#Left outraged even in victory and other commentary

“Progressives’ responses to the 2016 election are indistinguishable from their reactions to the 2020 election,” notes William Voegeli at City Journal. This, even though President Trump won the first and lost the second. The Nation’s Joan Walsh, to take just one example, says “America’s failure to repudiate Donald Trump in a landslide has left her ‘ashamed of our country.’ ” Yet lefties “might think hard about the possibility that Trump and Republicans in general surpass electoral expectations because the alternative to the GOP” is “progressivism.” And shockingly, “many voters do not respond gratefully to being execrated as bigots, fascists and idiots.” The left’s “aversion to introspection” has its bright side, however: Those “who lack the capacity to ponder their mistakes never get around to correcting them.”

Conservative: GOP Will Win Georgia Runoffs

Control of the Senate will come down to a pair of Georgia runoff elections, and while Democrats “insist they will win both seats,” the most likely scenario “is not on their side,” predicts National Review’s John Fund. For nearly 30 years, Republicans have won every statewide runoff vote in Georgia, which remains a very conservative place, notwithstanding Joe Biden’s ballot-box gains there last week. The state’s Republicans will use the left’s “radical agenda” to get voters motivated. “Georgia voters may have acted to change the occupant of the White House, but it’s doubtful they wish to ‘change America,’ ” as Chuck Schumer has vowed to do. Instead, “the incoming Biden administration will take office with no mandate and seeing its candidates repudiated in Georgia just before the president takes office on Jan. 20.”

Neocon: The Porridge of the United States

Commentary’s John Podhoretz compares Joe Biden, the apparent winner of last week’s election, to political “porridge”: “He’s not too hot (Trump). He’s not too cold (AOC). But even if he’s just right, he’s still porridge — dull and flavorless, but for those who voted for him, hopefully filling.” Paradoxically, however, that’s precisely “why he won.” He emerged the winner of his own party’s primaries by steering clear of the lunacies of the far-left, and he won the presidency “by simply not being Donald Trump.” And he may yet be a successful president, because “with every breath he takes, he will be as promised — Not Donald Trump.”

From the left: Why ‘Blue Wave’ Didn’t Happen

At Talking Points Memo, John Judis looks at why Democrats fell short of the electoral gains they expected. Dems in districts that backed President Trump in 2016 “were hampered by the national party’s identification with demands to ‘defund the police’ (which most Americans outside of a few zip codes saw as a threat to public safety),” as well as Nancy Pelosi’s failure on a stimulus bill, Joe “Biden’s threat to ‘shut down’ the economy in the face of the pandemic (which frightened Americans who are worried about losing or have already lost their jobs), the party’s support for a Green New Deal and opposition to fracking and the specter of socialism.” And while health care and climate change remain key winners for Democrats in other areas, both side “have to recognize that the country is divided on these questions and is going to remain so.” Surprise at Trump’s success with Hispanics, meanwhile, mainly reflects a failure to understand “the complexity of the Hispanic vote.”

“Stolen” Election watch: Two Can Play That Game

Democrats are raging at President Trump’s claims of a stolen election — a clear case of the pot calling the kettle black, snarks the Washington Examiner’s Byron York, since “they said the same thing four years ago after the 2016 election.” And Democrats’ sour grapes didn’t last just a few weeks. “Democrats pressed the cheating accusation to extraordinary lengths, month after month, and year after year, inflicting as much damage on Trump’s presidency as they possibly could. . . . Democrats made a false accusation of cheating part of their political strategy. They are in a poor position to complain about it now.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board