This is not the outcome Democrats expected.
Despite many bold predictions of a rout in which Democrats gained (or re-gained) Trumpian red territory of 2016, as of early Wednesday only one state — Arizona — had flipped from red to blue. Six states remain outstanding: Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
Assuming North Carolina and Georgia have slipped away from Biden — Georgia is not out of reach for him — and that Nevada remains blue, the best-case scenario for the former vice president is a 290-electoral vote victory. That’s more than George W. Bush achieved in his two successful campaigns (271 in 2000 and 286 in 2004), but fewer than Barack Obama (365 in 2008 and 332 in 2012) and Donald Trump (304 in 2016).
A win, of course, is a win. But if Biden is victorious, it will be under radically curtailed circumstances from what Democrats had assumed.
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Biden lost ground with Black voters and Latinos, though he gained some ground with white voters. Realignments are generally built around concrete ideas and specific policy platforms. But this campaign was always a referendum on Trump, rather than an affirmative endorsement of Biden and his agenda. That dynamic already cut against Biden claiming a strong positive mandate. He needed a crushing rejection of Trump to strengthen his case.
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Final results that fall short of a massive rejection of Trump, as seems likely, would fail to trigger the repudiation of Trumpism in the Republican Party that many Democrats — and a minority of Republicans — had hoped for. As John Harris
argues, whatever the final numbers, Trump’s appeal to half the country has proven to be durable. Even a narrow Biden victory would generate a larger debate about Trump’s harm to Republicans, but the full-scale de-Trumpification of the GOP required a landslide.
To be sure, presidents who have won narrow victories have been able to turn them into consequential presidencies. Bill Clinton, a popular vote plurality victor, passed much of his first term agenda and comfortably won reelection. Circumstances can always intervene. George W. Bush, the lowest electoral vote winner in modern history, vastly expanded executive branch powers after 9/11 on his way to reelection.
But this is not the scenario many Democrats hoped and prepared for. They wanted a landslide that ended before midnight on Election Day, one that unambiguously crushed Trump and Trumpism, swept in a Democratic Senate, and showed a large majority for the Biden agenda.
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