The Middle Finger Election

Well, that was weird.

As the dust settles from the 2020 Election, the main take away from it was that the voters were fed up with everyone and as result gave them massive middle finger and advised them not the door hit them on the way out.

At the top of the ballot, they decided that four years of rage tweeting, insult hurling, and a feeling of reality show chaos and incompetence was enough to show President Trump the door.

Yet, it was not the widespread repudiation of the Republican Party that the left was hoping for. Joe Biden will enter office severely wounded. Against expectations, Republicans have gained seats in the House and it appears they will keep their majority in the Senate. Voters rejected Democrats’ radical calls to pack the Supreme Court and add states simply so Democrats could get more senators. They rejected the Democratic Party’s leftward lunge, viewing The Squad as the face of the party. They rejected social progressivism with Republicans improving with minorities and not just Cuban-Americans in Florida.

The message was clear: We don’t like Trump, but we don’t trust Democrats to marginalize the Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders-wing of their party.

There has been a lot of talk about Scranton this election, so it may be appropriate to describe what happened as the voters replacing Todd Packer with Michael Scott, but also sending David Wallace down to keep an eye on him to make sure he does not get any crazy ideas.

It turns out Americans don’t want their president to be a proud and unrepentant jerk, but they also do not their local police departments defunded. Voters want racial progress and healing, they do not want to tear down statues of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. Hispanic voters, just like every other ethnic group, care about the economy, not Anglicizing the Spanish language by subsisting an ‘X’ at the end of Latino/a.

Joe Biden won because he convinced enough voters he is not the narcissistic jerk that Trump is. Republicans won because they said “It’s either us or the left.”

If Republicans learn from this election that being a jerk and fighting for what you believe in are not the same thing and Democrats realize that being the party of the social science and grievance studies faculty lounges are not the way to electoral success, maybe the country is not in as bad of shape as we thought and maybe 2020 just got a little less crazy.