The meme image below was created for chess players, but it can apply equally to political parties. With respect to the 2020 elections, it can apply to both of the major American political parties. The Republicans obviously should examine why they lost the presidency, and the Democrats should look into the reasons they had such a disappointing cycle in the House and Senate.
I’m not sure either party has really embraced this task with the gusto required to make improvements, but at least the Democrats acknowledge the legitimacy of their losses. The Republicans are still fighting over the counts in the presidential election and that makes introspection difficult.
But that doesn’t mean the Republicans haven’t adopted a plan to avoid future defeats. In this respect, they seem to be ahead of the Democrats. Their plan, ironically, is a tacit admission that the results in 2020 were in fact legitimate, but their solution is to make future results illegitimate.
They are not focused on winning more support from voters. What they want to do is make it so fewer Democrats can register to vote, can cast their vote if they are registered, or can vote in a competitive election where they’re decision might have any influence on the outcome.
Pollsters are seeing some really strange results when they survey the Republican base. One recent poll, which is done at John Bolton’s request, found that 64 percent of Republicans believe that Trump actually won the 2020 election. What precisely GOP voters mean by that is an open question, but it explains why the party isn’t focused on doing a better sales job. They think their sales job in 2020 was just fine but there was too much early and absentee voting, or there was a corrupt tabulation that requires better security in the future.
There’s no evidence that the counts were wrong, but the Republicans aren’t wrong that early and absentee voting heavily favored the Democrats. That’s mainly because then-president Trump told his base not to trust early voting so many of them waited until Election Day to cast their vote. In reality, this had a very modest effect on the actual outcome, but a big effect on when the votes were counted. Election Day votes were counted first in most states, and that gave Trump an early lead.
Yet, making voting easier, especially during a global pandemic, helped boost turnout. And that helped Biden overcome a very strong turnout from Trump’s army of supporters. Democrats, who were much less inclined to risk infection with COVID-19 by voting in person, would not have turned out in the same numbers without remote voting options. In that sense, Trump really did lose because of early voting, but primarily because he juiced things so they turned out that way.
One solution would be to get Republicans to trust early voting again. But the GOP has only won the popular vote in a presidential election once since 1988, and that was a very narrow advantage in the post-9/11 election in 2004. They simply don’t believe that they’ll have a good chance in a high turnout election. They want to rely on their structural advantage in the Electoral College, which yielded them wins in 2000 and 2016, and to suppress turnout in ways that disproportionally affect Democratic candidates.
The Democrats want to counter these moves, obviously, but they’re not interested in creating an artificially advantageous electorate for themselves. They’re confident that they’ll win in a fair election and they also happen to believe in fair elections. They know they had poor results in House and Senate races in 2020, but their focus is on determining why this happened rather than in disenfranchising their opponents’ supporters.
On the other hand, the fact that they won the presidency and narrow control of the House and Senate is probably having a negative influence on the urgency with which they’re looking at this question. They should do more than play defense against the Republicans’ efforts to change the rules of the game. Before they hit “new game” and run for offices in 2024, they have to complete the analysis of why they lost so many seats in 2020.
I think the Democrats’ performance was only “disappointing” if you started with unrealistic expectations. They dumped an incumbent president, gained 3 Senate seats, and kept the House majority.
Re the House, Democrats in 2018 busted their asses to retake the majority, and succeeded, but it doesn’t surprise me that those seats couldn’t all be held. Here in California in ’18 the party put a huge focus on six House seats that had Republican reps but had voted for Clinton; with major fundraising and effort they flipped all six; in ’20 without the state party focus and funding 5 of them flipped back (IIRC the only one held was the awesome Katie Porter in Orange county). There’s no reason to think some of those won’t go Dem again in ’22.
Re the Senate, people thought Maine should have been winnable, but dislodging an incumbent is rarely easy. I’ll let people from New England post-mortem that one.
I think the analogy of a chess game is deeply flawed.
It is more akin to Russia grabbing Crimea, or China refusing to be transparent about Corona virus data, or perhaps even Bashar Al Assad decimating his own opponents – what can others do about it? NOTHING!
How many people voted for Trump in 2020 – after 4 years of flinging the dung by the OrangOtan? 74,222,958 – what are you gonna do about them? NOTHING!