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

We told you in August to plan for an election that might take weeks, given the challenges posed by COVID-19, and stressed the possibility that neither Trump nor Biden would reach 270 electoral votes on election night. That is, indeed, exactly what happened. Only on Saturday, five days after election night, did Biden clinch 270 votes in the Electoral College, putting him over the edge and on track to win the presidency.

And the electoral map, as editor-in-chief Nate Silver wrote earlier today, is pretty different than it looked on Tuesday night. In fact, it’s already changed (Nevada was projected for Biden since Nate’s story was published), and will continue to do so in the coming days:

There are outstanding races in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Alaska, not to mention a number of Senate and House races. But don’t worry, we’ll be tracking all that and more at our unresolved races live blog, which will launch tomorrow.

But in the meantime, I’ll leave you with our team’s final thoughts after covering this historic election — scroll all the way through if you dare! — and as a reminder, don’t let your understanding of this election settle neatly into any one narrative at this point. The picture is still coming into focus.

In our era of political polarization, competitive elections are the norm and our country remains deeply divided. Trump might not have won a second term, but the question of where the country heads next is an open one.

Thank you, readers, for following along and stay tuned for more coverage of unresolved races and analyses of what we’ve learned about 2020 in the weeks to come.

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.