We’re Divided. But Will We Fall?

“French dedicates his book to James Madison, saying, ‘May we remember that you were right.'”

In the leadup to the 2020 election, the Democratic Party and many thought leaders on the Left were thinking big. Their proposition, supported by the polling, was that the electorate’s repudiation of President Donald Trump would usher in Democratic dominance—the Democrats would expand their majority in the House, overtake Senator Mitch McConnell’s GOP majority in the Senate, and of course, win back the White House.

With President Trump trounced and a historic mandate in hand, the party was going to pass more Coronavirus (COVID-19) relief and then shift to large-scale institutional reforms that would make American government more democratic (in both the lower-case and upper-case sense of the word). The blue wave would usher in blue dominance. In the words of The Week’s Damon Linker, the Democrats “wanted to lead a moral revolution, to transform the country—not only enacting a long list of new policies, but making a series of institutional changes that would entrench their power far into the future.” Court packing was on the table. Statehood for Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico was on the horizon. The Senate filibuster’s days were numbered. All the while, Democratic gains in state legislatures would help create a friendlier electoral map as districts would be redrawn this term.

Little of this is going to happen. It looks like the Democrats are going to lose, not gain, seats in the House while keeping their majority. The GOP will very likely retain its Senate majority. The Democrats will take back the White House (barring any surprises), but as The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein put it, “nothing about the results suggests that [Joe Biden] has decisively broken America’s national stalemate.” In short, we are not witnessing the dawn of a new era of Democratic dominance in which the Republican Party is vanquished and thereby punished for its embrace of the ever flawed and eminently divisive figure of Donald J. Trump. Rather, thanks in large part to the power of negative polarization, we are getting more of what we have had for quite some time now: divided government.