1. I think that Joe Biden has been elected president.
2. Absent some substantial evidence of wrongdoing, I don’t think the Trump campaign’s lawsuits to stop the counting will prevail.
3. It’s pretty obvious that the Democrats will hold the House albeit with a smaller majority.
4. I have no idea what will happen with the Senate. We may not really know for months due to Georgia’s situation.

Just about everything is progressing much as I said it would. I don’t like purely partisan control of government. In a country as closely divided as ours it’s a formula for mounting discontent. I’ve already said what I think Joe Biden is likely to do and he’s already doing it.

A major question is what will happen during the lame duck session? I’ll be digging around for that and may post on it later.

This morning I caught a snippet of an interview in which the interviewee said that once the number in a population with a disease exceeds 1% it’s very unlikely that the spread of the disease can be slowed by the mitigation techniques that we’ve been using. If that’s the case we might want to consider that in the context of this story from UPI:

New York City had a high rate of infection with the new coronavirus long before its first case of COVID-19 was confirmed on March 1, researchers report.

By that date, more than 1.7 million people in the city — 20% of the population — had already been infected, and the COVID-19 death rate was close to 1%, or 10 times deadlier than the flu.

To arrive at that conclusion, the researchers analyzed nearly 10,700 plasma samples taken between Feb. 9 and July 5, 2020. The samples were checked for the presence of antibodies to past infections of COVID-19, rather than the presence of the virus.

There was very little testing capacity in New York City at the beginning of its outbreak in early March, the researchers noted.

“We now know there were many asymptomatic and mild-to-moderate cases that likely went undetected,” said senior study author Dr. Emilia Mia Sordillo, an attending physician in infectious diseases at the Icahn School of Medicine and the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City.

That certainly confirms the surmise I’ve expressed for some time that the only real hope of containing the disease was in China back in December and that would have required a very different posture on the part of the Chinese authorities.

I found this news, reported in LiveScience, somewhat disconcerting. A Massachusetts woman remained infectious for with SARS-CoV-2 for 70 days while remaining asymptomatic for COVID-19 throughout:

A woman with COVID-19 in Washington state shed infectious virus particles for 70 days, meaning she was contagious during that entire time, despite never showing symptoms of the disease, according to a new report.

The 71-year-old woman had a type of leukemia, or cancer of the white blood cells, and so her immune system was weakened and less able to clear her body of the new coronavirus, known as SARS-CoV-2. Although researchers have suspected that people with weakened immune systems may shed the virus for longer than typical, there was little evidence of this happening, until now.

That’s a difference on the order of a factor of ten.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal summarize the “downballot” results of the election:

Democrats went into this election with 39 legislative chambers, 19 statehouses and 15 trifectas. The GOP boasted 59 legislative chambers, 29 statehouses and 21 trifectas. Democrats aimed to flip the legislatures in North Carolina and Arizona and chambers in Texas, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Iowa.

They came up short everywhere. Democrats didn’t pick up a single new chamber or governorship while Republicans won two more trifectas in Montana and New Hampshire by flipping the governorship in the former and both legislative chambers in the latter. Oh, and Republicans expanded legislative majorities in Florida and North Carolina.

Some races in Arizona are still too close to call, but an independent commission will draw its new maps and GOP Gov. Doug Ducey can stop Democrats from turning the state into California without the beach. Voters in Michigan also recently approved a referendum creating redistricting commissions. Republicans can nonetheless continue to use their statehouse majorities to advance more reforms and set examples of sound governance.

They’re actually understating the magnitude of the loss. A half dozen Blue States including California, Illinois, New York, and Rhode Island are on track to lose seats in the coming reapportionment while the Red Texas and Florida will gain seats. There will be some rationalization of that as the “purpling” of those two states but that doesn’t change the reality: control of redistricting not only will give Republicans greater control over the electoral map but reapportionment will end up pitting incumbent Democrats against one another.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal ponder Joe Biden’s mandate:

As the votes continue to be counted in swing states, Joe Biden has the best chance to become the next President. But the closer we inspect the nationwide election returns, the more the result looks like a defeat for the rest of his Democratic Party and especially for the progressive agenda. Mr. Biden would take office without a mandate beyond addressing Covid-19 and not being Donald J. Trump.

Not being Donald Trump? Mission accomplished! I suspect that “addressing Covid-19” will be a lot tougher. Fortunately for Mr. Biden, he has a compliant media to protect his back.

