The just-concluded 2020 elections showed that America’s democracy remains resilient.

It was a rebuke of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, given that President-elect Joe Biden, a moderate, ran ahead of many down-ballot Democratic candidates.

It was bad news for the whole Republican Party, whose loss of the White House portends a difficult future as the nation becomes more diverse in years ahead.

The takes above are all true – unless they aren’t, and democracy showed its flaws, moderate Democrats stumbled, and the GOP can take hope, given the makeup of its down-ballot electorate.

A week after voters went to the polls, the nation’s political class writ large is already engaged in fierce debate about what the election means. As more data emerges about vote breakdowns and voter demographics, those on the left, right, and center are struggling to frame the results in ways that reflect their beliefs and policy preferences.

It may be hard to distill the 2020 experience into a few key lessons – the electorate and politics in general is much more fractured than it was 50 or 60 years ago, says Bruce Cain, a professor of political science at Stanford University.

But a few themes are emerging. One central one is that much of the vote revolved around incumbent President Donald Trump – the man, and his values. 

“A lot of us who have been around can say that not since Nixon has an election shook a lot of us to the core over whether our commitment to democratic values and fair play has eroded to the point where we are flirting with authoritarianism and undermining the integrity of our electoral system,” says Professor Cain.

A crossroads election 

For its part, the Trump campaign is still contesting the most basic story about the 2020 vote: who won. Without evidence that stands up to scrutiny, President Trump continues to insist that the election was stolen and he is the real victor. Many GOP elected officials have declined to acknowledge Mr. Biden’s status as president-elect in deference to the incumbent’s wishes.

Trump allies have primarily questioned vote counts in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. To date, most Republican legal efforts have been small-scale and many have been thrown out by judges.

If there is one narrative about the election that all sides agree on, it’s that the turnout, driven by an explosion of interest in the presidential battle, was phenomenal. Final figures will likely show that the percentage of eligible voters who cast ballots will be the highest in 120 years.

One way to look at this is to see it as a triumph for democracy. Voters, tired of the chaos that has gripped Washington for the past four years, stepped up to their job and made choices that reflected what they believed needed to be done about the situation.

“People truly recognized that this was a crossroads election,” says Allan Lichtman, a distinguished professor of history at American University.

But what was the force pushing voters to the polls? It wasn’t both candidates, but only one of them, the incumbent president, and one emotion, fear. His supporters feared he would not win reelection. His opponents feared he would. The powerful polarization driving this is not itself positive for U.S. politics.

“It wasn’t Biden driving the turnout. ... It was Trump driving the turnout,” says Professor Lichtman.

President Trump motivated Bill Huggins to vote, for instance. The retired former manager for Black & Decker says he voted for Mr. Trump in 2016, and was enthusiastically voting for him again. “I’m for small government, the Constitution, and run the government like a business,” says Mr. Huggins, standing outside his polling place at the Shrewsbury Municipal Building on Election Day.

At the Cornerstone Baptist Church in York, Pennsylvania, Benita Howard also said the vote felt important and different to her this year.

Ms. Howard, who works as a nurse and voted for Mr. Biden, says the sentiment in the country has felt very bad for the past 1 1/2 years or so. She thinks the U.S. needs a change for the good of the people.

“I’m voting for equality for everybody. It used to be that the U.S. was looked at as the land of opportunity,” she says. “Where you could make changes for yourself and improve yourself and your family. And it doesn’t feel like that anymore.” 

Democrats, divided

Perhaps the hottest down-ballot argument right now about the meaning of the 2020 vote is between moderate Democratic members of Congress and progressives.

With the party reeling from an unexpected loss of seats in the House, Democratic moderates are blaming the more liberal members of the party for pushing big government policies such as the Green New Deal, and especially for the “defund the police” push to reorient urban spending priorities.

Bob Brown/Richmond Times-Dispatch/AP

Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger helps her daughter Catherine feed the congresswoman's ballot into the machine at the general registrar's office in Henrico County, Virginia, Sept. 18, 2020, on the first day of the state's 45-day early voting period. Representative Spanberger was narrowly reelected.

