Timothy D. Easley/AP Photo
Yes, thank you, Mitch McConnell.
So much for the polls.
As I write, with millions of voters from the Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Detroit metro areas still out, and who knows how many mail ballots yet uncounted, Joe Biden can still win the presidency. In fact, with a dump of votes in Milwaukee giving Biden the lead in Wisconsin, it may be a more-likely-than-not bet. Even if he does, however, Mitch McConnell is still likely to be master of the Senate. Unless Susan Collins falls victim to Maine’s ranked-choice voting system and Democrats win at least one improbable victory in Georgia’s January Senate runoffs, their party will probably fall one vote short of a Senate majority. I suppose that makes it likelier that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can defeat a damaged Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer in the 2022 New York Democratic Senate primary, but much as I love AOC, I’d prefer it if Schumer became majority leader in January and the Democrats were able to pass legislation. At best, it will be Lisa Murkowski’s Senate—the Alaska senator being the only Republican member who might ever so infrequently vote with the Democrats. It’s not even clear that McConnell would permit the Senate to approve any Biden judicial appointments.
McConnell will not even be the main obstacle to Republicans occasionally voting with Democrats. At 2:30 this morning, Trump declared victory and said he’d go to court—to the Supreme Court, somehow—to stop any further vote-counting (except in Arizona, where he believes he can still come from behind as the counting continues … I guess Trump’s invoking the “except in Arizona” judicial doctrine). To continue the counting, he said, would be to steal the election. While even the Fox News election night anchors and reporters noted that his claims were legally baseless and perhaps even morally questionable, we have yet to hear from Hannity and his ilk, who will doubtless join Trump in instructing the Republican base that a Biden victory would be completely illegitimate. Given those circumstances, any Republican senator who sides with the Democrats on a vote would surely be read out of the party and Western civilization by Fox and its friends.
It’s too early for a definitive postmortem on what just happened, but the national exit poll offers some hints. Nearly a third of both Latinos and Asians—32 percent of the former and 31 percent of the latter—voted for Trump, as did 12 percent of Blacks and 57 percent of whites. What’s interesting here is the gaps between various subgroups of the races. Overall, women were 8 percent more likely to vote for Biden than men (56 percent to 48 percent). The gap between white women and white men, however, was only 3 percentage points. Between Latino women and men, that gap rose to 9 points, and between Black women and men, it stood at 11 points.
The gap between white college graduates and white non-graduates is one of the largest in the exit polls: Those with degrees voted for Biden at a rate 15 points higher than those without. Among people of color, however, there was virtually no gap at all: College grads voted for Biden at a rate only one point higher than non-grads. Which, I’d suggest, could mean that educational attainment doesn’t magically transform the worldviews of minorities in a nation ruled by whites. Race-based challenges to minorities in what the election revealed to still be a substantially Trumpian nation persist, degree or not.
Union membership made a difference, but not a great one. Voters from families with union members gave Biden 57 percent of their votes; voters with no such union members under their roofs gave Biden 51 percent. No doubt that 57 percent support was higher among Black and Latino union members and lower among white members, but the exit pollsters seldom break down union members by race or gender.
But the numbers from this year’s election, even should Biden prevail, are depressing as hell. Trump may yet be defeated, but not by a margin that signals a national repudiation of this rancid demagogue and the white nationalism he promotes and which cements his link to his base. The rifts in this nation will only grow wider, at least until millennials and Gen Zers come to dominate the electorate.
“All right, we are two nations,” John Dos Passos wrote in his USA trilogy. At least since 1865, never more than now.
