Joe Biden defeated Trump to the presidency, and is on pace to win up to 306 electoral votes, a total that would match what Trump exaggerated as a “landslide” four years ago.
In a typical election year, such a victory would mean Biden would have carried other Democrats along with him. Instead, several promising Democratic Senate and House candidates, including incumbents, lost.
For Trump, the situation was the opposite. His popularity among his base voters helped protect incumbent Republicans but was not enough to save him. He won more votes for president than any other candidate.
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The election did little to suggest that the country was suddenly less polarized. Trump wrung out votes from areas where he already had a core of support, in rural and small-town America. Biden did the same, only more, in urban and suburban America while also holding down Trump margins in some rural areas. The outcome didn’t change the fact that much of the country is still speaking two different political languages.
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“This defied everyone’s expectations. Everyone said if Joe Biden wins, Democrats win the Senate. If Trump wins, Republicans win the Senate," said Rahm Emanuel, the former mayor of Chicago and chief of staff to President Barack Obama. "That’s not what happened. Clearly there was an undertow.
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“Life is not binary," Emanuel said. "It’s more complicated. Florida, a state that voted for Trump, voted for the minimum wage. Illinois, a state that voted for Biden, voted down a progressive income tax. California, cobalt blue, voted against affirmative action in the place of employment.”
Emanuel claimed that Democrats may have erred in not offering clearer plans about how they would rebuild the economy while also gaining control over the virus and in not batting back Republican efforts to label them socialists.
“It’s clear there was more voter frustration with Trump than with the ideology of the Republican Party,” said Mike Murphy, a strategist to several Republican presidential campaigns who broke with his party over Trump. “Clearly the presidential race was operating in its own world from the congressional race.”
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“Trump lifted Republican candidates by vastly boosting turnout in areas of Republican strength," said David Axelrod, former senior adviser Obama. "In the states and districts that favor Republicans, they ran up the score.”
Not a single president in recent memory had maintained such iron-grip allegiance from his own party as Trump, with only a handful of Republicans in Congress ever willing to cross him, fearing that they were always one presidential tweet away from a primary challenge.
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Some voters liked Trump's tough talk on trade and getting other nations to pay more for common defense. They gave him credit for an economy that was buoyant before the pandemic struck. Still, there was a collective limit to how much more of Trump’s always-in-your-face presidency they were willing to take.
Not enough, though, to deliver Biden a majority in the Senate, at least not until the outcome of two runoff elections in Georgia in January.
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