Joe Biden must now listen to those disaffected with the political establishment

Editorial: The Democrats have neglected their old base for too long but Mr Biden has the opportunity to be a president for all Americans

Most immediately, Mr Biden will need to forge some sort of common purpose with Congress and the states and cities over how to combat Covid (AFP /Getty)

The Biden Revolution” is not a phrase that trots easily off the tongue. Even if, via some eventual resolution of Senate seats in Georgia, the prospective President Biden was able to rely on a Democrat-controlled Congress, neither his track record nor his campaign pledges presage much radicalism. 

Added to this, if the Republicans manage to hang on to their position in the Senate, Mr Biden will find himself constrained on his plans to rejoin the Paris climate accord, domestic emissions, the Iran nuclear deal, trade with China, reforming the Supreme Court, and much else.

On the other hand, he will find support across the aisle for rebuilding relationships with friends such as Mexico, South Korea, Canada and the European Union (with the UK and Brexit, alas, very much an afterthought).

Mr Biden will probably be almost as much of a protectionist as his predecessor, but he will at least not treat with contempt international bodies such as the World Trade Organisation, the World Health Organisation and Nato. Mr Biden will probably return to a more conventional version of the “two state solution” in the Middle East.  

Most immediately, Mr Biden will need to forge some sort of common purpose with Congress and the states and cities over how to combat Covid. That failure, after all, probably sealed Mr Trump’s fate.

Where Mr Biden should be able to make bipartisan, consensual progress across the nation is in restoring some decorum and dignity to the office of the presidency. Simply not being Donald Trump will go much of the way to achieving that. The moderators at Twitter will be much less busy.

If Mr Biden lives up to his promise to be president for all Americans he should also try to listen to those so disaffected with the political establishment, the “swamp” of Trumpian demonology, that they found themselves under the spell of Mr Trump. The Democrats have neglected their old base for too long.  

Indeed, Mr Trump managed to retain the loyalty of most of his base until the end, and even scored some progress in appealing to certain minority groups. Approaching 70 million Americans wanted four more years of President Trump, the largest absolute vote for a losing candidate (if that is where it ends up) in American history.  

Mr Trump might soon be gone, but Trumpism, the forces that gave rise to it and its adherents will still exert huge influence. The swing to the Democrats was hardly a landslide, being the rough mirror image of the Trump-Clinton arithmetic of 2016. American politics these days only shift at the margins of the relatively small group of voters prepared to switch sides. That essential truth means that Mr Biden will quietly leave untouched some of Mr Trump’s monuments, such as the Mexican wall and his renegotiated trade deals.  

There will be symbolic changes, too, heavy with meaning. A president judged by many to be a misogynist and a racist will be followed by a president ready to take the knee and, for the first time, a woman of colour as vice president of the United States. It is perfectly possible, though a little early, to speculate on a presidential campaign in 2024 fought by Donald Trump (looking for a comeback), and Kamala Harris hoping to make even more history.

For now though, the election of 2020 is not yet quite settled.