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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Polls showed Joe Biden in the lead over Donald Trump from start to finish. And then he won bigly. In fact, they showed just about anyone the Democrats might nominate defeating Trump. Therefore, we might conclude that no surprises occurred. Everyone expected Biden to beat Trump, and he did*. A tidy election.
As it turns out, not exactly. For one, that’s not quite a valid argument. Perhaps more relevant to readers’ purposes, its conclusion is also false. But we’re not here to nitpick at logic. The point is that plenty of people expected Trump to win. Mostly liberals and left-leaners concerned about a second Trump term and prone to fret about electoral fraud. But the sentiment took in many analysts and pundits, too.
So why did that happen? And why did Biden win, anyway?
The short answer: Trump blew it. Bigly.
Welcome to another edition of our election predictions! People get riled up about most elections, but Trump especially worked people up in 2020.
Will Trump win? What will happen in Iowa? What’s going to happen after the election? Let’s investigate.
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?
Joe Biden’s supporters point to his winning strategy: attracting older voters and moderates to the Democratic Party while trying to minimize losses among younger voters who often don’t vote anyway. Biden mostly ignores higher-income progressives, who don’t have anywhere else to turn and will therefore stay in line and vote a straight Democratic ticket.
And it’s working rather nicely for Biden. He’s way ahead in the polls and will likely defeat Trump handily. But I think a closer look at the evidence shows two ways to beat Trump. Biden took one path.
I’m more interested in the other.
