The jury is still out on who’ll occupy the Oval Office, but America’s verdict on liberal norm-busting is resounding. This election’s clearest losers were Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the public faces of the unhinged left.

The Democratic Party is split, and if Joe Biden prevails, it will be because he claims (accurately or not) to represent its moderate wing. He spent his campaign hiding from his party’s progressive agenda, and toward the end even disavowed parts of it. Mr. Biden’s greatest selling point was always his promise of a return to normalcy.

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This was a hit on his own party. If Washington has been a circus these past four years, it is in substantial part due to congressional Democrats. Americans elect lawmakers to pass budgets, confirm judges, develop considered legislation. The Pelosi-Schumer era has been day after painful day of faux scandals, gotcha hearings, breathtaking accusations, progressive-fantasy bills and promises to dismantle longstanding institutions. It’s theater, not governance.

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The press would normally check such behavior. Instead, Democrats and their media allies allowed their disdain for Donald Trump to lull them into believing they’d benefit. The liberal FiveThirtyEight election-analysis outfit in July mused on Twitter: “Could Democrats pick up 13 seats in the Senate?”—an estimate that now looks to be off by a mere 12. The accompanying video envisioned Democrats presiding over a “filibuster-proof majority.”

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