There was no blue wave, and certainly no mandate for progressive change. If anything, the fevered Democratic and media anticipation of a “transformational” election drove more voters to turn out to stop it. When Mr. Trump finally focused on the economy and progressive agenda in the last weeks of the campaign, his support rose and lifted Republicans in some places as well.

Meanwhile, Mr. Biden’s campaign platform boiled down to he’s not Donald Trump, he’ll do a better job fighting Covid-19, and he won’t take away your health care. His TV ads were largely biographical, contrasting his character to Mr. Trump’s.

Mr. Biden barely mentioned the agenda his aides developed with Bernie Sanders, and the press barely asked him about it. When the former Vice President did finally admit in the last debate that he wanted to “transition” the economy from fossil fuels, his campaign had him scramble to explain it away.

Mr. Biden does have a mandate to defeat Covid-19, rolling out the vaccines already in the pipeline and setting an example by wearing his mask. He has a mandate not to tweet, not to call the press “the enemy of the people,” and not to make himself the center of attention all the time. He also has a mandate to work across the aisle with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

That’s cute. I don’t believe there’s any prospect for that whatever if only because of the House. Can anybody remember a case of Nancy Pelosi compromising with Republicans? Me, neither. Her own caucus, yes, but not Republicans. Remember that when I say “Republicans” I mean the present Republican Congressional leadership rather than a right-leaning think tank 25 years ago.

I think they’re understating the risks ahead for Democrats. More about that in my next post.

There’s a sort of optimism, too, in Michael Gerson’s Washington Post column:

The 2020 presidential election — conducted during a deadly pandemic, accompanied by racial protests, in the wake of massive economic dislocation — felt like it should be transformative. But what has unfolded is really a mirror. And most Americans seem happy with their reflected image.

Trumpians feel confirmed in their belief that a hostile establishment and hidden “deep state” are conspiring against their dignity and influence. Democratic progressives feel confirmed in their belief that the politics of compromise has gained liberalism nothing. Democratic centrists feel confirmed in their belief that they are saving liberalism from political oblivion. No large group of voters came away chastened or sobered.

More than any other reason, this is because politics has become a function of culture. A factual debate can be adjudicated. Policy differences can be compromised. Even an ideological conflict can be bridged or transcended. But if our differences are an expression of our identities — rural vs. urban, religious vs. secular, nationalist vs. cosmopolitan — then political loss threatens a whole way of life.

Where’s the optimism? You may well ask. Here:

It encourages me that organizations such as the American Enterprise Institute are producing the innovative policy proposals (see AEI’s “Governing Priorities”) that an ambitious Republican reformer might run with.

And there’s something practical that citizens can do to address political polarization. It is important to the cohesion of our society that people keep a portion of their deepest selves off limits to politics entirely — the place where kindness, decency and hospitality dwell. Any political belief (really, any belief) that causes us to refuse friendship or fellowship to nonbelievers is wrong and corrosive, no matter how noble or necessary it may seem.

I’m not as optimistic as he. I think that as long as there’s good money to be made in division and treating people with whom you disagree as enemies and beyond disdain, that’s what will happen.

And this convinces me he does not follow social media:

In a divided nation, Americans need to defend a space in their lives where cable news does not reach, where social media does not incite, and where the basic, natural tendency is to treat other people like human beings. This offers not just the prospect of greater tolerance, but the hope of healing.

What space would that be? Google and Facebook know what you’re doing on a second to second basis. They’re like not particularly benign Santa Clauses: they know when you are sleeping, they know when you’re awake, they know if you’ve been bad or good. They’re measuring your pulse rate and your breathing.

And in his regular Washington Post column David Ignatius sounds some hopeful notes:

“Don’t fight the problem,” famously observed Gen. George C. Marshall, the Army chief of staff during World War II and later secretary of state. Meaning, in this case, if Joe Biden is elected, he shouldn’t try to govern over the heads of people who voted for Trump, or behind their backs — but through them, with policies that will make “unity” more than just a slogan. To quote Jamie Gorelick, a Democratic lawyer and former deputy attorney general, “Just telling people that they are wrong does not work.”

[…]

Divided government would probably push Biden to govern more from the center, where he seems most comfortable. That’s a mixed blessing: The country needs bipartisan solutions, but it also needs economic change — making health care available to all, for example, and distributing the rewards of future prosperity more fairly. The center should be a locus for action, not paralysis.

