The Last Vote Cast

Biden won. Get over it. And so it begins that credit for the win is claimed, and with that credit comes the demands.

One Black woman—historic, dope, progressive, passionate and competent, though she is—is not a sufficient salve for the festering wounds of American racism and sexism. . . .

Meanwhile Black communities will demand that she represent an actual progressive agenda on race and gender justice. In the end, her job as Vice-President is to support Biden in delivering on the policy promises he made, and to push him to do more. Her presence begins rather than ends a conversation about what America owes Black women.

That dope is Kamala Harris, and the “the price of the ticket” is that Biden owes black women for winning. Not appreciative for their support, but “owes,” because they were the margin of victory. Of course, that’s not how votes work, since black people are about 13% of the population, black woman are a portion of that, and there might have been a few black women here and there who didn’t vote, or didn’t vote for Biden. It could happen.

In order for Biden to get over 77 million votes, more than black women voted for him. And had they not, black women voting for him wouldn’t have mattered. While there’s an emotional appeal to a voting block laying claim to a win, it’s at best the margin, not the foundation.

While black women claim ownership of the Biden victory, and accordingly demand their piece of the spoils, they’ve got competition.

The left-wing of the Democratic Party had the answer. To clobber Republicans at election after election, all they had to do was get out the vote. According to this theory, legions of would-be progressives weren’t casting ballots. But once activated, they would sweep the likes of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into higher office, transforming America.

Turnout was, to be modest, huge. It was huge for Trump. It was huge for Biden. It was huge. Had this presidential election only involved votes cast by the usual likely voters, it might well have gone differently. Demographics that rarely voted in the past turned out in droves this time. It’s a good thing that Americans exercised their right to vote, regardless of their grasp of civics as opposed to self-interest.

Back in 2018, Ocasio-Cortez articulated her vision for the Democrats. “Our swing voter is not red-to-blue,” she said. “Our swing voter is…the non-voter to voter.” When Claire McCaskill—former Democratic senator from Missouri—argued recently that divisive culture-war issues had distracted the Democrats from their focus on the economy, she earned a sharp rebuke from Ocasio-Cortez.

“Why do we listen to people who lost elections as if they are experts in winning elections?” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.

An interesting question from someone who’s only enjoyed electoral success in few block radius, where a chicken in every pot will make the rice tastier.

But Ocasio-Cortez has no experience winning in the parts of the country that are really at stake. She runs in a district of New York City that the 2017 Cook Partisan Voter Index ranks as 29 percentage points more Democratic than the national average—the Republican Party basically doesn’t exist there. And the reason that Ocasio-Cortez became her party’s candidate for the House of Representatives in the first place was not massive turnout but the opposite: In the Democratic Party primary election that brought her to prominence, about 200,000 Democratic voters were registered, but a little under 30,000 cast ballots.

On the one side, there are about 70 million people who did not vote for Joe Biden. Some adored Trump, but most recognized that Trump was repugnant, but saw him as the only thing standing in the way of tearing down statues of Abraham Lincoln or burning cities.

Then there were the people who voted for Biden, some because they had to settle due to Bernie’s and Liz’s having failed to get the nomination, not even considering Kamala’s rejection as a candidate before the first primary ballot was cast. But most were from moderate people who either could take no more of Darth Cheeto or wanted what Joe was selling, a national return to sanity, to normality, to peace if not prosperity.

To be fair, one can’t blame small interest groups for trying to rationalize their critical importance to Biden. After all, they want their slice of the pie, and who wouldn’t? And they did support him, even if their support was merely the cherry on top of the Sundae. Without a Sundae, there would be nothing on which to put their cherry.

No one gets elected at the fringes, even if that’s what provides them with the margin of victory. Without the base of support, the marginal votes mean nothing. Joe Biden said he wouldn’t be the president of blue states or red states, but of the United States. It’s a nice platitude, but there is little chance it will work out that way. He’s not going to be the president of white supremacists, as well he shouldn’t be.

But does that mean he’s going to repay his debt, whether to the Squad, to black women, to whoever else claims ownership of his win? Or does that mean he’s going to be the president of the vast majority of voters who voted for him, and that portion of voters who didn’t out of fear that the extremes of the party’s left wing would destroy more statues and burn more buildings?

Yearning for an electorate that isn’t there is a dead-end, as Trump himself is learning in his desperate attempts to deny the loss. The nation wanted a moderate this time, and the left-wing of the Democratic Party must acknowledge that, too. You can’t just abolish the electorate that rejects you, and dream up another you’d prefer.

It’s unclear how many of the 77 million plus votes cast for Joe Biden were by black women or people who think AOC knows stuff, but it’s clear that the vast majority of those votes came from moderate people who want to be rid of the crazy, the hateful, the outraged, and get back to a normal American life. That’s who Biden’s victory is owed to, the majority of America, not the last vote cast.