The words “unprecedented,” “historic” and “never seen before” have all been used in public and in Congress, in Washington D.C., and throughout the country this past year in response to all the unexpected events brought on by the COVID-19 global pandemic and the highly contentious U.S. presidential election in our highly polarized and partisan country. And yet…the results are the most surprising of all. At the time of this writing in mid-November 2020, a middling center seems to have prevailed as the election victor. And vaccines to immunize the country and the world against the virus seem to be on the verge of acceptance just as the second surge hits. 

Nothing Was Predicted

Almost nothing that occurred this year was predicted or polled correctly by D.C. pundits and pollsters, experts and VIPS both conservative and liberal.  Certainly not the coronavirus pandemic and certainly not the election.   

COVID-19 became particularly real for us in Georgetown, D.C., when our popular pastor of the venerable Christ Church on O St. was the first victim early in March. Hospitalized and on ventilators, he emailed his more than 500 parishioners who had taken communion the Sunday before and told them to self-isolate. Two became sick.  The D.C. mayor closed the city and equipped the entire convention center as a medical emergency arena. To date, 19,064 Washingtonians have been infected, 660 have died (although the pastor and all parishioners recovered), the schools remain closed and the few restaurants struggling to remain in business in the record moderate fall temperatures, are looking gloomily at how to winterize their outdoor spaces. Dr. Anthony Fauci’s neighbors in NW D.C. have put up love signs around his home, and most everyone waits for him to say when the vaccine will be good to go. The end could be in sight.  

And so, it was in D.C. with the election. Naturally, we who live here are obsessed with it even though the Constitution grants us no congressional nor senatorial seats and although 95% of the district’s electorate votes for the Democratic presidential candidate every time.  Still we are the center of the partisan demonstrations and protests, and the destination and temporary residence of all the partisan warriors. And as a former black majority city, African American history is a daily reality. Georgetown alone experienced the ransacking of 58 stores in June after Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Downtown D.C. and Georgetown boarded up almost all buildings before the election in case of riots. So, the mixed results of the 2020 election so far have been perplexing to Washingtonians. 

Confusing Outcomes 

It seems that what happened in the presidential election right now is an almost perfect compromise, where both parties won and lost significant parts. The nice guy centrist, former senator and Vice President Joseph Biden from Delaware (who beat over 20 competitors in the primary, many leaning to his left in politics), won the presidential election over the unconventional, often loud-mouthed, populist anti-establishment Republican, New York City businessman Donald Trump (who in 2016 beat almost 20 competitors who leaned further right than he). Both won an unprecedented number of votes in the largest election voter turnout ever.  Just as surprising, the “minority voting bloc” that seems to have influenced the election the most, was the one almost ignored until the last few weeks – Latinos. Throughout the country, heritage Hispanic citizens participated in the election both as voters and candidates in historic numbers, as well as voted in larger percentages than ever before for Republican candidates (about 34% nationwide at last count).   

 As a result, the Democratic majority in the House seems to have shrunk significantly, and the Republican dominance of the Senate may certify at best a one or two majority come January. With the unexpected death of revered liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September and the rapid vote to replace her with conservative Amy Coney Barrett before the Nov. 3 election, the SCOTUS leaning moved decidedly right.  Meanwhile, President-Elect Biden’s choices for his cabinet and executive legislative branch secretaries appear to favor experienced and center-left old hands from the Obama and Clinton administrations. It is unclear what the portfolio of Vice President Kamala Harris – the first woman and mixed-race vice president – will be or if she even will get to select her own staff.  None of the majorities in the state legislators changed. Census counts that were delayed and largely remote due to the pandemic restrictions probably will result in a few redistricting changes that mainly favor Republican-led states. 

 In other words, the center left and right may have come to a draw in an unusual way.  It seems that voters in many swing states “split their tickets” as never before. Many voted for the nice Democrat Presidential candidate Biden, while voting in stable numbers for solid conservative legislators in a plurality of states. At the same time, voters refuted the Republican president’s often rude behavior and repudiated the Democratic seemingly far left agenda that in particular called for defunding the police. 

What Is The Impact? 

The impact of this mix is upending all predictions for a Democratic progressive agenda. It is likely that political splitting could force legislators and executive branch administrators to negotiate from positions of mutual dependence. Some say this signals changes in attitudes in the electorate. 

 Suddenly, it is becoming almost a mantra for political pundits from both the left and the right to claim in their election analysis that “the Latino vote isn’t monolithic.” Doubtless this statement is amusing to all involved with the wonderful complexity and rich diversity of Hispanic heritage people throughout the United States. Of course, U.S. Latino voters aren’t monolithic. Is any group really?  Is the woman’s vote really monolithic?  Is the Black vote?  Perhaps that glass ceiling that is breaking above the head of our first woman vice president is breaking the ceiling for all labeled monolithic group voters and candidates.  After all, Harris is the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, who immigrated to the United States as medical students and raised her in French-speaking Quebec Canada before she attended Howard University – the premier historic black college in Washington D.C., and married a man of Jewish faith. 

The breaking of the monolithic group glass ceiling could also upend a basic process of the America university admissions system – an unexpressed diversity quota based on race and ethnicity. The college admissions process was already undergoing extreme stress before 2020.  The admissions bribery scandals, challenges to SAT and other admissions tests and the debilitating life-long student debt crisis already were undermining the idea of an elite four-year college for all. In November, challenges to race-based affirmative action programs from the 1960s, culminated as voters in California agreed to ban the program they believed to have become obsolete. In the next year or so, SCOTUS will likely consider an affirmative action case to end the program or change its focus to economic diversity, not race mixtures.   

2020 has been a tumultuous year.  It could be followed by ones of less extremism, more equity and equanimity in our pluralistic nation. Maybe even Washington D.C., will vote for more Republicans. 

Margaret (Peggy Sands) Orchowski is the Credentialed Congressional Correspondent, Washington D.C., for The Hispanic Outlook Magazine and Senior Correspondent for The Georgetowner (Peggy Sands)  peggy@georgetowner.com  

She is author of “The Law That Changed The Face of America: The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965” (Rowman & Littlefield 2015);  and “Immigration and the American Dream: Battling the Political Hype and Hysteria” (Rowman & Littlefield Oct. 2008)