In the wake of Joe Biden’s clinching the U.S. presidency Saturday, Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian’s Sunday debriefing event – titled “What Just Happened and What Happens Next?” – featured Democratic leaders giddy with optimism.
Simitian’s 16th annual Community Conversation, held via Zoom, included former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla and senior Lincoln Project adviser Stuart Stevens. The event drew approximately 575 registrants.
Padilla was a late replacement for another scheduled guest, U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna. Simitian, a Democrat, serves as supervisor for District 5, which includes Los Altos, Los Altos Hills and Mountain View.
Given that Granholm, Padilla and Stevens, a former Republican campaign strategist, are all Democrats, their reactions to Biden’s victory ranged from joy to hope for the party, both in the near and longer term.
“We are counting our blessings in California – things ran smoother than even we could have hoped for,” said Padilla, whose office oversees state elections.
He noted that voters cast a record-high 17 million ballots safely and securely, with both vote-by-mail and in-person processes running smoothly due to months of planning and preparation.
Padilla noted that rules in other states that either complicate the voting process or prohibit early vote counts before Election Day, led to numerous counting delays. As of Monday, votes in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona were still being counted.
‘A good day’
Simitian tried to play devil’s advocate, asking rhetorically, “Did anything really happen?” The “blue wave” Democrats expected would help them take the House and the Senate never materialized, he said, and in fact, the Democrats lost seats in the House.
“The executive branch is a really big deal,” said Granholm, who was a two-term governor from 2003 to 2011. “The tone shift (from Donald Trump to Biden) is just massive. This notion of reaching across the aisle is shocking after four years of everyday divisiveness.”
“I’m with the governor on this,” said Stevens, whose disillusionment with the Republican Party culminated in his new book, “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump” (Random House, 2020). “I think people forget how hard it is to beat an incumbent president. The Biden campaign is going to go down as one of the most disciplined and best run of our time. At end of the day, Joe Biden’s going to get more votes than anybody. (He) flipped, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nebraska (second district) and Georgia – that’s like a good day. I think it’s the slow count that’s made it seem less overwhelming.”
Granholm, now a political adviser and law professor at UC Berkeley, was confident that the Democrats could also take the two run-off elections in Georgia in January that would give the party an edge in the Senate.
“It will take some heavy lifting, however, it’s not impossible,” she said, noting she would make the point to Georgia voters that “this is all about an agenda that helps you – if you want to see a $15 minimum wage, for example, you’re not going to get it if the Senate is in control of Mitch McConnell.”
In analyzing what worked for Biden, Granholm pointed to his campaign’s hard work of winning back people who had voted for Barack Obama but switched to Trump in 2016 over economic frustrations. She described “kitchen-table conversations” with voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania with a “two-parts offense, one-part defense” approach.
“Our goal was to cut into (Trump’s) margins while increasing turnout and registration,” she said. “We did both of these jobs.”
Hot-button issues
Simitian asked his panel what they felt were key issues that may have decided the presidency. The pandemic was on everyone’s list, but the social unrest this year and the exposure of systemic racism also played a role. Granholm noted “decency and compassion” made a difference “versus the horrible character of Donald Trump.”
“My 5-year-old asked (when Biden was declared the winner), ‘Does that mean Joe Biden can let the kids that Donald Trump put in cages go back to their parents?’” Padilla said. “When a 5 year-old is thinking that way, what does that say?”
The panel also touched on the Latino impact on the election. Although much election-night focus went into the Cuban influence tipping Florida in Trump’s favor, Padilla emphasized the great diversity in the Latino demographic and how much of it made the difference in Biden’s win.
“If it weren’t for Latino voters, Joe Biden would not be president,” he said.
Padilla is one of the names Gov. Gavin Newsom is considering to replace Vice President-elect Kamala Harris in the U.S. Senate. Padilla said it was “an honor” to be considered but offered no further comment.
Just as frustration with job losses led to a Trump victory four years ago, Granholm said people were won over by Biden’s pledge to manufacture products and create jobs in the U.S. She believes Biden can both generate more U.S. jobs and address climate change by focusing on the “trillions of dollars” to be had in creating clean energy products.
“The effect of Biden-Harris leading this country is just incalculable,” Stevens said. “The way the world looks now and the way it’s going to look in four months is going to be just so very, very different. And I think it’s going to make it much more difficult for Republicans who are going to have to somehow crawl out of this hole Trump created, they created, allowing themselves to be co-opted by enabling Trump.”
Stevens, who worked on the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, was not hopeful about the future of the Republican Party, despite Trump receiving more than 70 million votes for president and apparent GOP gains in the U.S. House. He felt the Democrats, like them or not, have “coherent” messages while Republicans do not.
“Are we going to be the only (industrialized) country in 10 years without national health insurance?” he asked. “Republicans are just going to say no. … I think the future of the national Republican Party, for the next decade or so, is a slow erosion of what happened to the Republican Party in California – increasingly irrelevant in any public policy decision. That’s our future unless the party changes – and there’s absolutely no desire to change.”
