Optimism? Why?

Daniel Henninger:

Pessimism is to conservative politics what pumpkin pie is to Thanksgiving: It’s always on the table. Not long ago about this time of year, liberals would post articles with titles such as, “How to talk to your Uncle Jim at Thanksgiving.” Those pieces had one valid premise—that Uncle Jim would say over his turkey that the world is going to hell, yet again. And on the evidence around some tables, Uncle Jim was right.

In that grumbling spirit, let many of us who are to the right of the 2020 edition of Joe Biden admit that in the runup to the election, we thought a left-wing idiocracy was about to sweep into power. More than a few arch-pessimists believed the curtain was finally falling on Ben Franklin’s warning that the U.S. is “a republic, if you can keep it.”

At the risk of arousing the dark side, we are here to posit that the 2020 election results are reason for optimism. (For those who disallow optimism on principle, the diminished election expectations of the Democratic left offer the consolation of schadenfreude.)

Let me count the ways.

Some thought the Senate next year might have a Democratic majority of 54-46, a wipeout. You knew something was up election night when Maine’s “vulnerable” Susan Collins wasn’t swept into the Atlantic. Then Iowa’s Joni Ernst won, as did North Carolina’s Thom Tillis. It will take Republican (or presidential) malfeasance to lose the Senate deciders in Georgia Jan. 5.

After the Democrats rolled up House seats in the 2018 midterms, they expected to ride an anti-Trump wave to a bigger majority. But their majority narrowed, and the tides of history look likely in 2022 to push Nancy Pelosi into retirement. Two years into Barack Obama’s first term, the Democrats lost 63 House seats. They shed 54 seats in Bill Clinton’s first midterms. By all means, the Democrats should push BidenCare.

Mrs. Pelosi has explained away the Republican House gains as the result of President Trump at the top of the ticket. A more fine-grained explanation would look at intriguing efforts such as New York GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik’s E-PAC project to recruit Republican women this year.

Ms. Stefanik hit it out of the park. Notable winners over Democratic incumbents include Michelle Fischbach in Minnesota, Nancy Mace (a Citadel graduate) in South Carolina, California’s Young Kim and New York City’s Nicole Malliotakis.

Add to the success of these Republican women the crossover to the GOP of black, Hispanic and Asian voters. Democrats argue these gains are small. But the opening for the political optimism of Reaganesque (now Trumpian) private-sector job opportunity is too big to ignore.

Conventional wisdom holds, with reason, that the Republican Party is a dodo bird in California and New York. But Democrats lost House seats to the dodos in both states.

The strongest evidence that the GOP won’t be spending a generation in any post-Trumpian wilderness is the National Conference of State Legislatures’ map of partisan legislative control. It shows a lot of red now, notably total control in four states where the Democrats hoped to flip at least one chamber—Texas, Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina—as well as such important battlegrounds as Georgia, Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, Arizona and New Hampshire.

Many of these Republican legislatures will be drawing congressional district maps next year. New York and California will each lose a House seat, the latter for the first time ever.

Yes, refugees from California and New York are turning states like Arizona and Georgia bluer, a story for another time. But speaking of refugees, if you can find one from Eastern Europe who voted for Joe Biden, let me know. Those I talked to from Albania and Romania (and as reported from Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba) couldn’t fathom how anyone would vote for “socialism.” Somehow these immigrant voters didn’t get the party’s memo that Mr. Biden isn’t a socialist.

But then, what is he? A moderate with socialist tendencies?

It’s hard not to notice that the Democratic Party is having an identity crisis at the precise moment “identity politics” is ascendant. The left-wing Justice Democrats have warned the Biden team it risks fracturing the party if it makes “corporate friendly” appointments.

The second-biggest story of the 2016 election was socialist Bernie Sanders’s strong primary challenge to Hillary Clinton. In defeat, Mr. Sanders became a darling of that swath of the media committed to opening a path to power for the progressive movement by contributing free publicity for its economic and cultural goals.

Maybe it’s time to consider that the media’s moralistic biases can backfire. After absorbing the progressive policies elevated during the 2020 Democratic primaries and then the content and tactics of the post-May street protests, it looks as if America’s voters, apart from their one-off presidential decision, decided to give the Democratic Party a timeout.

What happens next with Donald Trump is beyond human understanding. But the 2020 election results in toto have given the party a historic opportunity—if it can keep it.

Optimism? Why?

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