On a postelection call with colleagues last week, Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, who narrowly held on to her seat, said the number one concern voters in her district mentioned was “defund the police” rhetoric.

“If we are classifying Tuesday as a success from a congressional standpoint, we will get [expletive] torn apart in 2022,” said Representative Spanberger.

Progressives have pushed back. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said this week that some of the members who lost had made themselves “sitting ducks” by ignoring social media ads and other modern methods of campaigning.

Professor Cain of Stanford University says this tension is reflective of another trend revealed in the election returns.

“Both of the political parties are struggling with their core activist, heavily ideological bases,” he says.

This also reflects the polarization of American politics, he says. Party sorting, with conservative Democrats turning Republican and moderate Republicans turning Democratic, has in recent decades removed factions that used to keep both parties from becoming more extreme.

“The question now is ... how do we govern with that kind of polarization within the electorate?” he says.

Juliet Hooker, a professor of political science at Brown University, says she does not see the election results as a repudiation of progressives. Mr. Biden won with the enthusiastic support of a lot of people on the left, she says, who set aside their personal beliefs to unite behind their party’s candidate.

“The reality is that Democrats can’t win without progressives,” she says.

GOP’s demographic destiny 

For some years, top Republicans have worried about the demographic destiny of their party. It has become whiter and older, as the Democratic Party has become more diverse and younger. And white voters are shrinking as a percentage of the U.S. electorate, while Black and Hispanic voters and other people of color are increasing. The GOP may be on track to shrink so much that at some point in the future it simply becomes uncompetitive on a national level.

On one level, the 2020 vote may already reflect this. President Trump received over 71 million votes, the most ever cast for an incumbent – but President-elect Biden got about 76 million votes, the most a presidential candidate has ever received, period.

There are millions more votes still to be counted in heavily blue states such as New York and California. Mr. Biden’s overall lead is certain to grow.

But one surprise result may be good news for the GOP as it confronts its demographic limits. President Trump increased his share of the Hispanic vote, from about 28% four years ago to about 32% now. Meanwhile, his share of the Black vote also increased, albeit from very low levels to begin with. President Trump won 20% of Black men, for instance. (His support among Black women was about 9%.)

That’s led Dave Wasserman, House editor of the Cook Political Report, to conclude that it is now harder to argue that the GOP coalition is demographically “dying out.”

“As with past waves of immigrants throughout U.S. history, Hispanic voters are beginning to vote a little closer to the rest of the country – and it’s one possible path forward,” Mr. Wasserman tweeted on Nov. 9.

The Hispanic community itself is diverse, with origins rooted in different nations, and opinions varied and dependent on factors such as income, where they live, and religious affiliation. Democrats should not look at them as a monolithic bloc that cares primarily about immigration, say experts.

“You have to cover Latinos depending on where they are,” says Chris Zepeda-Millán, an associate professor in UCLA’s public policy department. 

This year, the Trump campaign did a better job of turning out conservative-leaning Cuban Americans in Florida, through ad “micro-targeting” and other means, says Professor Zepeda-Millán. That helped push President Trump to victory in the key state.

Meanwhile, Mr. Biden’s outreach was targeted more to Mexican Americans and Hispanics of Central American origin, which helped him in some of his key state wins.

“[Latino voters] could potentially be making the difference in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin – places that we don’t think about the Latino vote,” says Professor Zepeda-Millán.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

The U.S. Capitol – framed here by Autumn leaves a week after Election Day – will have more Republican women than ever serving as lawmakers come January. Gains for Republicans were propelled in part by new funding and recruiting efforts by the party after losses in 2018.

In a year in which Kamala Harris made history as America’s first woman to be elected vice president, Republican women have their own successes to tout. A record number of them are heading to Congress – with more races still to be called. Of the eight House seats flipped by Republicans, six have been by women.

