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

As a reminder, we don’t yet know when Trump will address the nation. The White House issued earlier today what is called a “travel/photo lid,” meaning no media access to Trump for the rest of the day. That is significant for the reasons you cite, Kaleigh, and as Julia said at the outset — this tradition of victory and concession speeches might have been made for the TV era — but the victory speech in the absence of a concession does speak to how polarized our country is.

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.