WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 05th November, 2020) The Democrats' failure to meet expectations in the 2020 US election, especially within key minority demographics, has shined a light on the party's structural and ideological weaknesses, analysts told Sputnik.
Although Biden is a few electoral votes away from winning the presidency, he fell below expectations set by pre-election surveys that had him leading in ten of 12 swing states. Moreover, the Democratic Party was highly expected to seize control of the Senate on Tuesday and gain up to 10 seats in the House - a so-called "blue wave" that never materialized.
Biden as of Wednesday evening had secured only 264 electoral votes, 6 short of the bare minimum 270 needed to win the election. Before the election, most polls predicted that he might secure more than 300 electoral votes.
Biden's underperformance among several minority demographics was surprising given the number of riots that erupted during President Donald Trump's first term over racial tensions.
Trump boosted his share of the Black vote by 4 percentage points in this year's election versus 2016, Edison Research exit polls revealed, Newsweek said Wednesday. The polls also showed Trump improved his standing among Hispanics and Asians.
"I am surprised by the lack of a 'blue wave' as many pundits predicted especially in Senate races in Maine, Iowa and South Carolina," California State University Emeritus Professor of politics Beau Grosscup told Sputnik.
Trump's disastrous response to the pandemic and "herd immunity strategy" apparently failed to convince many voters in Florida and Texas to abandon the president, he added.
Grosscup also observed that African-American support for Biden had also fallen short of what was generally expected, Grosscup said.
Win or lose, Trump was doing better than analysts had expected as even in the run-in to the election his own advisers had privately expressed gloom and doom, Grosscup recalled.
During the Democratic Party's presidential Primary race, Biden faced criticism from some on the left for not embracing more progressive policies on issues related to law enforcement and healthcare.
Political commentator Professor John Walsh told Sputnik the performance testified to deep structural problems in the party and its ideology.
"What further testimony do we need to the total rot in the Democratic Party. It has nothing to offer the American people, not peace but more wars, not Medicare for All, but a profoundly inadequate health care system," he said.
The US media and opinion poll industries had both also been exposed for the second national election in succession as being utterly incompetent and corrupt in their bias against Trump, Walsh stated.
"This is the second time that the polling and punditry were wildly off the mark. That should be enough to point to corruption in both. The punditry is as out of touch with the people as the pollsters," he said.
