FIVE PAGES OF COMMENT

Our expanded Saturday lineup includes Barbara Kay in defence of the female athlete, as well as Rex Murphy, Conrad Black and Fr. Raymond de Souza on the meaning of Trump's (possible) loss.

Presuming that Joe Biden will prevail in the election, American voters deserve praise for managing, with surgical precision, to remove a malignancy with minimal damage to the body politic.

I wrote four years ago that Donald Trump's mad genius was to apply the successful celebrity style of Gorgeous George, Muhammad Ali, professional wrestling and reality television to electoral politics. That was, and remains, true, but it also, as president George W. Bush was wont to say, “misunderestimated” him.

Trump put legitimate and significant policy changes on the table and shifted conservative politics from a long-term losing proposition to a long-term winning proposition. For that, both his country and his party will thank him, even as there is relief that he will now depart, loudly or quietly. (Is there any doubt about which he will choose?)

Some 145 million voters managed to achieve five remarkable results simultaneously.

First, a shift from exhausting outrage in the White House to tranquillity and restraint. Second, to check radical initiatives on the other side, setting up a political landscape perfectly suited to Biden. Third, to retain the heart of “Trumpism” without Trump, namely a concern for the beleaguered working class. Fourth, to move toward a less racially divisive politics. Fifth, to rebalance presidential politics toward a competitive future.

It is not possible to entirely separate the Trump agenda from the man himself, but American voters did the best they could.

Name-calling was a distasteful part of Trump's style, but his rhetorical shorthand was accurate.

“Crooked Hillary” was an extension of the corrupt Clinton machine, and “Sleepy Joe” did run a somnolent campaign. Trump thought that was a bug. It was actually a feature. “Sleepy Joe” may have been early to bed and late to rise, with a modest few hours of platitudinous campaigning in between, but that was attractive after four years of manic appearances and all-night tweeting.

The Democrats, with a wide array of candidates to choose from, stumbled into Biden, the archetypal timeserver with no deep principles or intense passions. Over five decades, he aimed always to be in the comfortable middle of his own party. He was for mass incarceration in the 1990s when president Bill Clinton was for it; he was for making the Bush tax cuts permanent nearly 20 years later, when president Barack Obama was in favour of it. Now, his party opposes both and so does he.

Yet in granting Biden the narrowest of margins, potentially keeping the Senate in Republican hands and reducing the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives — which was the greatest shock of the night — voters have made it impossible for any of the Democrats' radical progressive causes to proceed. Biden would have needed substantial majorities, not mere control, in both chambers given the likely defection of moderate Democrats from red states. Indeed, given the traditional losses an incumbent president faces during his first midterm election, Biden is looking at an entire term without sufficient congressional support.

That will suit Biden perfectly. Despite the more extravagant bits of his platform, he is not a radical and lacks the energy — not due to age, but because of his disposition and temperament — for such an agenda. Americans wanted to turn down the volume on this cacophonous presidency, and a new president who has little to say was the ideal mute button.

Biden, like many senators on both sides, has grown wealthy from a lifetime in public office by allying himself with moneyed special interests. Yet he never stopped presenting himself as the working-class kid from scrappy Scranton, Pa. Trump's signature contribution to American politics was to bring the workers of Scranton and elsewhere back to the centre of political concern, after a bipartisan Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama consensus neglected their interests in favour of a new economy that made less room for them. Biden should find continuing Trump's emphasis congenial, as it returns him to his political roots.

An honourable mention was earned by Black and Latino voters, who increased, if one might say, the diversity of their community's voting patterns. Given America's troubled history of racism, it is manifestly unhelpful to have one party as the “white” party and the other as the “minority” party. This year's campaign rhetoric accentuated that, though Trump insisted that his record was good for Black and Latino voters. Independent of the merits of that claim, that he improved his standing with those voters will hopefully lead to a less racially polarized electorate.

California has become an impregnable Democrat stronghold, with it alone providing the popular vote margins for both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Biden's four million (and growing) vote margin in California exceeds his national popular vote lead — i.e., without California, Biden would trail Trump in total votes. But California does matter, massively, and for the past five presidential cycles the wisdom has been that Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Florida and Texas would all become more like California, leading to a permanent Democratic lock on the Electoral College.

Nothing is permanent in politics, and the shifting basis for Trump's victory in 2016 and narrow loss in 2020 suggests that a competitive Electoral College will be maintained. It may even be that, as my colleague John Robson argued here, the long-term trends toward the Republicans from the '50s to the '80s, and toward the Democrats from the '90s until now, may be at a turning point again.

BIDEN REALLY NEEDED BIG MAJORITIES IN BOTH CHAMBERS.