“I’ve been saying 2018 is the year of the woman, and 2020 is the year of the Republican woman,” says Olivia Perez-Cubas, spokeswoman for Winning for Women Action Fund, the first super political action committee dedicated to electing Republican women.

Part of the reason for their strong performance is the good political environment for women candidates, with Republican women inspired by the Democratic women’s wave, as well as by women in Republican leadership positions, such as atop the Republican National Committee. Experts on women in politics say there’s a motivational effect of women running for office that crosses party lines. “If you can see it, you can be it,” as Ms. Perez-Cubas puts it.

These women – so far 24 in the House and eight in the Senate – were also poised to benefit from what turned out to be unprecedented turnout for President Donald Trump.

They could not have been elected had they not been on the ballot in the first place. This year, a record 227 GOP women jumped into the pipeline to run for the House, with 94 making it past the primaries to the general election, nearly double from the prior cycle. Primaries are a big hurdle for GOP women, due to fundraising and the stereotype that women are less conservative than men, but this time Republican women focused on helping female candidates win those early contests.

“What happened this year, they were inspired … and they were more strategic,” says Dianne Bystrom, co-president of the League of Women Voters in Nebraska.

The newcomers come from mixed backgrounds. Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene made headlines for her support of the QAnon conspiracy theory, while Colorado’s Lauren Boebert owns a gun-themed restaurant that defied pandemic shutdown orders and where servers openly carry firearms. In Florida, Maria Elvira Salazar is a longtime journalist who worked for the Spanish-language network Telemundo. She flipped her district, as did Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma, Michelle Fischbach of Minnesota, and Nancy Mace of South Carolina, all of whom had served before in their statehouses, with Ms. Fischbach a former lieutenant governor. Meanwhile, Cynthia Lummis will be the first woman to represent Wyoming in the U.S. Senate. She is an attorney and former state lawmaker.

“The lesson here is that if you want more Republican women to serve and win, there have to be more Republican women on the ballot,” says Kelly Dittmar, research director at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University in New Jersey. That’s obvious, she says, but not easy to achieve for a party that eschews identity politics and lags far behind Democrats in targeted financial support for female candidates.

But two years ago, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York and a cast of other Republican women took this challenge into their own hands. They had just witnessed 2018’s blue wave reduce their numbers from 23 congresswomen to 13. The contrast on swearing-in day was striking: the Republican side a mass of dark suits with red ties, the Democrats a cornucopia of lively colors worn by a record-setting 89 female members.

Representative Stefanik, the youngest GOP woman in the House, called the lack of Republican women a “crisis.” As the first woman to head up recruiting for House Republicans that cycle, she convinced more than 100 women to run, but only one was elected. So she changed her strategy – quitting her official recruitment role and relaunching her political action committee, known as E-PAC, so she could focus on endorsing and financially supporting women in primaries. That’s something the national party steers clear of, even while primaries are the toughest hurdle for GOP women.

Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP/File

Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York (with fellow Republicans Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, left, and then-Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina) speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill on Jan. 25, 2020. Ms. Stefanik helped lead a comeback for GOP women candidates in 2020.

Her move was at first called a “mistake” by the head of the House’s Republican campaign arm, Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota. But Ms. Stefanik was not cowed. “NEWSFLASH: I wasn’t asking for permission,” she tweeted, with siren emojis. Other women stepped up, including this cycle’s House GOP recruitment head, retiring Rep. Susan Brooks of Indiana. They put in hours on the phone recruiting and mentoring female candidates, guiding them through everything from budgeting to the media to managing family life in Congress.
“If Elise had not stepped forward … I don’t think we would have had the success that we had,” says former Rep. Mimi Walters of California, who lost to Democrat Katie Porter in 2018. “It was something Elise did on her own. It was not the party saying, ‘Go do this.’ It was Elise saying, ‘I am going to do this.’”