I think that Mr. Ignatius misunderstands the nature of Joe Biden’s centrism and his remarks about health care remind me of Groundhog Day, returning as we are to discussions I had a decade ago. The effect of the Affordable Care Act, what Mr. Biden has proposed, and even what Bernie Sanders has proposed do little to make “health care available to all”. They are much more insurance reform than health care reform. They may even serve to limit the availability of health care to all. Although insurance and care are related they are not synonymous.

The effect of subsidies is to increase willingness to pay and, unless you increase the supply of care at the same time, that will cause prices to rise. Period. You cannot tax or issue credit fast enough to counteract that effect. To truly make health care available to all you must increase the supply of care, cut prices, or both. The other alternative is to re-define care to mean what people need rather than what they want and who decides? That has been castigated as rationing.

But in conclusion as long as there are anti-Trumpians out there who demand that Trump supporters be, in effect, cast out I see no way that Mr. Ignatius’s vision of a unity government will come to pass. Mr. Biden will not reject his own supporters.

In his regular Washington Post column Fareed Zakaria offers Democrats some good advice which I suspect will go largely unheeded:

At the broadest level, it is fair to say that the vote was a repudiation of Donald Trump. Presidents rarely lose their bids for reelection — only five have in the past 125 years — and Trump seems on track to lose the presidency. And he will lose the popular vote by a larger margin than when Jimmy Carter defeated incumbent Gerald Ford in the wake of Watergate.

And yet, it’s obvious that the country remains deeply divided. After an impeachment, a pandemic and the worst economic paralysis since the Great Depression, Republicans overwhelmingly voted for their party, and Democrats did the same. Polarization is now deep, tribal and existential — largely unaffected by events or job performance. In fact, as when things get bad in sports, it seems to have become a greater test of loyalty to stay with your team.

Democrats are more disappointed because they had hoped that this would be an election that resoundingly repudiated Trump and realigned politics. Those expectations were fed by their success in 2018 as well as in recent polls, which seem to have been about as inaccurate as those in 2016. The largest disappointment surely should be that in a year in which Democrats fully embraced ideas about multiculturalism and movements such as Black Lives Matter, Trump appears to have won a larger share of the minority vote than any Republican since 1960. He won the largest percentage of the Black vote since 1996 (though he still got only about 12 percent of the Black vote). One poll indicates he won 35 percent of the Muslim vote. What happened?

He offers two explanations:

• It’s still the economy, stupid! Health care was not the only issue and running as the “Lockdown Party” is probably counter-productive for Democrats to some extent.
• Conceptually lumping minorities composed of individuals who have differing views among themselves into a monolithic “minority” grouping depends too much on affiliation.

I found the second more interesting:

The dominant Democratic approach is that minority groups face deep (systemic) discrimination and need to be protected with active measures by the government across a series of fronts. This idea is rooted in the experience of Black people, for whom it is entirely applicable. America’s treatment of Black people has been cruel, with policies that have broken their families and treated them as either subhuman or as second-class citizens. Historical, structural barriers have left a lasting imprint, and discrimination persists to this day.

Other immigrants — almost all of whom came voluntarily, not bound in chains — have had a very different experience. While we have also encountered discrimination and exclusion, we have found a country that on the whole has been far more open and receptive to foreigners than most other places.

That means an ideology born out of the treatment of African Americans will ring false to American immigrants and their descendants. For us, harsh treatment by White Americans is not the single searing experience that shapes our politics. Some of us are socially liberal, others conservative. Some view themselves as self-reliant entrepreneurs, while others demand a more active role for government. Some seek to assimilate by distancing themselves from newer immigrants or Blacks. Some of the most racist Americans I know are themselves “minorities.”

I think he overstates how true it is even for “Black people”. The dirty little secret of affirmative action is that Caribbean and African blacks benefit disproportionately from it. Upper middle class whites dig their accents. Plus they may have better academic qualifications, personal habits, and other cultural features which means that to the extent that they experience “systemic racism”, a lot of it is in their favor.

I have a friend who’s from Nigeria who tells me he’s never experienced racism in the United States although he definitely did in Europe.

Here’s something Democrats should keep in mind:

Even African Americans vary much more widely on policy than one might imagine. A recent Gallup poll, for example, found that only 19 percent of Black Americans want less police presence in their neighborhoods, while 61 percent want the same amount and 20 percent actually want more. So slogans such as “defund the police,” pushed by the most woke activists on Twitter, might unwittingly turn off mainstream African Americans.

