US Election 2020: Biden has achieved his No. 1 campaign promise: Beat Trump. Now what?

When Joe Biden steps into the Oval Office in January, he will already have fulfilled his No. 1 campaign pledge: to oust President Trump.
That likely will turn out to have been the easy part. It will be much harder for Biden to deliver on his broader promises to push far-reaching progressive initiatives to address the health, economic and social crises besetting the nation.
Senate Republicans are poised to deep-six Biden’s agenda in Congress, whether they keep control or Democrats eke out a one-vote majority. Biden’s party is already roiled by competing demands from anxious centrists and restless progressives. The broad, ideologically diverse coalition that united behind Biden out of disgust for Trump is quickly fracturing.
Biden’s much-vaunted experience and willingness to work across party lines will be put to an immediate test as he navigates a nation further polarized in the Trump era.
The campaign season party truce that spared Biden from sniping progressives who wanted a bolder agenda and centrists who worried he was drifting too far left is breaking down amid finger-pointing over disappointing down-ballot results. The sides already are jostling over decisions Biden must make on personnel, strategy and policy as his administration takes shape.
Democrats lost seats in their House majority, an unusual outcome for a party that won the White House. Their high hopes for winning a majority in the Senate have nearly vanished — Democrats’ remaining chance is to win two runoff elections for Senate seats in Georgia on Jan. 5, a long shot.
Still, Biden and his running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, are undeterred from moving quickly on an ambitious agenda that they say the perilous times demand.
Bernstein pointed to two areas where voter frustration across party lines creates an opportunity for the new administration to move quickly: COVID-19 is still killing more than 800 Americans a day as fresh virus outbreaks multiply across the globe, and the U.S. economy is struggling to recover, with unemployment still twice what it was a year ago. Both problems have spotlighted racial inequities, economic and health-related, that together with incidents of police brutality sent protesters to the streets this year by the millions.
Biden has campaigned on policies designed to address not just current health and economic crises but also the underlying inequities that predated the pandemic. The measures include increasing the minimum wage, political reform and expanding Obamacare and Medicare.
Yet even as the president-elect channels Franklin D. Roosevelt with big plans and ambitions amid crises, he doesn’t have the voter mandate or the congressional votes to spare that Roosevelt did.
As Biden looks for a way to work with Republicans, he will be navigating the differences in a Democratic Party already looking past him: Biden has said he would be a transitional leader, and the internal fight for the party’s future has already begun.
Even as progressive leaders have bristled at talk of recruiting Republicans to the Cabinet, and at Biden’s persistent efforts during the campaign to keep daylight between himself and the left, they see big opportunities in the agenda he has committed to push.
If faced with a Republican Senate majority, Biden may be tempted to default to a centrist, pragmatic approach more natural to him before he tacked to the left in the Democratic primary and in the face of the pandemic.
If Democrats had control of the House and Senate, the debate would be “between far left and center left about how big to go; that might be harder for him,” said Lanae Erickson, a vice president of Third Way, a centrist Democratic group. But if Republicans run the Senate, “the question is how big Republicans will let him go. It’s no longer an intraparty argument.’’
That could mean choosing issues like a minimum wage increase or an infrastructure program, then trying to build political pressure in Senate Republicans’ home states.
Democrats have much at stake in Biden’s ability to have a consequential presidency, after an election that mobilized a record numbers of voters. If Congress is uncooperative, Biden will be under heavy pressure to use the tools of presidential power — executive orders, regulatory actions and the bully pulpit — as aggressively as Trump did.
But Biden will also have to keep the support of moderate Democratic senators, including Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Democrats from purple and even red states see opportunity after so many Republican and independent voters supported Biden, who promised collaboration and to govern from the center.
Biden’s balancing act may provide an opening to progressives who are not the most famous firebrands, think Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, but instead are behind-the-scenes coalition builders — lawmakers such as Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown or California Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) and Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles).
Khanna says he sees a lot to like in Biden’s blueprint for governing, and potential to use it as a springboard for more ambitious plans down the line.