Do You Remember the Ecstasy of Electing Joe Biden?

The coalition that formed in 2020 with the purpose of defeating Donald Trump is exhausted, divided, and falling apartand it seems increasingly unlikely that biden can capture that magic again.

- By Jonathan Chait

Biden supporters in Washington, D.C., on November 7, 2020, the day his victory over Trump was confirmed.

We danced in the streets when Joe Biden was elected. Do you remember? American cities staged the greatest spontaneous outpouring of joy since V-J Day with cars honking and strangers high-fiving one another on an unusually warm November weekend. When I ventured down to Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C., on a Sunday night, a day and a half after the election had been called, the street party was still going. That was just three years ago.

I would estimate that a very tiny percentage of the joy was attributable to specific policy objectives of the incoming Biden administration and that virtually all of it reflected relief that the bad man was gone. The 81,268,924 voters who pulled the lever for Biden were united by the belief that Donald Trump’s presidency was a civic emergency.

The underlying basis for the belief— that Trump’s defeat mattered more than any other political question—has not changed. On the contrary, it has become only more obvious. The 2020 election took place before Trump tried to overturn the result, before he summoned a mob, before he started describing his opponents as “vermin.” But the conviction behind the idea has dissipated. “As a Biden campaign theme, I think the threat to democracy pitch is a bust,” Mitt Romney—who made that theme the core of his own Trump-era political identity—confessed to the New York Times. “Jan. 6 will be four years old by the election. People have processed it, one way or another.”