You got what you deserve, Republican Party...

[A Black Falcon]

Republicans gained in the House -- our margin there is thin now -- and may hold the Senate.  As much as I'd like to ignore all of those fascist enablers, you can't govern properly if you do that.  The key is to not surrender our principles while we do so.

It will be really fantastic if we do win both Georgia runoffs, but even then a lot of dealmaking will be required to get anything passed, given that that'd leave us 50-50 with several red-state Dems who may not exactly be thrilled to pass some stuff.  But that's what y9ou get when you have a rigged system that gives small red states an unfair advantage (in the Senate and Electoral College)...

Anyway though, Biden's a dealmaker legislator type who WILL try to deal with the other side. He always has and always will. I was frustrated by that kind of thing often during the Obama-Biden administration, since Obama constantly did that stuff and often got creamed by the Republicans when he did so, and I'm sure I will be again, but he is not the type to completely ignore the other party. I do think Biden's not going to be pushed around as easily as inexperienced Obama was sometimes, though... like, he's not trying the "how about we start with something close to the Republican position and then be surprised when they say that no that's not good enough, go farther right" like Obama was; Biden knows that game, I I think, and is starting with much more liberal policies. We'll see how it goes though, Mitch McConnell is dedicated to destroying our system in the name of power and I don't think he will stop now just because this Democrat is white instead of black. (I'm sure racism was a factor in why Republicans hated Obama so much after all...)

So yeah, I am not too hopeful for major legislation now, unfortunately, since we didn't win those Senate seats we needed, but if Biden ignores all Republicans entirely then even LESS happens, so we have no choice really unfortunately.

If a pandemic results in greater turnout than any GOTV efforts have ever managed, maybe the Democrats' GOTV efforts weren't really very good to start with. I believe AOC is spot on, Democrats have a tendency to treat internet outreach in particular as unimportant, but the GOP does not, and it's key to their high turnout. It's way cheaper and easier to saturate. Republicans don't send outreachers to pound the pavement. They stage big rallies and flood the internet with ads and disinformation.

What you are forgetting here, again, is that the groups that more often vote Democratic are less frequent voters, while groups that more often vote Republican are more frequent voters.  Republicans do not have to try very hard to get middle-age and older whte people to vote; they are voting anyway.  But young people and minorities?  It's always a struggle to get those peopel to the polls, they wrongly do not consider voting to be as important as it is and don't vote in high numbers compared to older age groups that we mostly lose.  So Democrats outnumber Republicans, but struggle to win partially because of geographic sorting and partially because of how much harder it is to get our people to actually vote.

So with this election, we saw what happens if you can't do the normal outreach and just rely on peoples' outrage towards the current government to get people to the polls.  And we saw a lot of enthusiasm on our side due to all of the horrible thing Trump has done, and Biden did great gaining ground in white suburbs and such; this is what flipped Pennsylvania for instance.  However, there also were some weaknesses with some areas that I think the absence of door-to-door campaiging goes a long way towards explaining -- Biden probably did worse than Hillary in big cities like Philadelphia, for instance, despite it being his campaign headquarters.  Do you really think that Trump's minority outreach explains that, or is it because we couldn't go door to door to convince lower-frequency voters to brave the cold and COVID and vote?  Yes, COVID was a big thing causing people to vote against Trump, but some people who are much more likely to support Dems than Republicans need encouragement to vote.

I feel 100% confident Joe Biden won because of COVID. Donald Trump with his roaring economy and stock market would have easily won re-election, had COVID not been a major disruptive factor. It was a referendum on Donald Trump in particular, not about Republicans in general. Hence, the downballot results. Anyone who chooses to interpret this as Americans wanting to go back to centrist Democrat politics, rather than Americans being tired of a particular incompetent moron, are setting us all up for more heartbreak. We need not replicate the specific tactics of the Republican Party, but they are wizards at playing the long game and finding ways (ethical or not) of overcoming a natural electoral disadvantage. Democrats need to study how they do this and adapt their methods in such a way that is not destructive and stupid.

We will never know if Biden would have won otherwise or not, but Trump could have pulled it off maybe, sure.  It'd have been even closer than it was most likely. I do think that we had a good chance to win either way due to revulsion against Trump though, it wasn't some certain Trump win, for sure. It's actually possible that due to the anti-fact world many Republicans live in now that COVID didn't have as much of an impact as it should have, electorally... I mean, there are literally people on ventilators in the hospital, dying, who refuse to believe that COVID is a real thing and not a hoax! They do not believe in reality anymore. The question would be how many people who were going to vote soft Trump turned against him because of COVID. I'm sure some did, but looking at polling Biden's lead was pretty stable throughout the year... and yes I know the polling was off in Trump's favor again, due to his hard-to-poll wave of cultists who showed up to vote, but still the numbers are useful.