A Cold War Between Red and Blue America
The clearest message of this week’s complicated election results is that the trench is deepening between red and blue America.
Late vote counts in Michigan and Wisconsin put Joe Biden in position to oust Donald Trump so long as the Democrat holds his leads in Nevada and Arizona, which he appears likely but not guaranteed to do. Biden edged past Trump by amassing big margins around the large population centers of virtually every state—a showing that could push him well past 50 percent of the total popular vote and possibly put both Pennsylvania and Georgia in his column. With Biden’s near-certain popular-vote victory, Democrats have now won the most votes in seven of the past eight presidential elections, something no party has ever done since the formation of the modern party system, in 1828.
Yet the election did not deliver the unequivocal repudiation of Trump that Democrats and his many Republican critics had hoped for. Even amid a pandemic whose death toll is approaching 250,000 Americans, record campaign spending by Biden, and unprecedented defections from prominent former Republican officials, Trump
