Joe Biden will be the next President of the United States. The election will not grant him a Democratically-controlled Senate. Mitch McConnell and the Republicans will likely remain in the majority. This is the best outcome for President Biden. This is the outcome that allows Joe Biden to govern towards his own political agenda.
Biden is a moderate, by habit and by instinct. But during the campaign, to capture the vote of Democratic progressives without whom victory would be elusive, he compromised. Biden accepted policy planks outside his own moderate comfort zone. He hooked up with Bernie Sanders to generate the so-called Biden-Sanders Unity Plan. He long believed that “packing” the U.S. Supreme Court was wrong, for reasons well stated by a Democratic Senate in 1937 and by an overwhelming Senate vote. Yet he wavered on court-packing because he knew, given the confirmation of Justice Barrett, that the Democratic left-wing would demand it.
Now, with Republicans apparently winning the Senate for at least the first two years of a Biden presidency, Biden knows that much of the progressive agenda is dead on arrival in the Senate. Court packing is now a dead issue. The Green New Deal is dead, and so much more. This is the best outcome for Biden. It is the outcome that frees him to govern in a manner more closely aligned with who he is, and has been, politically.
Biden cannot afford to take an eight-year view. It is unrealistic. He has four years to lead the country as he may. Ironically, a Republican Senate, not a Democratic one, provides him with the best opportunity to govern in the way that Joe Biden likely always dreamed. He will have to work with the Republicans. But after so many years in the Senate and in Washington, he well knows how to do it.
As Biden noted during the campaign, to the chagrin of pseudo-outraged progressives, he worked well with “Jim Crow” Democrats early in his career. He understands the nature of political compromise. He knows that the country moves best when it moves slowly and thoughtfully with the buy-in of at least some from the other party.
Biden surely realizes that the United States is evenly divided among good people with different views as to which policies are best over the long term. That is as one would expect and likely as it should be. Reasonable people will almost always disagree over outcomes for which there are many reasonably plausible choices. Views outside of the mainstream of American political thought need time, if at all, to become mainstream. That is not where the American people are today, and Biden knows it. The election results show it.
The best outcome for Biden is the one he is likely going to get. At this point in American history, it is the best outcome for the country.