>>17490965
>biden had zero coattails!
>- Presidential coattails is the ability of a presidential candidate to bring out supporters who then vote for his party's candidates for other offices. In effect, the other candidates are said to ride on his coattails.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/11/daily-202-biden-won-with-weakest-coattails-60-years-that-could-make-him-dependent-gop-senators/
The Daily 202: Biden won with the weakest coattails in 60 years. That could make him dependent on GOP senators.
washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/11/daily-202-biden-won-with-weakest-coattails-60-years-that-could-make-him-dependent-gop-senators
November 11, 2020
This article was published more than 2 years ago
PowerPost
Analysis by James Hohmann
Columnist |
November 11, 2020 at 10:43 a.m. EST
with Mariana Alfaro
WILMINGTON, Del. – President-elect Joe Biden said Tuesday that he hopes to name a couple of Cabinet secretaries before Thanksgiving, but first he wants to talk with Mitch McConnell to gauge whom Republicans would help confirm. Around the same time, the Senate majority leader suggested he may not even acknowledge Biden’s victory for several more weeks.
“I haven’t had a chance to speak to Mitch,” Biden told reporters at the Queen theater here. “My expectation is that I will do that in the not-too-distant future. I think that the whole Republican Party has been put in a position, with a few notable exceptions, of being mildly intimidated by the sitting president.”
Biden, 77, has worked with McConnell, 78, since the Kentucky Republican was elected in 1984. The president-elect said he expects the majority leader to share which potential nominees Republicans could support and whom they would try to block. “That's a negotiation that I'm sure we'll have,” Biden said. “We'll just work this out. … I am not a pessimist.”
But the GOP leadership’s refusal to congratulate Biden and willingness to indulge what many privately admit are President Trump’s baseless fantasies of widespread fraud foreshadow how constrained Biden is likely to find himself next year.
McConnell, unanimously reelected by Senate Republicans as their leader on Tuesday, said at his own news conference that legal challenges by Trump are “no reason for alarm” and won’t prevent a new administration, “if there is one,” from taking office. “Until the electoral college votes, anyone who’s running for office can exhaust concerns about counting in any court of appropriate jurisdiction,” he said. “At some point here, we’ll find out, finally, who was certified in each of these states, and the electoral college will determine the winner, and that person will be sworn in on January 20th.”
Assuming Republicans maintain control of the Senate by winning one or both of the runoffs in Georgia on Jan. 5, which many strategists in both parties expect them to pull off, Biden would be the first president since George H.W. Bush in 1989 to take office without controlling both chambers of Congress. In fact, Biden would be the first Democratic president since Grover Cleveland in 1885 to take office with his party not in control of both chambers.
Biden received more votes – 77.3 million – than any other candidate for public office in American history. With the highest levels of turnout since 1900, he beat Trump by more than 5 million votes nationwide, and that number is expected to grow as California continues to count its ballots. Biden has garnered a higher percentage of the popular vote – 50.8 percent – than any challenger to an incumbent since Franklin Roosevelt defeated President Herbert Hoover in 1932, narrowly edging out Ronald Reagan’s share of the vote in 1980 when he beat Jimmy Carter.
But Biden also appears to have won the presidency with the weakest House coattails of any president since John F. Kennedy in 1960. Republican strategist Bruce Mehlman illustrated this dynamic with these two charts in a 48-slide PowerPoint deck that he shared Tuesday with clients of his lobbying firm:
A full week after Election Day, the Associated Press finally projected Tuesday that Democrats will retain enough seats to hold the House but counting still continues in several districts, so we cannot say definitively yet just how many seats they lost. But Democrats had expected to gain several. They won two open seats but knocked off no incumbent Republicans. Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.) is stepping aside as Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman amid intense finger-pointing between moderates and liberals about who is to blame.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will preside over the narrowest House majority of any leader in either party in 18 years. This gives her less leverage and makes it harder to pass big bills. Many Republican operatives will be single-mindedly fixated for the next two years on taking control of the House. If history is any guide, it is very winnable.