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

My final take on this campaign is … IDK, to be honest. Harris ascending to the vice presidency is a huge milestone in the history of this nation and clearly important.

But other storylines and narratives? I’m just not sure yet. Perry has made this point before, but the results of the 2020 election are still coming in, making any takes now pretty premature. Also, the vote we have so far paints a fairly muddled picture — maybe the clearest takeaway is the repudiation of Trump specifically.

But as for politics more broadly, and how much it goes back to “normal” — how much democratic (small “d”) norms and values will be respected again — I just don’t know. I don’t think many actors in the Republican Party, the majority of whom have looked the other way or supported the Trump administration’s anti-democratic moves, will suddenly gain a new reverence for those values. Especially when voters didn’t seem to punish them electorally for the last four years. But again … we’ll just have to see.

The rhetoric tonight was bipartisan, traditional and somber, and it kept Harris’s role in the foreground — but I imagine they’ve got to be planning for an immediate resumption of the tense relationship with Senate Republicans that characterized Obama’s final two years in office.

Biden and Harris both presented a message of hope while recognizing the challenges their administration will face — not only the raging pandemic, but also a country that’s increasingly divided along partisan lines. Those are big challenges. On the latter, Biden said we need to “lower the temperature” in partisan fights, which gave me whiplash! Such a contrast with Trump. But we will have to wait and see whether he can actually increase cooperation.