Though no official winner has been declared, it looks like Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden will be our next president. He has overtaken President Trump’s narrow leads in Georgia and Pennsylvania, and without either state, Trump has no path to reelection. We can expect a recount or several where the race was close, and Trump’s campaign has already announced plans to take the results to court. But one thing is clear: If, once the dust settles, Biden is certified as the winner, Trump will have no one but himself to blame.
Given the many crises our nation has faced this year alone, it is remarkable that Trump did this well at all. The polls predicted a Biden landslide for months, and Democrats expected to carry not only the White House, but the Senate and House of Representatives as well. Democrats actually lost ground in the House, and Republicans, depending on what happens with Georgia’s two Senate runoff elections in January, are in a good position to keep their majority in the Senate.
But Trump lost, even as the rest of his party won, which suggests that this election was not the result of mass voter fraud, as the president has claimed, but of collective fatigue.
Likewise, the rest of the GOP’s performance on Tuesday proves Trump’s policies were not the problem. If they were, Republicans would have experienced the repudiation Democrats had hoped for. But the blue wave never materialized, and Trump even made gains among groups Republicans have struggled with for years.
But he floundered among the groups of voters he needed most: suburban women, middle-class men, and older people. He won these voters in 2016, in part because Hillary Clinton was a horrible candidate but also because his platform was appealing. And even though Trump was facing a much more reasonable candidate this time around, his platform never changed. So, what did?
The real question, however, is not what changed but what didn’t change. And the answer is simple: Trump. Throughout four years of his presidency, Trump did not change. His rhetoric remained crude and divisive, his messaging on important issues, such as the coronavirus pandemic, was always muddled, and his bombastic personality often distracted from the actual achievements his administration made. And voters got sick of it.
There’s a Bible verse, Proverbs 18:6, I keep coming back to: “A fool’s lips walk into a fight, and his mouth invites a beating.” Unfortunately, I think this describes Trump. He had the platform. He had the record that should have earned him reelection. But in word and deed, he never rose to the office of the presidency, and I believe it cost him the White House.
