What Happened, Why, and What Happens Now?
Editor’s Note: For those who are interested, this is from a talk I gave for Temple Emanuel on the meaning of the election, nationally as well as in Michigan.
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Now then, let me start out by stating the obvious. The man I believe is the most flawed person and the most incompetent President in our nation’s history has been defeated.
If you think my description is exaggerated, read Bob Woodward’s new book Rage.
Forget Trump’s bluster and his lies; he has lost. There is no rational dispute about the outcome; he will most likely lose by an electoral vote of 306 to 232, which is exactly what it was four years ago, except the other way around.
By the way, the electoral vote would have been that in 2016 except for seven faithless electors who went rogue because they didn’t like either nominee – five Democrats and two Republicans. We’ve never had as many faithless electors before, and it’s not likely we will have any this time.
Incidentally, it is very important that Biden hang on to win Georgia and Arizona, as he seems to be doing, because that would mean Trump would have to mount legal challenges in multiple states, which would be much harder to do.
There are, believe it or not, still many millions of votes left to be counted, most of them in strongly Democratic states like California and New York. President-elect Biden has a lead of nearly 4.5 million votes now and an absolute majority of the popular vote. When all the returns are in, he will likely have more than 51, perhaps close to 52 percent of the overall vote and a margin of six million or so.
One other interesting point – while there has been a lot of attention paid to how old President-elect Biden is – 78 on Nov. 20 — what virtually nobody has mentioned is that he will be only the second Roman Catholic President in American history, though he didn’t get any notable Catholic support because he is pro-choice, and the church is, of course, anti-abortion.
He is a good and decent man, highly skilled and experienced, who has also caused the first woman and the first woman of color to be elected vice president.
That’s the good news, and I suspect you knew most of that. And now for the bad news — or at least news that is much less comforting to us all. Donald Trump came close to winning this election. This is a man who has horribly mismanaged the worst pandemic in more than a century, killing, the experts say, at least a hundred thousand more Americans than needed to die.
This is a man who clearly has no idea how government works and no empathy for his fellow human beings. He is a sexist and a bigot and makes no attempt to hide any of that. He has given aid and comfort to racists and white supremacists.
He has upset our allies, sucked up to dictators and our enemies and ruined our reputation abroad.
None of that is secret. And yet – more than 71 million people voted for him. Joe Biden got less than 40 percent of the vote and almost no white votes in Mississippi and Alabama and Louisiana.
In some states like West Virginia and Wyoming and Oklahoma Trump got close to 70 percent of the vote, unchanged from four years ago.
In Michigan, he got nearly 400,000 more votes than he did four years ago, and the counties that had the highest increase in turnout were solid Trump counties.
Nationwide, he will probably get more than ten million more popular votes than he did in 2016.
He won Florida by three times as much as he did against Hillary Clinton, mainly because he did much better with Hispanic voters. Perhaps most shocking of all, he did better with black voters nationwide and black voters in Detroit than he did last time. He didn’t get a lot of votes there …
But he got almost twice as many as he did four years ago, while Biden got fewer than Hillary Clinton did. This, despite Kamala Harris campaigning the day before the election in Detroit and Southfield.
Joe Biden was saved …. I almost said we were saved, but, let’s face it, the nation was saved, by affluent college educated voters, white women and in Michigan, Oakland County. Hillary Clinton won Oakland by 53,000, about the same as Obama had.
Biden won it by almost 110,000. He did better in little prosperous towns like Traverse City and Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids. In Charlevoix, which is very Republican but with an educated class of retirees, Trump’s margin fell from 63 percent four years ago to 58 percent.
When all was said and done, that meant Biden won Michigan by about 148,000 votes, or 51 to 48 percent. Four years ago, of course, Trump won the state by 10,704, the closest Michigan result since Wendell Willkie won it in 1940.
Michigan turnout was a record high last week – the unofficial total was 5,563, 279, about 700,000 more than last time. Still, Biden did far worse in Michigan than Obama or Clinton or Gore or even John Kerry. He won only 11 of Michigan’s 83 counties, though better than Hillary’s eight.
And below the Presidential race, it was NOT a good year for Democrats. U.S. Senator Gary Peters did manage to win a second term against John James, who has been described as a charismatic empty suit.
Why did that happen? James had been campaigning for years – remember, he took on Debbie Stabenow in 2018. Peters was an uncharismatic work horse, not a show horse.
Still, Peters managed to win, though he only carried seven counties; he won statewide by about 86,000, almost exactly his margin in Oakland County. This continued Republican frustration in US Senate races in Michigan. Democrats have now won 14 out of the last 15 contests.
Michigan Democrats also managed to keep their seven seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, though both freshmen Elissa Slotkin and Haley Stevens had a scare.
By the way, it’s very likely that this will be the last term for one of them, because Michigan is going to lose another seat in Congress in 2022, after redistricting. That will make six seats and a lot of political clout we’ve lost since 1980, because other areas of the country have grown faster.
