Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.

We of course can’t know for sure how a Trump-Sanders race would have played out. But in January, I surveyed a national sample of Americans 30 and over and found that a key sliver of voters backed Biden over Trump but not Sanders. My October survey confirmed that, with Biden outperforming Sanders by 4 percentage points. To be sure, some of Sanders’s strongest support was among young voters. But the survey evidence overall does suggest that there was a meaningful fraction of voters who backed Biden but not Sanders.

Near the top of his speech tonight, Biden said “They delivered us a clear victory, a convincing victory.” Indeed, as FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver wrote earlier today, Biden’s win wasn’t a landslide, but it was a thoroughly convincing win with a pretty good map.

But Biden is now asking these questions — “What is our mandate?” — and is answering in very broad terms like decency before pivoting to more specific questions like the pandemic and systemic racism.