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At the state level, Democrats faired no better, failing to capture a single state legislative chamber. Republicans flipped the New Hampshire Senate and House, and the Alaska state House. Republican Greg Gianforte also captured the Montana governorship.
Joe Biden will enter the Oval Office perhaps the weakest Democratic president since 1884, with only one House of Congress.
Is it any wonder that voters seem dubious about the Democratic party? Pelosi’s pre-election Covid relief hardball tactics will surely come under intense scrutiny. She seemed to think the country would pin the entire failure on Trump and ignoring her salon sessions and her fridge stocked with $13 pints of ice cream.
Trump’s gains within minority communities, especially Hispanics in Texas, threaten an entire coalition the Democrats have spent years decades developing. Trump and the Republicans also made historic gains with African Americans and even the Muslim community, carrying 35 per cent of the vote according to AP’s VoteCast survey.
As the weeks and months pass, Democrats will agonise over their collapse and ask why it happened. The main reason for the Democratic failure to regain the Senate is that their platform tilted toward the far left and away from legislative reality. Court packing was willed into the national spotlight by Democratic activists, as was abolishing police departments. Rep. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia lamented on a conference call Wednesday that defunding the police almost cost her the race. The fact that Joe Biden worked to either avoid answering these questions or distance himself from them seems to have paid off in ways that embracing them did not for members of his party.
Trump might be vanquished, but there are far more questions facing the direction of the Democratic party as they face a legislative agenda that’s already DOA in Mitch McConnell’s Senate. There will have to be a serious reckoning on whether or not to double down on the intersectional social justice ambitions of the young activist base, or distance themselves from a media obsessed with promoting them and the their fringe ideas. Can a 77-year-old President Biden rein those aspects of the party in?
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