Four years of lies and divisiveness, a mass death event of Americans, under a president who has not had a positive approval rating since two weeks into his term, sounds like an election race that should be a runaway for the challenging side. Instead, millions of nail-biting Americans wait days for results that come down to microscopic margins.
While Donald Trump remains affable with white supremacist groups, explicitly calls various ethnicities and countries insulting names and his management of the pandemic has disproportionately affected people of color, he has also won the highest support of any Republican candidate in 60 years among them. According to political strategist Adrian Gray, even without the full results of the election, 26 percent of nonwhite voters went red this year.
In fact, according to Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project, exit polls show that Trump has done better than in 2016 with every race and gender except for white men. One possible reason why this seemingly bizarre statistic happened is that the opposition is simply so unappealing that Americans choose to stay with the status quo, no matter how unhappy it may be.
Looking at the results, this seems to have quite a bit of merit. There was no “blue wave” in retaliation to Trump’s presidency. Key battleground states such as Florida and Ohio remained red. Hopeful senate seats Democrats had a shot at went to the incumbents, as in Iowa and North Carolina. While the wave sounded logical, the Democratic Party barely managed to garner even a moral referendum on the current state of America. While 52.7 percent of Americans disapprove of the President, Biden has so far only won 50.2 percent of the popular vote.
Much of the problem is that the Democratic platform did not appeal to the issues Americans currently care the most about, or to many clear issues at all. Mostly, they focused on the immediate address of the pandemic and affordable health care. Even these main issues are difficult to extract, as generally messages are mixed or ambiguous across the Democratic Party.
It may be mind blowing, but Americans simply don’t care very much about the coronavirus. FiveThirtyEight polls show that only 32.7 percent of Americans are “very” concerned about being infected. Meanwhile, what 52.9 percent are actually very concerned about are the economic impacts from the pandemic. What Trump says about the economy, that he is doing very well with it and he will continue to, whether or not true, seems to at least assuage anxious Americans out of jobs or losing business. Biden’s campaign should have focused more directly on an explicit plan to calm voters’ fears on this topic.
On issues such as affordable health care, a higher minimum wage, banning fracking or defunding the police, Democrats’ diverse opinions bite them from behind. Biden’s own message on health care has been very moderate and not targeted toward either economic conservatives who want to energize private insurance markets, nor progressives who want universal health care from the government. The disparities allow conservative opponents to paint a straw-man picture of any of these policies, because while Biden himself may not support more radical ideas, other members of his own party do. The ease of launching these attacks leads to Biden having to spend a lot of time denouncing views of some in his own party, rather than offensively poking holes in Trump’s plans, or lack of. The moderate ambiguity of it all ends up both turning off conservatives who don’t agree with the general ideas as well as progressives whose ideas are refuted explicitly by Biden.
Another great issue with the Democratic strategy was overlooking the need to appeal to minority voters. In my own experience, I often hear Democrats saying, “How could any member of a minority group vote for Trump? That would never happen!” It initially doesn’t make sense because of Trump’s racism and apathy toward issues that hurt people of color or members of the LGBTQ community, for example, but as mentioned in the beginning, his support in minority groups has increased since 2016. The mentality that minorities inherently will vote blue is fatal.
Despite the common notion to not treat any group as a monolith, this is what the Democratic Party has continued to do, especially evident with Hispanic voters this election. There are so many distinct national, political and cultural origins of Latinos in the United States, and many traditionally align with socially conservative values to begin with. Instead of reaching out and trying to gain more support among Hispanic voters by addressing what issues they care about, Biden’s campaign allowed Trump’s to do that first, by painting Democrats as communists and promoting lower taxes.
Ultimately, the Democratic Party not only failed to capitalize on dissatisfaction with the pandemic, Trump’s character and his handling of other current issues, but also fell somewhat short on providing an attractive alternative to Trump at all. What America needed was a charismatic candidate willing to address what Americans are actually passionate about, with explicit policies and plans prepared. Running on Biden being the moderate, just-not-Trump option, may not have been enough to ensure a blue wave.
No matter who ends up winning the presidential election, if the Senate flips or if the House stays blue, the Democrats have to acknowledge their failures and reevaluate their strategies. There has to be some sort of unity in the party, with tangible solutions and attention paid to the people. Otherwise, America will continue to slip further away from progress and into the abyss of far-right politics.
Photo courtesy of Harlequeen/Flickr