Ms. Walters praises Ms. Stefanik for her PAC, explaining that it’s typically harder for women to raise money, which discourages them from running. But “that dynamic is changing,” she says, mentioning other funding sources for GOP women, such as VIEW PAC, a political action committee that’s more than 20 years old, and the newly formed Winning for Women Action Fund, which was formed after the 2018 congressional losses.

“We asked ourselves, why is this happening, why aren’t women getting over the finish line?” recalls Ms. Perez-Cubas, of the Winning for Women Action Fund. One conclusion: “There’s a big hole in the Republican Party ecosystem.” Now it’s starting to be filled with the first super PAC – with no limit on fundraising – directed solely at GOP women candidates. This cycle, the PAC spent nearly $3 million.

But Democrats dwarf the efforts of their Republican counterparts. For instance, EMILY’s List, which recruits and supports pro-choice female candidates at all levels of government from start to finish, raised $72 million this cycle. So far this year, Democrats have elected 103 women to the House and Senate (slightly behind their 2018 record). They also shattered the glass ceiling in the vice president’s office, electing the first Black woman and first person of South Asian descent.

“The left does a really good job of elevating women,” says Ms. Perez-Cubas, a former aide to Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. “We have to make sure [we] go toe to toe.”

Getting more Republican women elected challenges monolithic conceptions about what women believe, says Ms. Dittmar, and brings diversity of style, perspective, and experience to governing – not to mention a more equal representation of constituents. But it’s also important for the future of the party, for its image and its ongoing battle for suburban women voters.

In California’s Orange County, once a bedrock of Republicanism, GOP women are leading in two very tight races to win back House seats that Democrats flipped in 2018. Young Kim was the first Korean American Republican woman elected to the state legislature; Michelle Steel, also a Korean American, is a county supervisor.

“The focus of the Republican Party has changed. We understand now, you have to be politically aligned with the party but your identity is important,” says Randall Avila, the executive director of the Orange County Republicans. “We have to communicate that we are not the party of old white men.” 

Editor's note: This story was updated to correct the spelling of Mr. Avila's name. 

From the tiny port town of Sassnitz in northeast Germany, local politician Christine Zillmer bristles with fury when she recalls how America stuck its nose in her country’s business.

Late in 2019, a trio of American senators insisted international firms halt work on a controversial natural gas pipeline linking Russia and Germany. Failure to comply would mean sanctions for companies doing business around the pipeline, and a Swiss-Dutch company pulled out of the project, leaving the Russians to send ships to lay the last stretch of pipe.

The senators named her hometown’s port operator in the letter, and Ms. Zillmer saw red.

“I went into shock as if I just saw a terrible car accident,” says Ms. Zillmer. “Sassnitz is small, and to threaten these ‘small people’ with sanctions is shortsighted. We are simply a chess piece, with Germany caught between America and Russia.”

In August, a new development came in this game of transatlantic chess: Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was poisoned in an apparent attack, and then evacuated to Berlin, where German leadership ensured his safety and medical care. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the Kremlin must answer for the attack, while her party’s politicians began to publicly question whether Nord Stream 2 should be halted.

On the face of it, Nord Stream 2 is simply an energy project. Yet, because it connects Russian natural gas with Germany and Europe at a time when the West has little trust in Russian President Vladimir Putin, the pipeline has become a geopolitical flashpoint. Climate change activists have also seized on the opportunity to remind the world its natural gas product is the energy of yesteryear. How will the project’s optics fare under a Joe Biden presidency? He has opposed the pipeline, yet he’d likely want to avoid the appearance of exerting undue influence over key allies like Germany, as he works to reestablish and strengthen transatlantic ties with Europe.

“The main question,” says Christoph Weber, an energy economist at the University of Duisburg-Essen, “is ‘How far can Europe go to allow America to use its powers to influence American interest on European ground?’”

A geopolitical football

The U.S. contends that Nord Stream 2 – the second of twin pipelines that would supply the European Union with 55 billion cubic meters of Russian natural gas each year for the next 50 years – would increase European dependence on Russia. The Germans, however, counter that Americans are driven less by European energy security than the desire to sell more liquefied natural gas to Europe.

