Already the Democrats look like they intend to compete with the incumbent president in the post-election exaggeration game. Much as the incumbent claimed the most decisive electoral college victory ever, President-elect Biden and his supporters are suggesting that the recent results represent a mandate for near-revolutionary changes in American policy.
The empirical evidence for this "mandate" is tenuous, as we polite folk say when a statement is just plain rubbish. The electoral vote is a massive two votes higher than the result the incumbent misspoke about 4 years ago; the popular vote, it's actually nice to see, confirmed the very average electoral college score, but at the time of this writing was pretty tight. The claim that this represents the largest number of votes cast for a presidential candidate tries to obscure the fact that the incumbent's total is a fairly close second.
Even more damning for the mandate exaggeration is the results in the House of Representatives. This is the chamber the left wing values more because it more closely reflects a raw majoritarianism that appeals to their lust for government power. The Blues lost seats in the House of Representatives.
A narrower majority in the House is the best thing to come out of this election so far. The Democrats should listen to their beleaguered moderates who know that dancing about singing "Defund the police, abolish ICE, and here's your green new deal (the directions to the unemployment office are on page 53 of the appendix)" has cost the party a chance to actually get a mandate any time in the foreseeable future. For now, the stunning incompetence and smug superiority complex of the progressive left has kept us safe.
Another claim being made by President-elect Biden and his enablers is that the have rebuilt the "blue wall" of mid-sized states that border the Great Lakes. From right to left, in deference to the preferred order of things in the minds of the blue party, those states are Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. In the 18 Presidential elections that have been held in my lifetime, the "blue wall" was a complete or almost complete structure five times. If we're honest, you can't rebuild something that wasn't really there.
A sad coda to the blue cubicle divider narrative is that the real blueness of those states was the blue-collar, often unionized, working class that used to be the backbone of the Democratic Party. These are the people, generally white, usually without education beyond high school, often skilled at a manual trade, fond of pickup trucks, church-going, and firearms-owning people that the Democratic Party officially labelled "deplorable" 4 years ago.
Non-Hispanic white males who have attained up through a high-school diploma and no further formal education make up 11 percent of the voting age population. The Democratic Party chooses to demonize them and then wonders why they vote for Republicans. Go figure.
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