2020 Election Post Mortem V. Conservatives down ballot, Marching through Georgia, and what it means.

One seat.

That's all that will make up the difference between the Democratic majority and the Republican minority in the House of Representatives in the next Congress.  The Republicans will have 217 seats.  The Democrats 218.

A razor thin difference.

And all because the Republicans lost a seat in Georgia after picking up six elsewhere.

And the Senate may have that same razor thin margin as well. We don't know yet, as we will have to endure two Georgia Senate runoffs.

What does that all mean?

Well, if the Republicans win, they'll have 52 seats, and retain control of the Senate.  And they really only need to keep one in order to do that.

The Democrats need to take both to tie up the Senate, which would mean that Kamala Harris may have the tie breaking vote on a lot of party line votes. That would occur because the Vice President is the President of the Senate and can take that role.

Which would make the office of Vice President unusually important for at least two years.

And agenda wise, that would make all the difference in the world for Vice President Elect Biden.  A tied Senate would give him two years to achieve an agenda.  A Republican Senate, on the other hand, would mean that he'd need to cut a lot of deals with the Senate, and historically Presidents who had been Senators have not been very effective at doing that.  And getting those deals would depend upon a Mitch McConnell willing to enter into them, rather than hedging his bets that the Republicans would pick up the House in 2022.

So the race in Georgia is going to be the most heavily contested Senatorial race in American history.

Beyond that, however, these results show that conservatism is much stronger than pundits would have had it. We believe that's an evolving trend, as we've recently addressed here.  To have watch recent press reports from earlier last year, and to listen to the pundits leading up to the election, you would have had the impression that a new era for Progressives, and a permanent one, was about to be launched.  That turned out to certainly not be the case, at least, for this election.  Conservatives, as Mitt Romney pointed out on last weekend's Meet the Press, did quite well.

Populist (People's Party) candidate from 1892, James B. Weaver.

Indeed, conservative populism is much stronger than we supposed, which we didn't see as a trend, and which some liberal organs like The Guardian are now worried about.  That populism was growing has been obvious back to 2016, where it was growing in both parties, given us both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.  It's a dirty word to pundits, but it's a political fact one way or another, and its one that has always been an element of American politics.  Sometimes its been a very strong one, and in that sense, we've returned to a long running and continual stream of political thought in the US.

Left wing Populist Party, and then Democratic Party, Presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan.

Another area where the punditry would appear to be wrong, therefore, would be the predictions of the death of populism and the death of conservatism, which aren't the same thing and aren't necessarily always aligned.  Both might be nearly as strong in Joe Biden's first two years of his oncoming term they have been in the last four and potentially a bit more organized in opposition than it was in partial power.

Mitt Romney has indicated that he thinks this shows the overall strength of conservatism and that the country is basically center right.  He may be very well right and that's how I'd interpret it as well, which if that is the case its good news for Joe Biden as he has traditionally been center left and should be able to find some common ground.  If that analysis is wrong and we really have two hard and fast camps, whoever, nothing will be occurring in the next two years.

But I don't think that's the case, and so far I've been getting things more accurate than most of the pundits, which doesn't amount to 100% accuracy by any means.  

So, going into 2021, the nation is really divided, but more crowded towards the center than has been supposed. It didn't vote for anything radical and there doesn't appear to be any support for radical measures.  Even while divided left and right, it may be more united with certain populist leanings providing the surprising union between the two side, which also means that the nation may be opting just not to decide certain things that people on the left and right argue should be, and which the current Supreme Court is going to throw back to the legislative branch to decide.

Biden has just two years to achieve something as the Republicans are amazingly posed to take the House back and almost did.  Making predictions now would be risky, but it would be my guess that they'll achieve that in 2022.

That may depend, however, on what occurs in the next couple of months.  The election turned out to be a referendum on Trump himself.  Now that the election is over, longshot options based on court action aren't going to be popular with the electorate and they aren't going to succeed.  Choosing the courts as hills to die on will achieve just that, lasting voter animosity.  And that would amount to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory for conservatives at a moment in which they did very well.