Know so far.....

What we know so far

Sarah Isgur

Two takeaways so far:

First, the old Republican party of limited government and fiscal discipline is officially dead. There was no repudiation of Donald Trump -- neither his character nor his policies -- tonight. In fact, one of the biggest takeaways is that, but for the pandemic, it seems very likely that Trump would have been easily reelected with a pre-March economy.

Many Republican Senate candidates appear to have been reelected on the President's coattails. Both parties will focus on what this realignment means as it will have dramatic effects on future candidate recruitment efforts and almost certainly ends the conversation around the kinds of sweeping changes Democrats were hoping for, such as adding justices to the Supreme Court.

Second, for the first time in modern history, we were able to study the outcome of two asymmetrical campaign strategies. Both campaigns focused on turning out their voters, but despite raising more money than the Trump campaign, the Biden campaign spent almost none of it on a traditional ground game. If Biden loses -- and even if he wins -- we may have just learned a valuable lesson about the importance of voter registration drives and door knocking programs.