By the TBE Editors

Now that the dust has cleared (maybe) from this long, painful election season, and President-elect Biden will be inaugurated on Wednesday, let’s examine how the voters in Bristol made their decisions.  It really appears that it was a split decision.  Joe Biden carried Bristol pretty comfortably, but down the ballot, the Republicans easily won a majority of Bristol’s state legislative delegation with two out of three state house victories and another in the race for state senate.

How can this be explained? Well, maybe it is beyond explanation. On the one hand, a majority of Bristolites voted for a candidate who pledged to undo most of the decisions the Trump administration made for the past four years. Maybe it was because he promised to return decency and empathy to the Oval Office. But surely voters were also aware of Joe Biden’s economic and domestic promises.

Here is a summary and analysis of some of President-elect Biden’s platform, courtesy of: Kody Carmody from the Penn Wharton Budget Model.

1. Biden is proposing large public investments over the next 10 years.

Those investments include $1.9 trillion for education, including universal pre-K, more funding for schools serving low-income students, two years of guaranteed-debtless college, and tuition-free public college for lower-income families, along with $1.6 trillion for water and transit infrastructure, other green infrastructure projects, and clean energy R&D.

2. Biden is also proposing a large expansion of health care, although it’s much smaller than progressive proposals like Medicare for All, and it’s offset by his drug savings plan.

Other than expanding the Affordable Care Act marketplaces and subsidies for middle-class Americans, the Biden health care plan also invests heavily in expanding elder care and making Medicare available to those as young as 60 — collectively, a $1.6 trillion increase in spending over 10 years. This increase is offset by $1.2 trillion in savings from Biden’s proposals to lower prescription drug prices by, for example, using Medicare to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies.

3. The Biden platform would increase spending by $5.37 trillion over the next decade.

In addition to public investments and health care, over 10 years Biden proposes $650 billion of new housing assistance, $547 billion for 12 weeks of universal paid leave, and $290 billion to boost Social Security benefits for beneficiaries with low earnings histories.

4. The Biden tax plan would raise $3.375 trillion over 10 years, with 80% of the new revenue coming from the top 1% of households by income.

The Biden tax plan is explicitly designed to not raise taxes directly on those with adjusted gross incomes (AGI) of $400,000 per year or less, focusing instead on higher income households and corporations.

Then there was the platform proposed by the Republican Party and President Trump-  It basically read- We are in favor of whatever President Trump wants. 

Actually, although not stated exactly as worded above, President Trump and the Republican Party chose not to draft a policy platform this year, so the statement pretty much covers all  their proposals.

While the vote for President-elect Biden in Bristol can certainly be attributed in part to a repudiation of President Trump and his behavior, certainly the voters who chose Mr. Biden were aware of his platform to increase taxes on the wealthy and the big corporations and use that money to lessen some of the huge inequities in our society.

The Republicans that Bristolites chose for our state government were all big supporters of President Trump.  One was proud to be a delegate for him at the Republican convention.  They all stated they wanted to lower taxes, not raise them. In fact, they were totally against everything in the Biden platform, including his health care plan and his plan to make the country free of fossil fuel emissions over the next twenty years.

And this past election year was also dominated by two huge issues, the Covid pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement spurred by multiple killings of unarmed Black citizens by the police.

Again, the approaches  of the two candidates to these two issues were diametrically opposed.  Trump downplayed Covid at every opportunity.  Biden listened to and followed the advice of doctors and scientists.

Trump saw Black Lives Matter as an opportunity to show himself as the law-and-order candidate, and attempted to crack down on BLM protests wherever they occurred.  Biden viewed the issue as a real civil rights crisis that needed to be addressed.

So how do you juxtapose a person’s vote for Biden with a vote for Trump supporters?  It is a mystery to behold. And this dichotomy did not occur just in Bristol. It was evident everywhere. The Republican Party actually gained seats in the House of Representatives. 

Do the voters of Bristol and the rest of the country have split personalities?  And after the ongoing fiasco of President Trump’s final days in office, including an attack on the U.S. Capital, do our state representatives and other Trump voters still support Donald Trump? 

We welcome any thoughtful explanations that you can submit to alleviate our bewilderment.