“Once upon a time, a popular-vote victory as decisive as Biden’s projected win would likely have swept his party to broad congressional gains. Democrats’ only modest advances in the Senate and modest retreat in the House testify to the durability of the divisions between a Democratic coalition rooted in the places immersed in the changes forging 21st-century America and a Republican coalition that dominates the places most apart from, and skeptical of, those changes. In America’s domestic cold war, this election was more like Antietam, a brutally bloody stalemate that wounded both sides, than a Gettysburg or Vicksburg, which pointed to a decisive victory for one side over the other. The election did more to underscore the impermeability of the nation’s divisions than to offer a path toward the reconciliation and unity that Biden has promised.” The Atlantic‘s excellent Ron Brownstein: A Cold War Between Red and Blue America. (If Biden hits 270, his first move should be to reach out to rural America. Same for the rest of us. Hold the enablers accountable. Then hold each other. One country.)

+ And a must-read from George Packer: “Tens of millions of Americans love MAGA more than they love democracy. After four years of lawbreaking and norm-busting, there can be no illusions about President Donald Trump. His first term culminated in an open effort to sabotage the legitimacy of the election and prevent Americans from voting. His rallies in the final week of the campaign were red-drenched festivals of mass hate, autocratic self-absorption, and boredom, without a glimmer of a better future on offer—and they might have put Trump over the top in Florida and elsewhere … But the composition of Trump’s followers, with a large minority of Latino voters and a nontrivial number of Black voters, makes their motivations more various and complicated than the single, somehow reassuring cause that progressives settled on after 2016: racism. There turn out to be many different reasons different kinds of people want to fling themselves at the feet of a con man. The votes show that progressives’ habit of seeing Americans as molecules dissolved in vast and undifferentiated ethnic and racial solutions without individual agency is both analytically misleading and politically self-defeating, doing actual harm to the cause of equality.”

+ If you live in a rural area, please share get your friends/neighbors to sign up for NextDraft. If you know people or have relatives in deeply red communities, please do the same. We need to stop defining each other and start talking to each other. Here’s a link to share NextDraft.