Anyone expecting the "blue wave" pollsters were predicting before November 3 is by now profoundly underwhelmed. Suburban housewives, we were told, were repelled by Trump's misogyny and the bad example he continually sets for the nation's children. People of color were motivated against him by his racist, fascist policies. Voters inclined to give him a try four years ago were dismayed by his feckless response to COVID-19 and empty promises on health care reform. Republican candidates were starting to distance themselves from him.
Even Texas was supposed to be in play!
Then came November 3, 2020, and it looked like Election Night 2016 all over again.
It has taken days for the massive numbers of early and absentee votes to be counted; they each have to be removed from envelopes, unfolded, checked for witness signatures and so forth, and that takes time. But they have turned the tide for Joe Biden. Hooray for that.
It was not, however, the sort of tide we had been promised.
"The fact is we are, perhaps more than any time since the late 1850s, a divided country—divided not only by ideology and policy preferences (that’s normal; it’s what elections are supposed to decide) but also by the way we see the world. The two sides seem to occupy different universes. One universe observes facts, respects science, and values at least the goals of democracy and civility; the other universe does not. And the two view each other with seething contempt. Trump may wind up defeated, but Trumpism very much endures."
Looking back, Dear Misleader found support in the polls from that hard-core base of his: the people who took time from their busy day to swarm the freeways in their Trump-flag-waving pick-ups and SUVs, to sink their pleasure boats in Trump flotillas, or, like one home we passed on our way home from vacation this week, to festoon its yard with upwards of fifty Trump Pence signs.
His poll numbers should have included all the people for whom criminalizing abortion is the one and only issue at all times. In September, when Biden came to the church where I work, for a community discussion of race and policing after the Jacob Blake shooting, comments from the anti-abortion zealots flooded the church's Facebook page and website, and the phone rang off the hook with their calls. Not all, but many of their irate messages were about abortion and nothing else.
To the hard-core Trumpsters and the anti-abortion zealots were added on Election Day a great many voters who told pollsters that they were "undecided." They may not have been Trumpsters loud and proud, but they saw him as a protector against the scary-looking rioters setting cities on fire, marauding through residential neighborhoods, and shooting police officers.
I know these people. The church where I work filled with the smell of smoke from the surrounding business district in the days after Jacob Blake was shot. Opportunistic thugs speeding through a suburban neighborhood the first night of the riots wrecked their car right outside the house of my in-laws. The Trump and America First ads on radio and television linking Biden, Kamala Harris, and every possible down-ballot Democrat to the burning and looting proved more effective around here than those clever ads from the Lincoln Project.
Sure, Biden eked out a victory in Wisconsin, but our well-gerrymandered Republicans in the legislature and Congress fared better in this general election year than they did in 2018.
Besides, as far as down-ballot races were concerned, did you really think those dismayed Republican housewives, even if they broke for Biden, were going to vote a straight ticket?
I predict that the Lincoln Projectors will turn against Biden in a heartbeat come January 20. But they may not be exactly welcomed back into the Grand Old Party they forsook. Trumpsters are in charge there now, they ain't leaving, and they ain't the forgiving type.
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