It’s energy at the cross section of economics and geopolitics. Since roughly a quarter of Germany’s energy needs are met with gas, almost all imported, “of course the question of gas and where we get it is important for the German economy,” says Julian Hinz, an international economist at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

Axel Schmidt/Reuters

A Russian pipe-laying vessel sits docked at the port of Mukran in Germany, July 7, 2020. After a Swiss-Dutch company pulled out of the project, Russian ships completed the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Yet Nord Stream 2 would foster a mutual, rather than one-sided, dependency between Germany and Russia, says Dr. Hinz. “It’s a dependency fostered by trade. Of course the Russians could stop sending gas, but we could also stop paying them. They need this income. On the other hand, if sanctions are implemented, this costs both sides.” And, he adds, other ways of importing gas might be more expensive.

But the poisoning of Mr. Navalny in August was a reminder of how antagonistic Germany’s relationship with Russia has become. “Navalny was not the first incident,” says Stefan Meister, a political scientist and Russian-EU relations expert. There was also the Russian hacking of the Bundestag, Russia’s constant disinformation campaigns, and the 2019 shooting of a man in a Berlin park believed to have been orchestrated by Russian agents.

“You’ve had all these events and the reaction by the German government was mostly statements but no action,” says Dr. Meister. “Maybe this is now the moment the German government cannot step back. Germany is powerful enough to get other [EU] member states’ support” to respond to Russia.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas told Bild that he hoped “the Russians won’t force us to change our position regarding the Nord Stream 2.”

Environmental stalling?

The renewed focus on Nord Stream has also been a clarion call for climate change scientists, who say switching to natural gas is a waste of time. “Climate change is happening much faster than we previously thought,” says Dr. Niklas Höhne, a German climatologist and founding partner of the New Climate Institute. “Ten years ago when the German government was thinking about [Nord Stream 2], we thought gas was more of a bridge energy towards renewables, but we are much too late. We have to go directly to renewables.”

The billions in investment in Nord Stream could have instead been used to forge ways to use less energy, such as retrofitting buildings, climate experts argue. It could also have been pumped into renewable energy such as wind, whose industry in Germany has suffered with tens of thousands of layoffs.

Yet few experts believe Nord Stream won’t ultimately go through. A “big shift” – say, of anti-Russia voices and climate change activists coming together – hasn’t aligned to really jeopardize this project, says Michał Baranowski, director of the Warsaw office of the German Marshall Fund of the U.S. And stoppage would result in major lawsuits and come at great cost to all partners involved.

Still, there’s plenty of speculation. If Mr. Biden asks “Germany to reconsider Nord Stream 2,” Mr. Baranowski says, “it’s going to be much more difficult for the German government to say no to President Biden, rather than President Trump.”

Keeping the conversation going

Back in Sassnitz, whose Mukran Port had suddenly become a household name in Russian-EU geopolitical circles, the politician Ms. Zillmer says the pipeline should be “separated” from Germany or America’s wish to punish Russia. “For the people in this region, if the project doesn’t go through, it would mean we let ourselves be dictated, be threatened by America.”

One way to avoid that, she says, is to make sure the U.S., Germany, and Russia are talking. Ms. Zillmer and a group of citizens had sent a letter to U.S. Sens. Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, and Ron Johnson to that effect. “I was really ready to make compromises with these three senators,” but they didn’t answer. “I do think our letter arrived ... but then they forgot about it.”

In the end, she says, the furor over Nord Stream 2 is not a financial one in Sassnitz. While many in her orbit had been employed around the logistics and pipe-laying, “now they are done and those jobs are gone,” she says. “Economically, [halting] Nord Stream 2 won’t hit us. But it is hitting us emotionally.”

Courtesy of The Tyre Collective

(From left to right) Hugo Richardson, Siobhan Anderson, Deepak Mallya, and Hanson Cheng launched The Tyre Collective to address tire pollution using an attachment that captures up to 60% of airborne tire particles. Now, they're turning their award-winning design into a full-fledged startup.

