florida, the red rag of “socialism” has necessarily played with voters of Cuban or Venezuelan origin.

In Texas, it was rather the effectiveness of Donald Trump’s message about his excellent record before the COVID-19 pandemic that weighed heavily.

Even more surprising is the fact that Donald Trump’s attitude of distrust during the demonstrations against police violence and the stigmatization of the #BlackLivesMatter movement did not prevent him from making strong progress with the African-American electorate.

Of course, they overwhelmingly supported Joe Biden in that election. But seeing Donald Trump’s progress with this electorate is a sign of a real problem for Democrats.

The Democrats are also struggling to understand how Donald Trump was able to win more votes in the Muslim electorate than he did in 2016 or the Midterms of 2018. Indeed, presidential decrees banning Muslim nationals from entering the United States should have acted as a deterrent.

Finally, a setback perfectly symbolizes the problem of the Democrats at present. In California, during a referendum, the voters of this ultra-progressive state opposed by a large majority (53.1% vs. 46.9%) the principle of positive discrimination in government services, universities, and the awarding of public contracts.

Asians were among the most hostile, while Spanish speakers were extremely divided at best on this thorny issue.

All is not black for the Democratic Party. Joe Biden’s success in Arizona was achieved through the Latino vote. This is a first for a Democratic candidate since 1996, as in Nevada. The historic result in Georgia is also a source of satisfaction.

Even if the Republicans are likely to win at least one seat out of two in a run-off in Georgia on January 5, 2021, and thus retain a majority in the Senate, the Democrats will be able to draw inspiration from these successes to try to move towards common positions in the months to come.

Joe Biden’s first few months will be crucial to see if he can keep the Democratic Party united at a time when he appears more than ever in doubt.

While the left-wing remains a minority in the party and concentrated in its strongholds, the center of the party cannot do without its ability to mobilize and hope to win in 2022 against a GOP that is more than ever invigorated by its unexpected successes in the House of Representatives, but also by Donald Trump’s historic 73.9 million votes.