Barring a Christmas miracle from the Supreme Court, it’s looking like Joe Biden will keep his electoral lead and end up the president come Jan. 20.
But that victory for Biden will be a “lonely” one, according to a new Washington Examiner editorial, which argues that “voters punished the Pelosi Democrats” at the ballot box this year by flipping “about a dozen seats” in the lower chamber red.
While a few House seats remain undecided almost a month after the election, it looks like Democrats, on track to be led once again by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), will hold 223 seats to Republicans’ 212.
According to the Examiner, that means only six Democrats need to defect from any legislation for it to fail — the slimmest margin of majority in the lower chamber in decades.
Moving to the right
Clearly, the Examiner‘s editorial board wrote Saturday, Democrat voters were shaken by the party’s wild swing leftward over the last few years. Even as the supposedly moderate candidate, Biden campaigned on spending $2 trillion on elements of the Green New Deal and even vaguely supported defunding police.
Many Democrat members of Congress went even further left, the Examiner noted, and it cost them re-election. “The party of ‘defund the police,’ ‘zero deportations,’ and urban mobs in Portland, Minneapolis, and elsewhere proved a tough sell to voters,” the Examiner‘s editors wrote.
“The louder ‘the Squad’ of socialists squawked…the more attractive the Republican candidates became in swing districts,” the editors added. “Voters’ priorities just weren’t what Democrats thought.”
That was true even in California, where not only did Republicans pick up at least three seats in the House, but voters also supported distinctly conservative ballot initiatives like protecting gig workers and rejecting race-based affirmative action in state hiring practices, as CapRadio reported.
What’s more, it’s still possible that not a single Republican incumbent will lose their seat in the lower chamber, the Examiner‘s editors wrote Saturday; so far, all GOP House incumbents who ran for re-election have won their races.
A look ahead
Paramount among Pelosi and her Democratic House cohorts’ sins in the eyes of voters seemed to be her blatant obstruction of further coronavirus relief as a way to avoid President Donald Trump getting credit and bolstering his approval rating, the Examiner‘s editors argued. In addition, voters with a slightly longer memory saw the Democrats’ insistence on impeaching Trump for “something,” even without any semblance of cause, as particularly egregious, the editors said.
These and other perceived sins almost lost Democrats the majority in the House in 2020, and it is widely thought that a Biden administration will leave Republicans in a position to retake the majority in 2022.
Indeed, Democrats may have come out of the 2020 elections with slim victories, but they’ll be short-lived. Pelosi and company better enjoy being in control while it lasts.
The post Editorial: Voters abandoned 'Pelosi Democrats' at the ballot box this year first appeared on Conservative Institute.
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