I suspect that if you dig into BLM you will find it composed of at least two disparate groups—black Marxists who in their Marxist thinking substitute race consciousness for class consciousness and middle class whites trying to burnish their social cred. Both groups jettison the interests of the group that sociologist Charles Moskos called “Afro-Americans” (native born Americans of sub-Saharan African descent, the descendants of slaves) in favor of their own.

When elected officials and their families become wealthy and powerful but otherwise the lives of blacks or Hispanics or whatever other minority you care to mention remain largely unchanged, eventually people begin to notice.

Although I don’t agree with either its tone or its conclusion, I’m in broad agreement with Damon Linker’s analysis of the election outcome in The Week. Here’s its opening:

When every legally cast vote has been counted, Joe Biden will probably have prevailed in enough states to claim victory in the presidential race, perhaps even ending up with a few more Electoral Votes than Donald Trump managed to earn four years ago. That means Trump will probably be out, defeated in his bid for re-election.

But this is not a moment for Democrats to celebrate.

In the expectations game, the Democratic Party whiffed and whiffed badly. The Biden campaign and its allies managed to drive up turnout — but so did Trump. Republicans put up a hell of a fight, and not just, or even mainly, in the battle for the White House. Democrats have almost certainly failed to win a Senate majority, and so far they have lost some ground in the House as well (while still on track to maintain control of the lower chamber of Congress).

For the last thirty years progressive Democrats have had a recurring dream. Mr. Linker explains:

So much for the Democratic fantasy — the one that seemingly never dies — of unobstructed rule. Democrats didn’t just want to win and govern in the name of a deeply divided nation’s fractured sense of the common good. No, they wanted to lead a moral revolution, to transform the country — not only enacting a long list of new policies, but making a series of institutional changes that would entrench their power far into the future. Pack the Supreme Court. Add left-leaning states. Break up others to give the left huge margins in the Senate. Get rid of the Electoral College. Abolish the police. Rewrite the nation’s history, with white supremacy and racism placed “at the very center.” Ensure “equity” not just in opportunity but in outcomes. Hell, maybe they’d even establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to teach everyone who voted for or supported the 45th president just how evil they really are.

It has never come to pass and it will never come to pass. We are too large and diverse a country for 15% of the population to reign. Do the math. About 30% of Americans are Democrats about half of whom are progressives. If we are not to be like the ass frozen immobile between two piles of hay, politicians must forge coalitions and negotiate compromises including with people whom they detest. Here’s the part of his analysis I found most telling:

No wonder so many Republicans turned out to vote. Democrats proved to be the most effective GOTV operation for the GOP imaginable.

Yes, Trump and the Republican cheerleading section online and on cable news and talk radio harped on every extreme proposal. But this wasn’t just a function of the fallacy of composition, where one loony activist says something off the wall and the GOP amplifies it far beyond reason in order to tar the opposition unfairly. These were prominent Democrats — progressive politicians, activists, and scholars and prize-winning journalists at leading cultural institutions — talking this way. Joe Biden himself usually did the smart thing and tried to distance himself from the most radical proposals. But in the end it wasn’t enough to mollify fears of an ascendant left hell bent on entrenching itself in power and enacting institutional reforms that would enable it to lead a moral, political, and cultural revolution.

And therein lies a paradox that should be obvious but apparently isn’t: Democrats live in a country with a large, passionate opposition. Arrogant talk of demographic inevitabilities and transformative changes to lock Republicans out of power in the name of “democracy” has the effect of inspiring that opposition to unite against them, rendering political success less assured and more tenuous.

I also think that progressives are wildly over-estimating the appeal that their ideas have for blacks and Hispanics who tend to be social conservatives but that’s material for another post.

There will be no court packing. No added states. Nothing from the toxic progressive-fantasy wishlist will come anywhere close to passing. Instead, we will have grinding, obstructive gridlock. Some will demand that Biden push through progressive priorities by executive order. But every time he does — like every incident of urban rioting and looting, every effort to placate the left-wing “Squad” in the House, every micro-targeted identity-politics box-checking display of intersectional moral preening and finger-wagging — the country will move closer to witnessing a conservative backlash that results in Republicans taking control of the House and increasing their margin in the Senate in November 2022, rendering the Biden administration even more fully dead in the water.

I don’t think that tells the whole story. Based on the political advertising I saw on behalf of every Democratic House candidate, the strategy was clear: run on health care. That’s a fine strategy to appeal to people who get paid whether they come in to work or not but it leaves blacks and Hispanics with nothing. They have more interests and, indeed, more pressing interests than health care.