Most eco-conscious drivers are focused on their tailpipes, not their tires. But every time a car brakes, accelerates, or changes direction, the friction wears down the exterior of the tire, sending particles into the environment. Some remain suspended in the air, and others get swept into local waterways, where they can have devastating effects on plant and animal life. 

Humans produce about 6.7 million tons of tire pollution annually, according to some estimates. That’s more than enough dust and particles to outweigh the Great Pyramid of Giza.

A group of master’s students from Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art had an idea: what if the tires picked up after themselves?

The Tyre Collective, a project by recent graduates Hugo Richardson, Siobhan Anderson, Deepak Mallya, and Hanson Cheng, seeks to capture this stealthy pollutant as it flies off the wheel. For the past year, they’ve been working on a device that can attach to the bottom of a car and use electrostatic charges, along with the airflow of the moving wheel, to collect particles for reuse. 

The inspiration came from rubbing a balloon over a sweater and seeing the pieces “dancing around,” says Mr. Richardson, chief technical officer of The Tyre Collective. “That led us to the assumption that the particles are charged due to the friction.” 

Their prototype collects 60% of all airborne tire emissions on a bicycle wheel and sandpaper road test rig.

The Tyre Collective won the 2020 U.K. James Dyson Award and is now a finalist for the international James Dyson Award, which includes a $35,000 prize. The winners are set to be announced on Nov. 16.

Gavin Whitmore, manager of the Tire Industry Project, an initiative by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development geared toward better understanding the potential health and environmental impact of tires, says his organization is keeping an eye on their work. “We understand very well how difficult it is to try and capture and isolate these particles,” he said. “We’re certainly interested to learn more, because it could be a very, very promising thing.”

Growing research

Tires are more complex than they look. The vulcanized rubber compound that makes up the outermost layer, the tread, often contains sulfur, zinc, carbon black, bisphenol A (BPA), and other chemicals. A lot of that gets swept off the roads by rain, along with motor oil, bits of pavement, and other litter.

A three-year study by the San Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI) found that stormwater carries roughly 7 trillion microplastic pieces into the bay annually – more than 300 times the discharge from the area’s wastewater treatment plant. Nearly half of those appear to be tire fragments.

Courtesy of The Tyre Collective

This rendering of The Tyre Collective's award-winning design shows how the device could be attached to the underside of a vehicle, where it would use electrostatics and airflow to capture up to 60% of tire particles as the car is driven.

“Seeing all these black rubbery particles was a surprise,” said Rebecca Sutton, a senior scientist at SFEI. “Conceptually, there are few reports out there that indicated tires might be a big deal, but no one had really seen that. And honestly, no one had really looked at stormwater.”

“It’s also probably just a tip of the iceberg, because most tire particles are actually smaller than our sieve size,” she added.

Tires are the second-largest source of primary microplastic pollution in the ocean, after synthetic textiles, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. To reduce the amount of tire pollution, Dr. Sutton says governments could consider setting emission standards similar to those for engine exhaust.

But it can be hard to figure out how much material tires are actually shedding, or should be shedding. Tire wear is heavily influenced by the roadway, the weight and type of vehicle, and the driver’s behavior. In London, The Tyre Collective says a busy bus route can generate a grapefruit-size pile of tire dust in a day. 

And that dust won’t just sit in water – conservationists worry about the complex recipe of chemicals that leak out from the pieces of tread.

A study conducted in western Washington pointed to tire leachate as the cause of elevated coho salmon deaths in the Puget Sound. Anna O’Brien, a postgraduate student at the University of Toronto, observed tire leachate change the relationship between duckweed, a small plant that flourishes in still water, and the microbes that live on it. The problem is, researchers don’t know exactly which chemicals are responsible for these reactions.

