DURING HIS FOUR-YEAR tenure, President Donald Trump has presided over – and to a large degree strategically stoked for political advantage – a bitterness and increasing division among the American electorate.
But even if Trump loses on Tuesday by a landslide, the partisanship that’s dominated politics in the United States may not exit the political theater with him, despite former Vice President Joe Biden‘s pledge to restore the soul of the nation. And if the partisanship and division remain, so could the gridlock in Washington. Trump could be gone, but not forgotten – and his legacy could be years of inaction.
“I fear we are stuck in this polarized time and I don’t see the end of that,” Barbara Perry, director of Presidential Studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, says. “But I don’t think that means we are stuck forever more in this model that Trump has created for our government.”
Perhaps recognizing as much, Biden has taken pains to establish himself as the candidate who can unite the country during one of the most politically divided times in modern history.
He promised to put country ahead of party earlier this month during a speech in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, at the site of one of most important battles of the Civil War and the backdrop President Abraham Lincoln would later use to deliver the Gettysburg Address, a speech that established a new trajectory for democracy in the country.
“Today, once again, we are a house divided,” Biden said, referencing Lincoln’s own words. “Too many Americans see our public life not as an arena for the mediation of our differences. Rather, they see it as an occasion for total, unrelenting partisan warfare. Instead of treating the other party as the opposition, we treat them as the enemy. This must end.”
If polls are to be believed, Biden’s message is working. Beyond polling consistently ahead of Trump nationally for months – sometimes even posting double digit leads – and leading in key battleground states, the former vice president is widely seen by registered voters as the candidate most capable of unifying the country.
Results from a survey published earlier this month by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center show that half of voters say they are confident in Biden to “bring the country closer together,” compared with just 30% who express confidence in Trump. The survey also found that voters view Biden much more positively than Trump for compassion, honesty and being a good role model.
But for all of Biden’s high-flying unification rhetoric, the possibility exists that things might not change all that much, even if the election turns out to be a referendum on the figurehead who generated a landscape of division.
For one, most of the moderates in Congress have been driven out, so the major partisan figureheads in both parties – folks like Sen. Tom Cotton and Rep. Jim Jordan in the GOP and Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez in the far-left corner for Democrats – will remain the faces of the far wings of each coalition.
Perhaps nothing symbolizes that dynamic more than the fact that more than two dozen candidates for Congress have endorsed or given credence to QAnon or promoted QAnon content online, according to the non-profit watchdog group Media Matters. At least one of them, Republican small-business owner Marjorie Taylor Greene, is likely to win in Georgia.
Meanwhile Biden has already faced pushback from some more liberal Democrats for suggesting that he’d be open to putting a Republican or two in his cabinet as a signal of his good faith effort to unite the country.
Complicating things further, while Democrats could take the Senate, they won’t get to the 60 votes they need to prevent a filibuster, potentially making it difficult for Biden to act on his priorities through legislation. Major partisan disputes about packing the Supreme Court or enacting a Green New Deal, for example, will continue to fester.
“It’s going to present a problem obviously,” Perry says. “You’re going to have polarized stalemates even with both houses of Congress in the hands of the Democrats.”
And then there remains the very real possibility that Trump himself could take up a position as the head of the misinformation machine.
“There is always going to be that specter of Trump out there and he is not going to follow the norm of recent years, where you had Bush 43 not criticizing him, or Obama not criticizing him until just very recently,” Perry says. “I cannot see Trump doing that with Biden, so Biden will have that on his back.”
Beyond the political hurdles there exists a major obstacle in the American electorate itself. For example, the same Pew survey that showed registered voters having more confidence in Biden to unify the country, also revealed how deeply entrenched their fears are of their party losing.
Nearly 90% of Trump supporters say that if Biden wins, it will lead to “lasting harm” for the country – the same percentage of Biden supporters who say a Trump victory would result in lasting harm. Moreover, for voters who support Trump or Biden, when asked to think about those who favor their opposing candidate, said they not only have different views on politics and policies, they also have “fundamental disagreements on core American values and goals.”
Indeed, while a plurality of Americans today identify as independent, analysts say there is more sunlight between the Democratic and Republican coalitions than ever before. And polls show Americans not only disagree, but they hate each other.
And that hate could continue even if Trump loses.
“I thought ‘Oh good, we turned a corner,’” Perry says, remembering the acceptance speech former President Barack Obama gave in Chicago in 2004, which centered on uniting the country.
“And of course we can never take that away. That’s a great pivot point in American history,” she says. “But now, with the benefit of these extra 12 years, we see there was a terrible blowback to that.”
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