The biggest mistake pundits on the left and right seem to be making is assuming that these election results have much of anything to do with policy preferences.

The GOP didn’t even bother putting out a new platform this year! They just pledged allegiance to Donald Trump, whose policy preferences are... inconsistent, let’s say. Trump had no policy message or specific president promises. It was just dominance politics and fuck the libs.

Biden did put forward a series of policy goals but overwhelmingly, people who voted for him said they were voting AGAINST his opponent. This election was a referendum on who we are, not the specifics of what we want. And it turns out that who we are is... well, it’s not great.

So is this election evidence that the US is more conservative than we thought? I mean, kind of, if “conservative” means “partisan reactionary Republicans.” But this really doesn’t tell us much about divisions over policy, because one party has stopped talking about policy.

Which doesn’t mean “Bernie would have won” (probably not!). It does mean that “Democrats need to move right if they want to win in the future” is a really bad takeaway from what happened here.