POTUS/General Election Thread 2020 + Aftermath

[Montmorency]

My view is that the his siphoning off Republican votes that were variations of never-Trumpers and center-right voters gave him that edge. The ability of Trump to paint all Democrats as socialist/communist anarchists despite it being false was a way to motive his base. The more progressive wing of the Democratic party was of course not a big fan of Biden and would have preferred Warren or Sanders but thankfully turned out well as more of an anti-Trump vote than pro-Biden. Would Warren or Sanders have done better than Biden? It's possible but I honestly think that fewer Republicans would have voted for the Democratic ticket if either of them had the top billet, though we'll never know.

My support for Ranked Choice isn't with the illusion that it would result in large multi party systems like in continental Europe. I live in Hawaii and voting for anything other than Democrat is pretty much a protest vote beyond our county councilmembers and district representatives. I see it as more that it would allow for a third party option to not be a throw-away vote. I know plenty of people that prefer the Green Party or Libertarian policies and would like to vote for those but know that it's really just a throw away vote. Looking at the swing states that decided the election Jo Jorgensen seemed to have consistently gotten 1-1.5% of the vote which is about the margin that won it for Biden. If those voters could have had a second choice who knows how the election would have gone, perhaps it would have been solidly pro Trump or pro Biden. Ross Perot's run in 1992 is argued as one of the reasons Bush Sr lost and Clinton won.
Additionally there'd be more people that wouldn't mind voting for those third party options which would make them more viable and acceptable. If people could have a first choice candidate that might actually represent their ideals and then the compromise centrist candidate it is possible we'd get more voter turn out. I don't think this would make much of a difference for the POTOS position as it would likely remain R or D for the future but in the House and Senate and local legislatures third party options would be viable and possibly lead to no parties having a clear majority in the legislatures and having to form coalitions with all those ups and downs we see in Europe. Either way it'd likely stop the current trend of take power and dictate.

I don't like counterfactuals, so I would frame it as: By now we should acknowledge that from the beginning of the year Biden had the strongest case for being a successful party leader. I am not of the opinion that simply making an open, detailed, and passionate case on policy merits to the American public is sufficient to "win" votes. We know that it's perfectly possible for someone to want a $20 minimum wage and universal healthcare while hating Democrats. Status grievance is determinative. Although, again, it will take a year to do a proper post-mortem; exit polling suggests, contrary to so many expectations set by pre-election polling, that WHITE MEN swung hard toward Biden while other demographics either kept static or moved marginally toward Trump. We need to figure out what the best facts of the matter are.

I support ranked choice btw, or more precisely ranked pairs. I don't know about Libertarian voters deciding anything (except maybe Georgia or Arizona, and almost certainly the Ossof-Perdue runoff ramp), because in this election they constituted only 1% of the national vote. That is to say, as expected the third party vote share collapsed to its usual level in high-salience elections, meaning that most of the people voting Libertarian now are not poached Republicans but the hard core of the third party vote. On the other hand, I'm perfectly fine with the Republican Party going to war with the Libertarians.

A more important factor than third party voters this election (and they're not typically impactful) was, as I mentioned earlier, the Undecided vote share that split a little more evenly in 2016 going almost entirely to Trump/Republicans in this election. (Speaking of Clinton and Perot, the work I'm familiar with has indicated that Perot voters were about evenly-split in their secondary preferences).

Tangentially, if there's ever going to be an electoral structure for third parties in this country, they have to stop being joke organizations that seemingly only exist to grift followers or troll/hinder the major parties. At least, say, the Working Families party has some local existence in the Northeast, in contrast to the Greens or Libertarians.

Either way it'd likely stop the current trend of take power and dictate.

One thing I will push back against is the idea that even more gridlock in Congress would somehow produce compromise and good governance. It never has in history; meanwhile our backlog of crippling problems is just accumulating. I believe this country would have a clarifying experience, and be much better off, with a cycle under each party of total majoritarian control. Well, not under Republicans, simply because there is a serious chance of them implementing a single-party dictatorship. But if that impulse could be contained I would relish the opportunity for, say, a Democratic government to implement Medicare for All, only for a subsequent Republican government to abolish it and Social Security.

Because I believe such a rampage would permanently exhaust the Republican Party and finally end the interregnum before the birth of a new progressive age.

Again, in theory. Republicans can no longer be counted on to peacefully transfer power so that's kind of a dealbreaker. Ultimately this halfway-accelerationist argument for majoritarianism is not the actual case for majoritarianism, I'm just saying it would be preferable to the current arrangement. The argument for majoritarianism is the same as in the rest of the world, namely that majorities should have the opportunity to govern. If Clinton and Obama had had an opportunity to govern without Republican obstruction, I believe it would be much more difficult for Republicans to make the case for government dysfunction. Because it's been a cycle, right? Republicans blow shit up, the pendulum swings and Dems take power and can barely begin cleaning up the mess, before long Republicans regain power with an ever-more-radical bent and wreck even more shit...

I agree a centrist approach will not resolve our issues alone, the solutions needed are usually 'extreme' but because of that it is difficult to actually get the majorities needed to implement them, not to mention if there are any downsides there's a reactionary movement to undo them completely. Radical change seems to not go over well in the US, even when it's absolutely necessary, incremental steps in the right direction seem to work well here though it's infuriatingly slow.

Here's the thing: I'm only a socialist because of the self-evident failures of the centrist establishment. That part of the problem was that establishment's permanent and deepening siege under the forces of Reaction only emphasizes the failure to protect us.

Take climate change as an example. An international, incremental, US-led effort from the HW Bush admin on could have given us a smooth transition that hardly anyone would even have noticed. Now, however, it's the analog of facing a German front at the gates of Moscow without any national defense yet organized. Every delay or failure of what could have been productive incremental change only makes radical change increasingly necessary. I recognize this not because I love radical change for its own sake, but because I can grasp simple causality.

Constant incremental change may even be preferable to violent upheaval, but violent upheaval only becomes available/necessary because reform was lacking or absent! When there is a revolutionary regime change, sometimes one is sad to see the new regime. One is never sad to see the old one go.

Sink or swim.

I hope that Biden is able to get some Republican legislators to work with him on some of our pressing issues because if his turn in office is just years of filibusters and foot dragging until the mid-terms then I fear for the future of this nation.

The divergent and self-contained environment of the Georgia runoffs will be an interesting comparison point and testing ground. IMO Democrats should strive to make it very explicitly clear that Biden's ability to act as President is limited by control of the Senate. I would go so far as to promise that, if Republicans retain control their state will go bankrupt and schools will close, whereas if Democrats win then the country (and Georgia) will get bailouts and stimulus checks. Put everything else on the backburner for 2 months besides the immediate material consequences for Georgia and Georgians of this election.

The only other hope, laughable as it is, would be to try to bribe Susan Collins on the theory that her position is secure enough that she can go rogue from the GOP. This theory will fail, if only because by all accounts Collins is well-committed to the Republican project.