A sneak peek at the Times’s news analysis from Nov. 4, 2020.
.. Extraordinary turnout in California, New York, Illinois and other Democratic bastions could not compensate for the president’s abiding popularity in the states that still decide who gets to live in the White House: Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida.
.. In exit poll interviews, Mr. Trump’s supporters frequently cited the state of the economy to explain their vote. “What part of Dow 30,000 do the liberals not understand?”
.. despite an economy that continues to struggle with painfully slow wage growth, spiraling budget deficits and multiplying trade wars that have hurt businesses as diverse as Ohio soybean farmers and California chipmakers.
.. their signature proposals — Medicare for all and free college tuition for most American families — would have been expensive and would require tax increases on families making more than $200,000. Mr. Trump and other Republicans charged they would “bankrupt you and bankrupt the country.”
.. Democrats sought instead to cast the election in starkly moral terms. Yet by Election Day, the charge that Mr. Trump is morally or intellectually unfit for office had been made so often that it had lost most of its former edge among swing voters.
.. “I don’t care if he lies or exaggerates in his tweets or breaks his vows to his wife, so long as he keeps his promises to me,”
.. citing the economy and Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominations as decisive for her vote. “And he has.”
.. Many of Mr. Trump’s supporters also said they felt vindicated by the conclusions of Robert Mueller’s report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. While the former F.B.I. director painted a damning portrait of a campaign that was riddled with Kremlin sympathizers and a candidate whose real-estate ventures were beholden to Russian investors, no clear evidence of collusion between Mr. Trump and Moscow ever emerged and the president was never indicted.
.. Democrats also failed to capitalize on, and may have been damaged by, winning back control of the House of Representatives, but not the Senate, in the 2018 midterms. Mr. Trump proved effective, if characteristically vitriolic, in making a foil of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi.
.. Efforts to impeach the president mainly served to energize his base. Polling surveys suggested that wavering voters saw a Democratic Party more invested in humiliating the president than in helping them.
.. it did not take long for campaign aides to Senator Warren to offer damning appraisals of her performance as a candidate. Historical references abounded: The Children’s Crusade; Pickett’s Charge; the McGovern campaign of 1972. The common thread was that the campaign’s moral fervor repeatedly got the better of its message focus.
.. He got my party to lose its marbles.”
.. The lawmaker cited calls by party activists to abolish the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — calls the Warren campaign did not formally endorse but did little to refute — as emblematic of the party’s broader problems.
.. “What do Democrats stand for?” he asked.
- “Lawlessness or liberality?
- Policymaking or virtue signaling?
- Gender-neutral pronouns and bathrooms or good jobs and higher wages?”
“Democrats used to stand with the Working Man,” he tweeted Wednesday morning. “Now it’s the party of Abortion and Amnesty. All that’s missing is Acid. Sad!”