34 United States The EconomistNovember 14th 2020
B
esides donald trump, the election’s big loser was the Demo-
cratic Party. Having been predicted to win a governing trifecta,
it retained its House majority with around six fewer seats, won the
White House by a nerve-jangling margin and has probably fallen
short in the Senate. Joe Biden can expect to sign little legislation as
a result. He may be constrained in his cabinet appointments. If he
nominated as attorney-general Stacey Abrams, the hero of his
probable win in Georgia and a hate figure on the right, for example,
Mitch McConnell might give her the Merrick Garland treatment.
Unlike the president, Mr Biden’s party is already reckoning
with its failure. Bruised members of the centre-left—a faction that
includes almost all the party’s candidates in the battleground
states—blame the activist left for making them seem radical and
untrustworthy. The left, in particular its 31-year-old standard-
bearer, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is hitting back.
A leaked record of a meeting between House Democrats last
week—before Mr Biden’s victory had been called—included angry
exchanges between the two groups, which have continued on so-
cial media and in the pages of the New York Times. Abigail Span-
berger, a narrowly re-elected Virginian moderate, warned that the
party must resolve among other things “to not ever use the word
socialist or socialism again”. Ms Ocasio-Cortez, a proud democrat-
ic socialist, responded by suggesting the centre-left losers didn’t
understand how to campaign on social media (unlike her, presum-
ably, with her 10m Twitter followers). Moderates were outraged.
Understandably so. The Democratic losses were in spite of a
huge cash advantage and against a Republican opponent that over
the past four years appeared to have given up on governing. The
Trump party passed no major law besides a tax cut. It has no
health-care policy. Yet Democratic candidates ran behind Mr Bi-
den almost everywhere. And there are signs—beyond what Ms
Spanberger and other battleground Democrats heard from their
constituents every day—that the party’s perceived “radical left-
ism” was a big reason why. The Democrats lost most ground with
two groups that have a special loathing of socialism, Cuban-Amer-
icans and Venezuelans. Their shift to the Republicans cost the
Democrats two House seats in Florida and Mr Biden the state.
Ms Ocasio-Cortez says this is wrong because it is unfair. NoDemocratranonsocialism, “defund the police” or other leftist slo-
gans, she notes. Any damaging impression to the contrary was
confabulated by right-wing attack ads—which Democrats should
therefore do more to counteract. Point by point, she is right. But as
a proposed solution to the Democrats’ problems, it suggests that
“aoc”, who won her own district in Queens by a comfortable 38
points, has little conception of how hostile the battlegrounds have
become for Democrats.
That chiefly reflects the imbalances in the electoral system,
which mean that Democrats, the most popular party, need to filch
votes from the other side in a way that less-popular Republicans
need not. Democrats’ inflated—as it turned out—hope for this
election was to ride an anti-Trump wave big enough to compensate
for the over-representation of rural, conservative voters in the
Senate and electoral college that is the cause of the imbalance.
Some hoped the president’s unpopularity might even give them a
big enough Senate majority to reform it. Instead, the Republicans’
structural advantage appears to have grown so large as to have
dashed even the Democrats’ more modest expectation of power.
Mr Biden is on course to win the election by more than 5m
votes, but the presidency by less than 100,000 across a handful of
increasingly conservative states. Wisconsin—the indispensable
last component in his electoral-college majority, which he won by
a whisker—is more than three points more Republican than the
country at large. That is a measure of Mr Biden’s achievement; it
may also suggest how unrealistic it was for Democrats to have
counted on adding Senate seats in even more conservative states.
If all the battlegrounds continued on their current electoral tra-
jectory, North Carolina and Texas, where they had such hopes,
might not turn Democratic until after the ageing, white rustbelt
has become so reliably Republican that Democrats will have lost
their five Senate seats there. Having approached the election hop-
ing to win sufficient power to reform the system, Democrats are
now contemplating a bleak struggle to stay competitive in it.
The early Democratic feuding is mainly a response to the grim-
ness of that prospect. Ms Ocasio-Cortez makes herself an easy tar-
get for the aggrieved centre-left. Her claim that Democrats mainly
need a better Facebook strategy is as dilettantish as the “defund the
police” insanity she signally failed to disavow. The election also
suggests the left’s bigger idea to change the political tide, by wean-
ing working-class voters off right-wing identity politics with pop-
ulist economic policies, may be no more feasible. An electorate
that has embraced Mr Biden personally but rejected his agenda as
too radical seems unlikely to warm to the left’s actual radicalism.
Yet that was already off the menu, following Mr Biden’s thumping
win in the Democratic primaries. The dejection of battle-hardened
moderates such as Ms Spanberger chiefly reflects the overthrow of
their more promising effort to break the partisan deadlock.Change the record
If the left dreams of moving America with the power of its ideas,
the centre-left places its hope in compiling a solid governing re-
cord. The evidence of previous bouts of populism suggests there is
no better way to re-establish the centre. It is also a bolder approach
than the Sandernistas allow. The Democrats’ historic weakness,
devastatingly exploited by the Tea Party movement, is its reputa-
tion for defending bad government against small government. The
centre-left’s commendably daunting ambition is to compile a rep-
utation for modern, effective government. But to do that, it must
have power. And Mr McConnell is likely to give it none. 7Lexington A Democratic defeat in victory
If Joe Biden’s party cannot wrest power from the Republicans now, when ever will it?