It's surprising that anyone could look at the campaign Biden just ran and miss the degree to which it actually did internalize and act on the need to disarm Trump's version of economic populism. 1/
https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/1327624162215604226
Biden managed the debates over China, trade, and international supply lines, by seizing on the openings provided by Trump's epic failures on all those fronts. The Covid debate, in a surprise that still hasn't been fully appreciated, created those openings. 2/
Biden also was able to manage both immigration and the racial protests without any retreat -- in fact, with the opposite of a retreat -- in a way that didn't end up causing destructive losses of white voters. If anything, they may have even helped with educated whites. 3/
Trump's plutocratic sellout on other issues important to the supposedly populist GOP base also *mattered.* Biden was favored by big margins on health care and on "cares about people like you." 4/
While Biden is obviously not Bernie, he appropriated some of the Bernie/Warren progressive populist agenda. He ran on big stimulus spending, including on job creation, and on tax hikes on the rich. That's a response to both Trump's populism and his subsequent sellout of it. 5/
What all this means re D downballot losses is hard to say. But if Trump is deemed more populist than Rs, why would his populism explain D losses? Either way, given nature of Biden's win the idea that the D case against Trump didn't adapt to this new landscape is unpersuasive. 6/6
Adding: Trump's disasters on China and trade became issues in their own right. Covid opened the way for a critique on China and on Trump's failure to manage supply chains, but Biden's ability to manage those issues turned on those failures, separate and apart from Covid.
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Among pundits who marvel at the success of Trump's economic populism in 2016, there's a baffling refusal to reckon with how the catastrophic failures his agenda produce *in practice,* on China, trade and, yes, *immigration,* turned these issues into liabilities for him. b/b
When Dems win, pundits never want to say they won the argument. Same in 2012: Pundits pivoted from saying "this election is a grand ideological choice about our future" to saying "Obama's victory was so narrow that it says nothing about who won the ideological argument." FIN
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