Wall Street Journal article about Fucktard Biden

Wall Street Journal

OPINION

REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Joe Biden’s Non-Mandate

He may win the White House, but his party and progressive ideas lost.

By the Editorial Board

November 5, 2020

As the votes continue to be counted in swing states, Joe Biden has the best chance to become the next President. But the closer we inspect the nationwide election returns, the more the result looks like a defeat for the rest of his Democratic Party and especially for the progressive agenda. Mr. Biden would take office without a mandate beyond addressing Covid-19 and not being Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Biden will win the popular vote, and he may eke out a narrow win in the Electoral College. In essence he’ll have reversed Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016 with hair’s-breadth advantages in Wisconsin and Michigan, and perhaps Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona. None of them will be by large margins. He will have vanquished an incumbent President, which is no easy task.

But look down the ballot, or across the country, and Mr. Biden’s potential victory looks remarkably limited and personal. Most new Presidents enter office having swept allies into Congress and statehouses as the public embraces his agenda and vision for America. Certainly this was true of Barack Obama in 2008 and to a lesser extent Mr. Trump in 2016. Mr. Biden had no such coattails.

Democrats lost seats in the House, giving up some of the suburban gains they made in 2018 while continuing to struggle in rural areas. The full results won’t be in for weeks, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi may find her majority cut in half or more to the smallest in 20 years.

Senate control may be determined by a Jan. 5 runoff for two seats in Georgia. But the GOP already looks to have won 50 seats to 48 for Democrats, who had expected to ride public dislike for Mr. Trump into the majority. A GOP Senate may compromise with Mr. Biden around centrist ideas, but the aggressive House agenda of the last two years would die again.

This result is all the more remarkable given that Democrats had nearly all of the media, Silicon Valley billionaires, and all of the leading cultural figures and institutions helping them. Even the Chamber of Commerce paid protection money. Democrats raised unheard of sums close to $100 million for some Senate races, outspending Republicans by two or three to one. They still could oust only two incumbents and lost one of their own.

The lack of coattails was also evident in the states, where Democrats spent heavily to flip legislatures. Former Attorney General Eric Holder made this his personal project with a goal of dominating the fight over Congressional redistricting next year after the final Census count. He flopped. The GOP flipped both legislative bodies in New Hampshire, despite Mr. Trump’s loss in the Granite State, and Republicans protected their advantage nearly everywhere else. (See more details nearby.)

There was no blue wave, and certainly no mandate for progressive change. If anything, the fevered Democratic and media anticipation of a “transformational” election drove more voters to turn out to stop it. When Mr. Trump finally focused on the economy and progressive agenda in the last weeks of the campaign, his support rose and lifted Republicans in some places as well.

Meanwhile, Mr. Biden’s campaign platform boiled down to he’s not Donald Trump, he’ll do a better job fighting Covid-19, and he won’t take away your health care. His TV ads were largely biographical, contrasting his character to Mr. Trump’s.

Mr. Biden barely mentioned the agenda his aides developed with Bernie Sanders, and the press barely asked him about it. When the former Vice President did finally admit in the last debate that he wanted to “transition” the economy from fossil fuels, his campaign had him scramble to explain it away.

Mr. Biden does have a mandate to defeat Covid-19, rolling out the vaccines already in the pipeline and setting an example by wearing his mask. He has a mandate not to tweet, not to call the press “the enemy of the people,” and not to make himself the center of attention all the time. He also has a mandate to work across the aisle with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

This could be liberating for Mr. Biden, giving him leverage over a diminished Mrs. Pelosi and the Sanders-Elizabeth Warren wing of the Senate Democratic caucus. But he would have to risk upsetting the political left who supported him in hopes that he is the Trojan Horse whose personal contrast with Mr. Trump would usher in a new progressive majority.

Instead, in their considerable wisdom, the voters may have elected Mr. Biden but they left his party and its radical ideas behind.

Appeared in the November 6, 2020, print edition.