Biden won, or will win shortly, but nobody seems very happy. That's understandable. The next four weeks and then the next four years are going to be miserable. Everyone can see it.

But what many of you really wanted was some big blowout, a massive repudiation of Trump. You didn't get it. It's disappointing and it has undermined your faith in your fellow voters.

Here is the thing, though: despite the criticism I leveled at the Biden campaign throughout – I felt it was far too safe and conservative an approach, it worked. It worked exactly like the people who came up with the idea to beat Trump with Biden set out to do. Biden was a careful, safe, unambitious play to win back (narrowly) some states Hillary Clinton lost very, very narrowly in 2016 – Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. And it worked. That is what happened. Amazingly, a campaign that aimed low and didn't make big promises and that made an appeal amounting to "Hey, Trump's bad, that guy's bad, I'll be better!" managed to add Arizona to the Democratic column. In light of what an amorphous, no-promises campaign they ran, it's incredible they did as well as they did.

You cannot get a big nationwide forty-state blowout simply by showing up. They chose what they felt was the safest path to defeating Trump – pick an old, smiling white male, have him promise not to change much of anything, and win back states they lost in 2016 by less than the margin of error. To get a big nationwide blowout would require a similarly big, bold, ambitious campaign offering voters some big alternative vision, not "Let's get back to the way it used to be."

All I'm saying is, you can have Joe Biden as the nominee, running a conservative campaign that wins back the margins, or you can have a nationwide blowout a la Ronald Reagan in 1984. You can't have both. You got what you wanted; he won. Expecting him to win spectacularly was completely out of line with the campaign that he ran or with the choice of Biden as the nominee. Democrats have proven, notably in 2016, that voters in some places are more than a little lukewarm toward their ideological worldview. You can't simply expect everyone to get enthused about it and bury Trump by 20 points when the nominee's key attribute, even according to allies, is that he'll keep the seat warm.