It’s not like we didn’t see this coming.
As the 2020 election process unfolded, Democrats came to an inexorable conclusion: They could very plausibly take the White House and the Senate, and they could plausibly hold the House, but their victories in those three areas wouldn’t be resounding or historic.
Whoever was nominated, if they won, would win modestly. Once it became clear the nominee was Joe Biden, the polls showed him consistently ahead — but every time he’d start opening up a big lead nationally, it’d snap back like a rubber band. In swing states, that lead was less consistent and considerably smaller, when it existed at all. There was going to be no repudiation of the Republicans or Trumpism.
And most importantly, they weren’t going to get anything near the 60 votes they would need in the Senate to end the filibuster. There was no landslide on tap, no resounding defeat that would force moderate Republicans, tails between their elephantine legs, to vote with them.
Thus, the drum began to be banged, and hard: End the filibuster. Mind you, the first drum majors in the band were on the left fringe. In the Democratic field, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and billionaire tartan-tie enthusiast Tom Steyer were the first candidates whose poll numbers didn’t have to be measured with electron microscopy to embrace it.
