The presidential election was two weeks ago, and the country’s liberals are already deep into the blame phase.
Before those premature post-mortems get fully baked into conventional wisdom, though, I wanted to flag a handful of observations about the race and how it’s already being interpreted — some caveats, some counterpoints, some context that may help us understand the meaning of a big messy election in a big messy country, at least until we get the actually-reliable voter data.
In the end, it seems, Donald Trump’s margin in the national popular vote will be about 1.6 percentage points — the narrowest victory since razor-thin 2000.
The election did mark a decisive shift: a broad, uniform move to the right, down to the county level, that carried a Republican to a popular vote win for the first time in 20 years.
But this was not a wipeout even like the one in 2008 (let alone 1932, 1972 or 1984).
Persons:
we’ve, Donald Trump’s, Joe Biden, Trump
Organizations:
Republican
Locations:
Midwest