The president-elect insists he can work with Republicans. Some fellow Democrats have doubts.
The dissonance between the first and second halves of Joe Biden’s landmark speech this week encapsulates a central strategic challenge he’ll face as president. During his victory speech on Monday, following the Electoral College vote, Biden denounced more forcefully than ever before the Republican Party’s legal maneuvers to overturn his win, arguing that they constituted an effort “to wipe out the votes of more than 20 million Americans… a position so extreme, we’ve never seen it before.” Yet in the speech’s final sections, Biden pivoted to a more familiar message, promising to “turn the page” on these skirmishes and insisting that he’s “convinced we can work together for the good of the nation.” The big question his remarks raise is whether the Republican Party that Biden described in the speech’s first half is truly open to the kind of cooperation and partnership he promised in the second. The answer is already dividing centrists—who believe that Biden has no choice but to seek agreements with congressional Republicans—from progressives, who fear that he will sap his momentum and demoralize his coalition if he spends weeks on what could prove to be fruitless negotiations over COVID-19 relief and other subjects. The divide is not only ideological but generational too: Compared with Biden, who came of age in the more collegial Senate of the 1970s and ’80s, younger congressional Democrats forged by the unrelenting partisan warfare of the modern Congress—a group some Democrats think includes Vice President–elect Kamala Harris—are generally less optimistic about finding common cause with Republicans. Biden will obviously need to be more cooperative with Republicans if the GOP maintains its Senate majority than if Democrats control the chamber by winning both of the Senate runoffs in Georgia next month. But even if Democrats achieve a narrow 50–50 majority (with Harris casting the tie-breaking vote), Biden will face ongoing questions about how much he’ll compromise his agenda in order to win the 60 votes required to pass most legislation. Biden’s recent criticism of the GOP is notable because the president-elect has generally downplayed Donald Trump’s attempts to subvert the election while emphasizing his own optimism about future cooperation. Biden aides told me that his priority has been to project his victory’s inevitability, and to avoid giving what one top adviser called “any additional lift or credibility” to Trump’s groundless claims of election fraud, even as more Republicans have embraced them. But that choice has come with what some Democrats see as a serious consequence: a failure to alert the public to the magnitude of the president’s assault on a democratic election, and to the broad willingness inside the GOP to join him. The president-elect struck a different tone in Monday’s speech, when he condemned a Texas lawsuit to toss out the election results in four swing states where he won—litigation endorsed by about two-thirds of both GOP House members and Republican state attorneys general. Appearing on behalf of the Democratic Senate candidates in Georgia on Tuesday, Biden kept the pressure on, lashing the state’s two GOP senators for endorsing the lawsuit, which would have invalidated the votes of nearly 5 million of their own constituents. That messaging marked a subtle but significant departure from Biden’s usual language during the campaign, when he mostly presented Trump as an aberration within the GOP, and repeatedly predicted that once he was defeated, more in the party would return to centrist dealmaking. Biden’s broad criticism of Republicans on Monday may have been his most candid acknowledgment yet that much of Trump’s party has followed him over the past four years toward more radical positions, particularly by abetting his serial assaults on the rule of law. But the senior Biden adviser said that in targeting the GOP’s postelection actions, the president-elect’s goal was not “trying to score points against Republicans” or branding them as anti-small-d democratic.
