Votes continue to be counted in key battleground states, and no clear winner has emerged. Yet the US election result as-is still holds some clues as to what the next four years of governance in the United States might look like:

 

Serious tax hikes unlikely, regardless of presidential winner

It looks as though a ‘blue wave’ of Democrat control of all three levels of government has failed to materialize. Even if Biden emerges as the winner of the presidential contest, he will still probably have to contend with a Republican-controlled Senate.

One wrinkle here is that we won’t know for sure until Senate runoff elections are conducted for Georgia in January; the Warnock-Loeffler race has already triggered a run-off, and the Ossoff-Perdue race is also currently pointing to one, albeit by the narrowest of margins.

Different composition outcomes in the Senate essentially boil down to differing degrees of difficulty for the Democratic Party implementing its policy platform, a platform that will hinge on the question of taxes.