As a matter of fact, in nearly every case, Democratic candidates for Congress did less well last week than they did in 2018 – it usually works the other way around in presidential years, with Democrats doing better .
Democrats also really hoped to gain control of the Michigan House of Representatives, or at least a tie. They started out behind 58 to 52, and ended up ….behind 58 to 52.
No gain whatsoever.
Nationally, Democrats did even worse. it was the much the same. Democrats and Republicans alike predicted that Democrats would win control of the US Senate; the only question was by how much. Guess what – they didn’t.
They seem likely to gain just one seat. They started out at 53 to 47, and look likely to end up behind 52 to 48.
They defeated Republican incumbents in Arizona and Colorado, while Democrat Doug Jones as expected lost his seat in Alabama. Democrats were widely expected to knock off Susan Collins in Maine, Thom Tillis in North Carolina, maybe Jodi Ernst in Iowa – they lost all those seats.
A candidate named Jaime Harrison raised and spent an obscene amount of money – $43 million – to try and knock off Lindsay Graham in South Carolina.
He didn’t come close. Money can’t always buy an election. Amy McGrath raised millions to try to beat Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. She got 38 percent of the vote.
Now, there are going to be two runoff elections in Georgia in January, and there is a mathematical chance Democrats could win both. If they did, they would have a 50-50 tie.
That means Democrats could control the Senate since Vice President Harris could break any ties.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that it almost certainly isn’t going to happen. Democrats usually lose runoffs because their voters don’t show up for a second election.
U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana found herself in a runoff for a third term in 2014. She had finished first, but didn’t have a majority. Democrats poured millions into that race and sent Bill Clinton to campaign for her — and she lost 56-44.
I’m afraid we’ll see that again this time.
By the way, most models predicted that Democrats would add between 8 and 15 seats to their majority in the House of Representatives, which was 234 to 201.
Instead, they lost seats. As of now, they’ve lost a net total of five with 19 seats yet undecided.
Democrats also didn’t win majorities in any new state legislative chambers , which is important because next year will be a redistricting year for Congressional and legislative seats everywhere, once the census results are known and received in state capitals. In fact, Democrats lost the New Hampshire state senate and the Alaska House, so that doesn’t help.
So, on January 21, we seem likely to have a Democratic president, a narrowly Democratic House, and a Republican U.S. Senate. Guess how many federal judges Biden is likely to get confirmed. That’s right. Pretty close to zero.
The question is, what will President Joe Biden be able to do? What will his first priority be?
Well, the answer to both those questions are the same – deal with the pandemic, which is our biggest issue right now – the President-elect said as much last night.
He believes in science and will be able to put in place more rational policies, and I think the odds are that the number of cases and deaths will begin to decrease.
Biden has a strong foreign policy background, and it probably the best President we could have to try to repair some of the damage Trump did to our standing in the world.
We are also hearing that he is already preparing a flurry of executive orders to try to undo some of the crazy things Trump did. Beyond that, however, are uncharted waters.
Biden will be presiding over some of the most staggering federal government budget deficits in history. Those will continue to grow. We don’t know, or at least I don’t, how much money we can borrow, or at what point this will lead to inflation. But given the effects of COVID, it is almost inevitable.
Finally, every election is followed by another. What about politics in the future? Well, in Michigan, the next year is going to be all about redistricting. You know, for the first time ever, congressional and legislative boundaries will be set by a new multipartisan citizens commission, which should eliminate gerrymandering and give Democrats more of an advantage for 2022 – except voters tend to vote against the party in the White House in off-year elections.
By the way, Democrats will have another chance to take the U.S. Senate in 2022, when there will again be 22 Republicans up and only 12 Democrats.
As for 2024 –who can say – except that I think it is entirely possible that Trump may try to run again, if he is alive, and that he may well be nominated, if Republicans are again split.
We simply don’t know the future of Trump or of the tens of millions of Trump voters, except that neither of them are likely to go quietly! What I do know is that the next four years will say a lot about who we are as a nation.
Let me close my formal remarks with a couple little historical observations: It was four years ago today that Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, signaling both the beginning of our long national nightmare and — perhaps even worse–– signaling that we weren’t the nation we thought we were.
Sixty years ago today, John F. Kennedy beat Richard Nixon in one of the closest races in our history, a race that was almost an exact tie in the popular vote.
There was no state that year in which either man beat his opponent 2 to 1, and only five where one candidate or the other got 60 percent of the vote.
Today, most states are heavily polarized. Joe Biden got only 26 percent in Wyoming. Donald Trump got only 31 percent in Massachusetts – Biden did far better than John F. Kennedy did in JFK’s home state.
Biden will probably win California, once a Republican state in the days of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, by five million votes. In West Virginia, once one of the most Democratic states in the nation, Joe Biden got less than 30 percent – which was still a little better than Hillary Clinton had done.
We are two divided nations indeed, to a degree that is dangerous. We have to hope that somehow, the oldest president in our history and the most multicultural and first female vice president ever can heal them.
Thank you.
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