While I disagree with the pretense of the OP (I Still think that Michigan and PA matter when determining whether 2020 was closer than 2016), I still think the question of where Democrats go from 2020 is important.
I think it's right to see 2016 and 2020 as unusual elections, too. Trump is very difficult to gage, and so many white working class voters tie their white identity to Trump, it'll be interesting to see not having Trump on the ticket produces results more like 2012 and 2008 (where white working class voters really didn't feel the same attachment to John McCain and Mitt Romney, and this is even true in 2004, where GWB's re-election was more contingent on a broader coalition of voters than Trump's in 2016). Trump has an effect on the electorate unlike any candidate in generations, both for and against him... Though, about 6million more against him than for him.
The electoral college going forward is more than just subtracting or adding math and getting to 270. There are actual issues that inform the future. No state is bankable. I think more and more, Arizona is going to start to resemble New Mexico and Nevada. I wouldn't consider Georgia to be blue at all going forward, and that this election may be anathema for another 8 year. Demographically, though, I suspect that Georgia will begin to resemble North Carolina more so than it would resemble ... Alabama or South Carolina. North Carolina and Georgia have progressively blue suburbs, and NOrth Carolina may continue to look more like Virginia than it does South Carolina.
I'm more depressed about Ohio than just about anything. Ohio seems lost. Meanwhile, the North East is as democratic as it has ever been.
THe E.C. map still favors Republicans, and it will for ages, beyond where we can expect future political lines to be drawn, where celebrity candidates or celebrity-like candidates can still shake up an election. Trump was that celebrity-like candidate, but so was Obama in his affect on the electorate. It's hard to know what the norm is after the last 16 year, so if we look at demographic shiifts, they seem to be in Democrats' favor, even while the institutions like the E.C. and Senate makeup clearly benefit Republicans.
He's not being punished for winning AZ and GA. If he had lost those states and all other results remained the same then his total margin of victory would have been the ~20.5k votes that he won Wisconsin by.
Yes, but he won them, and Pennsylvania and Michigan, and NEB-2. I get it, if Biden lost the states he won then he would have lost the election. But he won them, and drawing up analysis as if he lost them, or as if winning by 20,000 is the same as losing by 23,000 is a weird excercize. No, that's a swing of ~43,000 votes in Wisconsin to the Democrat from the Republican. It's a swing in PA of ~150,000. In Michigan of ~160,000, 100,000 in Arizona, 140,000 in Georgia. This isn't even considering states that Trump narrowly lost (NH, MN, NEV) or the states that Trump lost by just over or around ~4-5% in 2016, that were functional blowouts in 2020 like Colorado and Maine.
I get it as a thought experiment. "What if Biden lost Wisconsin, ARizona, and Georgia, he would have lost the election." Sure, ok, but by that same token, what if Trump didn't win MI, WI, PA or Florida...? I get it from the sense of "these were close elections and less than 1% of the American population decided the results," but beyond that it's coming up with weird counter-factual scenarios and I don't know what the point of that is. I don't think that anybody seriously thinks that 2020 or 2016 were blowouts, sure, Donald Trump says that 2016 was a historic blowout, but he's an idiot, and everybody else knows that both of these are very slim wins... but they're still wins, and 2020 is a marginally larger win for Biden than 2016 was for Trump.
