THE DEMOCRATS' TROUBLES ARE ONLY BEGINNING.

Columnist S. E. Cupp takes stock of the presidential election, and, perhaps, she seeks to get her libertarian credentials in order.

Many of the small towns and rural communities between the coasts where Republicans have built their fortress have been battered and depleted by the same economic change that has benefited burgeoning metropolitan areas, where Democrats have prospered electorally.

Trump's anti-trade, anti-immigrant, anti-environmental, law-and-order jeremiads have found an audience in these communities, exploiting and inflaming a sense that Democrats are disdainful of their values and alien to their economic interests.

If Democrats are seen only as a coalition of economic and cultural elites and minorities -- with little connection to the rest of the country -- the party may still win narrow national victories, as they did in 2020, but will struggle to win and maintain governing majorities.

Democrats need an expansive, authentic economic message for these changing times that speaks to the experience of tens of millions of Americans, rural and urban, who feel that the system devised over time by experts from Wall Street to Washington DC is rigged against them. Biden's emphasis on boosting jobs and wages, reducing inequality and undergirding the middle class is a step in the right direction.

Somehow, a hundred days of additional lockdowns, and continued looking the other way at urban unrest, doesn't strike me as turning out so well.

For Democrats, that task now falls to Biden, who will take over amid a raging pandemic that has wreaked havoc on our economy in a country whose trust in institutions has been shaken to the core.

With divided government, Biden will have to deal not only with implacable Republicans but his own fractious coalition, mediating between a left averse to compromise, minorities demanding their rightful place at the table and suburban moderates who are an increasingly important element of the Democratic base.

Buckle in. The faction fight among Democrats is only getting started, and the coot does not deserve a honeymoon.