#election2020

Five-state primaries shape the 2026 midterm fight for Congress https://zeitline.news/en/2026-midterm-elections-primaries-congress?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr

And if Harris’s relatively moderate campaign has somehow been memory-holed by the politics experts of 2025, Joe Biden’s fairly progressive campaign of 2020 has also been carefully forgotten. His abominable later record on Gaza notwithstanding, he ran on a massive welfare state buildout, full employment, “at least three” genders, and with a Black woman running mate. That did work.

#palenzieperp Kamala Harris vs. Brett: Let Me Talk!

When Joe Biden was running in 2020, I expected him to exhibit this sort of centrist drift as president. In fact, he did the opposite, appointing Lina Khan at the FTC and Jennifer Abbruzzo at the NLRB and carrying out the most progressive and pro-worker economic agenda of any president in my lifetime. Why did lifelong moderate Joe Biden, the credit card industry’s favorite senator, end up doing so much good economic policy? One major reason is that after a tightly contested 2020 primary campaign that Bernie Sanders looked for a time like he might win, Biden made the choice to bring the left wing of the party into the fold, rather than slamming the door in their face. He created a formal “Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force” that hammered out a set of policy recommendations for his term. He gave progressives like Elizabeth Warren significant input into staffing decisions for parts of his administration. After watching Democratic presidents freeze out the left for decades, I failed to anticipate Biden’s willingness to allow the left some real policy power. It was a political decision, and it doesn’t mean that Biden himself is a resounding progressive, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the Biden presidency produced hugely important tangible victories for progressive economic values.

In the biggest exchange of the vice-presidential debate, J.D. Vance left little doubt: Had he been Donald Trump’s vice president on January 6, 2021, he would have faithfully done Trump’s bidding and tried to scuttle the congressional count of electors to help Trump overturn his presidential election loss. In other words, Vance would have done what Mike Pence would not.

Trump received 46% of the vote in 2016. He received 47% of the vote in 2020. This translated into a 304-227 Electoral College win for Trump in 2016 and a 232-306 loss for Trump in 2020. Biden won the popular vote by more than Clinton did, but the real difference was determined by a few tens of thousands of voters in places like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Polling is pretty good these days, even given the array of challenges it faces, but it can’t really tell us anything about the 50,000 or so voters who will make the difference among the 150 million or so who will cast their votes this year. We just don’t have instruments that accurate.