Biden won the Presidency by a huge margin, but Republicans still (probably) won the Senate, closed the gap in the House, and took a ton of state and local seats all across the country. That means two things:
- A lot of the people who voted for Biden didn't vote in any of the other races, and just left all the fields on the ballot other than President blank. This would indicate that they were probably independents rather than Democrats, which would seriously challenge the widely-held idea that independent voters don't matter and elections are decided entirely by which party can drive more turnout from their base.
- A lot of the people who voted for Biden were straight-up Never Trump Republicans who otherwise voted for GOP candidates straight down the ballot, but decided to vote for a Democratic President because they recognized that Trump was an existential threat to the U.S. who needed to be removed from office. This would indicate that Never Trumpers comprise a larger percentage of overall Republican voters than the polls show, and that a significant portion of moderate conservatives can be trusted to put the health of the nation above naked partisanship.
Given the election results we got, at least one of these things MUST be true, and it's very possible that both of them are. And they both fly in the face of the all-too-common notion that parties need to focus on appeasing hardcore ideologues and shouldn't even bother trying to appeal to moderates and independents.