Hillary Clinton must have had a sense of deja vu. In 2016, the blue wall collapsed, albeit by very small margins. In 2020, under completely different circumstances, the wall survived–barely. With the exception of Georgia, Arizona, and the turnout, in spite of the pandemic, the recession, and the four years of Trump outrages, we were running basically the same election.
Would the result have been more impressive if Biden had run a more energetic and ideological campaign? The evidence available to us says no. Biden either ran even with, or outperformed, the Democratic candidates for the Senate in the swing states. The only exception was Montana, and nobody is going to suggest that running a more progressive campaign would have helped him there.
Choosing Biden blunted, to the maximum extent possible, the GOP’s efforts to run a campaign based on white identity interests and hatred of socialism. As it was, they still ran the same campaign, but directed it against AOC and the rioters, not Biden. The degree of success that they had should be, but probably won’t be, a stark message to the left.