When all the votes are counted, Joe Biden may end up winning the White House by as many

as five or six million votes.

But everywhere else, the performance of Democrats was abysmal.

Republicans will control at least 50 Senate seats, pending a pair of run-offs in Georgia,

and have made gains in the House of Representatives.

As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez found out quickly, Democratic leaders have already found the culprit.

It was the left, they argue, that scared voters with talk of socialism.

AOC responded on CNN.

We have a slimmer Democratic majority.

It's going to be more important than ever for us to work together and not fight each other.

And so when we kind of come out swinging, not 48 hours after Tuesday, when we don't even

have solid data yet, pointing fingers and telling each other what to do, it deepens the

division in the party and it's irresponsible.

I'm Ryan Grimm, and in this episode of Deconstructed, we're going to take a deep look at that argument.

Now there are a few different ways to do that.

And one is to look at each race, look at what each specific candidate ran on, look at what

attacks they faced, and how they fared.

We'll do a little of that.

It's more important to zoom way out if you want to see what's going on.

Too much election analysis suffers from a focus on tactics and the most immediate news cycle.

So the analysts missed a big sweeping realignments underway until it's way too late.

We'll talk to Pennsylvania organizer Jonathan Smucker to get a sense of that.

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