First, if you are planning to rely on legislative accomplishments and improving conditions to prevail over right-wing culture war politics in a year without Trump at the top of the GOP ticket, you had better have some actual accomplishments to crow about.
Second, Trump is a wasting asset for the Democrats in elections in which the GOP candidate keeps his distance from the man on golf cart.
Third, as I have noted in several recent posts, it is far from clear that the public as a whole embraces the notion of transitioning from the dollar store economy to a more worker-friendly version, or from fossil fuels to more expensive and less reliable clean energy. The Democrats have a major selling job to do on these points. They didn’t win on those issues in 2020, but they might have lost on them yesterday.
Fourth, Joe Manchin is going to dig in even more, and the left has no leverage over him.
Finally, the election, of course, wasn’t rigged. Will that stop the right from saying that it was? Of course not!