Why Biden should go small
Most new presidents sweep into office claiming a “mandate” from voters to shake things up. Then they spend their first year in office pushing new policies meant to send the country in a fresh direction.
Incoming President Joe Biden might be wise to take the opposite approach, and go small instead of big. Voters did not give Biden a mandate, normally defined as commanding victory indicating widespread hope for a fresh start. Biden did better than Trump in 2016. His electoral vote tally could end up at 306, the same as Trump during the last election. And unlike Trump, Biden will win the popular vote too, leaving no doubt about the legitimacy of his election.
But Biden still won by very small margins in key states–less than 1% in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, if current tallies hold. Voters in Maine chose Biden for president but sent Republican Sen. Susan Collins back for another term, the sort or ticket-splitting that doesn’t typically happen in a sweep. Down-ballot candidates often ride the “coattails” of the president in a partisan rout, but so far, Democrats have only flipped one Senate seat. Republicans need to win just one of two runoff contests in Georgia to keep control of the Senate, meaning Biden is likely to govern with a split Congress.
Trump barnstormed into office in 2017 determined to undo as much of his predecessor Barack Obama’s agenda as he could. That is, arguably, one reason Trump lost in 2020. For all the hostile partisanship in America, many voters dislike the nauseating circularity of tribal warfare in which two ideological groups are constantly trying to vanquish each other. Biden won moderates with his promise to unify rather than divide, to govern for all Americans rather than just for the faction in his corner.
Sure, that’s treacly campaign fodder at odds with the dirty pool required to thrive inside the Beltway. But it’s also in Biden’s interest, and his fellow Democrats’, to restore calm, leave Trump voters unprovoked and let the country argue over sports or Netflix shows for a while, instead of politics.
Biden has made clear he’ll use executive orders, as Trump did, to dial back Trump policies on immigration, energy, climate policy and other things. And he’ll do it right away. That will roil the Trump base, who will lather themselves into fresh outrage about socialists building windmills and immigrants taking their jobs. But only some of the 71 million Americans who voted for Trump are these hard-core loyalists. Others won’t care all that much about Biden’s orders, which will have limited effect, anyway. And Biden doesn’t have to trumpet every executive order he signs with multimedia fanfare, the way Trump does. He can pursue executive action relatively quietly, which would satisfy his own core supporters without changing much that typical voters are likely to notice in their own lives.