A “huge amount of content” leaches out of tires, says Dr. O’Brien. “And just because something is more abundant doesn’t mean it’s what’s causing the effect,” she says. “Other things about the environment are changing, too. That might mean that these effects we see aren’t constant. We might think we know what the effect of a chemical is only to have it change in the future.”

Mitigating tire damage

While tire companies are investing in research on more sustainable materials, changing the chemical and physical makeup of the tire also poses challenges, says Sarah Amick, vice president of environment, health, safety, and sustainability for the U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association.

“Tires are one of the most regulated products for safety in the United States,” she says. “Ensuring that we can continue to meet those safety requirements, plus adding more renewable and recyclable materials to our tires, it’s a challenge, but our members are working on that.”

For their part, The Tyre Collective did consider developing a biodegradable tire, but quickly ran into several problems, including the realization that most people probably don’t want a “degrading tire” separating their moving cars from the road.

“We decided that a more practical solution would be looking at how we could collect this wear as it is right now,” says Ms. Anderson, the chief scientific officer at The Tyre Collective. 

During lockdown, the team has focused on turning their vision into a full-fledged startup. They say several manufacturers have expressed interest in their design, though no partnership has been formalized yet. When restrictions due to COVID-19 ease, they’re looking forward to returning to the lab and producing a set of first-generation prototypes to test with potential partners. 

“We’ve been working hard to make it a true business offering,” says Mr. Richardson, “and not just a cool university project.”

AP

Then-Vice President Joe Biden meets with congressional Republicans and Democrats in 2011 in hopes of a deal on deficit reduction.

In his first speech after the U.S. presidential election, Joe Biden asked all Americans to end “this grim era of demonization.” It was a timely request for civility given the vilification of candidates during the campaign. His call also opens a door for more constructive debate over policy in Washington.

Yet what stood out was that he did not name names. He did not shame anyone but rather merely pointed to the practice of name-calling, not the people who do it. He kept the demon of demonization separate from those who resort to it – with a certainty that it could melt away.

“Let’s give each other a chance,” Mr. Biden said, by listening to each other.

The moment was similar to a famous speech 70 years ago by Sen. Margaret Chase Smith on the Senate floor. The Republican from Maine asked her party to “do some soul-searching” and not ride to power on character assassination and unsubstantiated accusations of treason. She did not name her Republican colleague Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who was using public fear of communism to subvert his enemies. In fact, by not doing so she better exposed the emptiness of what is now called McCarthyism, or accusations unrooted in truth. Soon after, Mr. McCarthy’s crusade collapsed.

In both politics and diplomacy, it is still common to portray someone as “the other,” as not quite capable of good qualities to lead or open to change. But as former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger noted in 2014, the demonization of Russian leader Vladimir Putin in the United States is not a policy, “it’s an alibi for not having a policy.”

Personal attacks, or what political scientists call “negative partisanship,” are often an attempt to win a debate other than on merits. Mr. Biden himself has admitted he has struggled with separating the political from the personal. He often tells the story from his early years in the Senate when a colleague, Sen. Jesse Helms, denounced a bill granting rights to Americans with disabilities. An angry Senator Biden was ready to attack him for lacking empathy when Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield took Mr. Biden aside to inform him that Senator Helms had adopted a child with a disability.

“It is always appropriate to question another man or woman’s judgment. It’s never appropriate to judge the motive because you don’t know what it is,” Senator Mansfield said.

Negative stereotypes about others are often a fantasy. A recent poll by Beyond Conflict, a Boston-based nonprofit, found 79% of Democrats and 82% of Republicans overestimate the level to which the other side dehumanizes them. Scholars note that this practice occurs less in small states like Vermont where people tend to know each other or anticipate working with each other. In fact, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont was perhaps the most vocal presidential candidate against demonizing comments.

Mr. Mansfield told Mr. Biden one other thing in 1973. “Your job here is to find the good things in your colleagues – the things their state saw – and not focus on the bad.” Mr. Biden said it was “the single most important piece of advice I got in my career.” Now, as he heads toward the Oval Office, he is passing along that advice to all Americans.