Category: Partisan Politics (Page 10 of 17)

After an election, people get right down to the business of trying to influence the new administration (or they don’t). One way to do that is to claim to represent some group of voters who ‘delivered’ the election to the winner. And Joe Biden will be no exception to this trend.

Indeed, the think pieces started rolling in as soon as the networks called it for Biden. Bernie Sanders claimed progressives delivered the win, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez agreed, arguing further that moderate Democrats largely failed. Moderates in turn blamed progressives for their own failures. Many commentators argued Democrats should ‘thank a black woman,’ while some praised Stacey Abrams in particular. And so on.

What should we make of all this? Which voters won the election for Biden?

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OK, so the elections are done and Trump’s on the way out! But let’s step back a moment to evaluate. I made some election predictions last week. How did they go?

For readers: how did your election predictions work out?

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Liberals and progressives rejoiced as Barack Obama won in 2008. They preferred Obama from the start of the primaries, and he trounced John McCain in the general election. Finally, they’d get all the things they wanted: universal health insurance, card-check for unions, an end to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the closing of detention facilities in Guantanamo Bay, a full review of NAFTA and switch to fair trade policies, and an indexing of the minimum wage to inflation.

Oops. Obama, of course, got none of these things done. Some of them he even could’ve done on his own without Congress. In turn, liberals and progressives offered excuse after excuse for Obama’s shift to the right. And then they campaigned for Obama again as they declared 2012 to be the ‘most important election of our lifetimes.’

Now the same liberals and progressives say they’ll hold Joe Biden accountable if he wins. They think they can push Biden to adopt policies well to Obama’s left. Will they?

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