Despite Trump and his supporters’ continued insistence that he has not lost the presidential election, it is clear that there is no legal path for Trump to win and we now have a President-elect Biden. This is no decisive victory for Democrats however; they lost seats in the House and are gearing up for a fierce fight over which party will control the Senate once Biden takes office.
Moving past the seemingly never ending 2020 election, I’ve been looking into my crystal ball to predict the future of the three major political parties. I have given my thoughts on what the future of the GOP will look like and I will give my predictions for the LP soon.
Like I did in my post on the future of the GOP I will give a big caveat; the results of the Georgia Senate race will make an impact on the Democratic party going forward, however the stakes aren’t quite as high for them as they are for Republicans. Even if the worst case scenario for Democrats happens - that both of the Georgia Senate seats go to Republicans - it would be bad but not catastrophic. If Republicans gain both Georgia seats the Senate will stand at 50 -50 with Vice-President Harris as the tiebreaker vote. After Georgia flipping for Biden losing both seats would certainly be embarrassing and should be a gut check for the Democratic party but it is not a do or die situation like it is for Republicans.
As I have already written, this election was not a good one for the progressive wing of the Democratic party and they know it. There is mounting evidence that the progressive message of defunding the police and their embrace of socialism cost down ballot candidates votes and cost Biden a win in Florida. Instead of taking time for reflection Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doubled down, blaming the unexpected poor performance of Democrats on their refusal to fully embrace progressivism. Oddly enough she calls out Conor Lamb, a centrist Democrat who won an uncontested re-election this year, for not spending enough on online advertising. Her argument is that if a candidate didn’t pitch to the Very Online Progressives then their loss was on them, not on the overall image the Democratic party has currently.
I understand what Ocasio-Cortez is doing and it’s not a dumb move for her or the progressive wing of the party. To spin disappointing election results to try to bolster the case that if more of your party agreed with your wing’s views they would not have lost is hardly a new strategy. To explain what happened I’ll use the same split ticket argument I used to explain Trump’s loss; voters haven’t abandoned the Democratic party but they have made it known they don’t like the progressive wing of the party and do not want them to have power.
The Democratic party is in the middle of an identity crisis, one precipitated by spending eight years of centering Obama as a savior and four years of centering Trump as a demon. Basing the identity of your political party around one man is a fool’s errand - our electoral system ensures that one day that man will no longer be President. Trump’s surprise 2016 win allowed the Democratic party to avoid the hard work of deciding who they want to be post-Obama by allowing them to simply be anti-Trump. With Trump gone, the real fight for the future of the Democratic party will start.
My prediction, and the thing I am most hopeful for, is that a Biden presidency makes room for the Blue Dog wing to re-emerge in the Democratic party. For those of you too young or new enough to politics to not know, the Blue Dogs are a center left fiscally conservative branch of the Democratic party that has been all but extinct since 2012. Judging from Biden’s potential Cabinet picks, his transition team, and his statements about beating the progressive wing of the party, I think that a strong centrist movement could find its legs again.
Obviously the progressive wing is not going to disappear once Biden becomes President. That’s not a bad thing; political parties should have differing factions versus having a whole party in lockstep behind one person. It is good and healthy for a party to have friction within it, so long as that friction leads to meaningful policy conversations and a check on one wing of the party becoming too powerful. How this power struggle will play out remains to be seen but it’s a good sign that there will be space for it to take place.
From a libertarian perspective, the rebuke of progressive policy from both Democratic primary voters and general election voters is good news. As much as progressives do not want to face it, voters have rejected them on a nationwide scale. That a Biden administration is not planning to incorporate them into positions of power, especially in Treasury and Labor, is better still. Despite the gloom and doom scenarios posed by some libertarians about how a Biden presidency will go down, I think things will not be as bad as advertised.
That’s not to say there won’t be plenty for us to fight against and we should remain vigilant in holding a Biden administration to account. I’m predicting that the fight for Section 230 will be fierce and we’ll not have much help from Republicans, likewise on the economic nationalism front. It could have been much worse though and I’m glad that at least for now it isn’t.