The numbers say this was a truly ugly election for Trump and the Republicans
Updated 2020 election breakdown: Democrats won the presidency in a 6 million vote blowout. Democrats gained in the Senate by either 1% or 3%, depending on runoffs. Republicans gained in the House by 2-3%, depending on some still-uncalled races. Not a great election cycle for the Democrats, but a pretty bad one for the Republicans.
Also keep in mind Trump shut down the post office in key states just to keep Democrats from voting. We’ll never know for sure, but without that cheating, it’s feasible we could have won the presidency by 10 million votes, won a Senate majority, and not lost those House seats.
In other words, I don’t see how the Democrats did much fundamentally “wrong” in this election. It was thoroughly and blatantly rigged against us, and we won anyway. That said, there are some things we can do more smartly next time. For instance, no more crowdfunding long-shot Senate campaigns in red states. We should have known we weren’t going to win in South Carolina or Kentucky. We should have instead put that money into more “boring” but winnable Senate races like North Carolina, which we would have won if we’d properly funded it. For the record, Georgia is now a blue/swing state. We can win those runoffs. We should certainly fund them.
There’s no reason for moderate Democrats and progressive Democrats to be blaming each other for losing perhaps 2% of the House seats while keeping the majority. Trump literally rigged the election in plain sight. He’s so overwhelmingly unpopular, it wasn’t enough to help him. But it appears to have helped a number of republicans. Are Democrats really going to eat each other alive because we won an election that was rigged against us, but we didn’t win it in perfect fashion?
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report