Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.
Let’s talk about mandates. Julia has written about how real mandates are a bit of a myth, but doesn’t Biden have two sorta obvious and thankless mandates?
- Get the novel coronavirus pandemic under control.
- Help get the economy back on track (to the extent that presidents have any influence on the economy).
Biden’s explicitly thanking the Black community seems pretty significant to me. Obama was always caught in a bind when it came to talking about the Black community’s support — it was almost that he didn’t want to remind people too much of the historic nature of his presidency. He wanted to be president to all people. Biden, as an older white man, is perversely, given more latitude to talk about race.
Dan, I think we’re moving past the point of red states and blue states when the even more consequential divide is between rural America and urban America. And rural America is becoming even more red, and urban America is becoming even more blue. It will make it even harder for Republicans in Congress to have any room to work with Democrats, given who they represent and the kinds of primary challenges they’d face if they started being more bipartisan.