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

Another thing that’s striking to me: Biden said, “Let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end here and now,” which sorta reminded me of that line from Obama’s speech about the sea levels beginning to fall. The bar has kinda been lowered, huh?

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.