Even then, a knife’s-edge majority will leave conservative Democrats such as West Virginia’s Joe Manchin arbiters of the Democratic policy agenda. Biden’s ambitious healthcare plan will die on the vine. Noises about changing the rules of the electoral game to favour Democrats (packing the conservative Supreme Court, awarding statehood to Washington, DC and Puerto Rico to counter the Senate’s “anti-democratic” – that is, anti-Democratic – bias) have already quieted to murmurs. [...]
Where does all this leave the Republican Party? A succession is beginning under obscure portents. The party was not given the cauterising rejection that its most anti-Trump elements were hoping for. A resounding loss would have made it easier for the Never-Trump exiles to return triumphant, bringing with them a more collegial, “compassionate conservatism” – and perhaps also a return to the orthodoxies Trump rejected: fiscal discipline, free trade with China, fewer compunctions about keeping troops in Afghanistan. [...]
The day Texas turns Democrat has been delayed for the umpteenth time: expect it to be delayed to the Greek calends. Meanwhile, where Democrats have made electoral inroads, as in Georgia, this has not been down to racial-historical notions of “demographic destiny”, but the political efforts of figures such as Stacey Abrams, who has become the party’s most valuable organiser in the Deep South. In other areas, such as Arizona and the Rust Belt, Democratic gains have come from the increased white support in the anti-Trump suburbs. [...]
To overturn this precedent would not end abortion in the US, but it would mean many heartland Americans would no longer feel that laws they disagreed with were being imposed on them by Washington. The pre-Trump model of the party, marrying secular suburban businessmen with zealous evangelicals, might cease to function. Without this moral motivation, the movement would be forced to rely more on economic, cultural – or racial – grievance, with uncertain prospects of success.
