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.

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.

With the speech over, my mind turns to the next couple of months. How hard of a transition is Trump going to make this? My guess is he won’t make it easy. And while I think some Biden supporters may imagine that this is somehow the end of Trump, the president may decide not to go quietly, and he’ll have plenty of attentive ears should he continue to have an aggressive public persona come 2021. What the impact of that will be, I don’t know.

The contrast with Trump’s “American carnage” speech couldn’t have been starker. This was pure feel-good optimism. I’m not sure how much it changes the soul of America, which is still deeply torn, but it sure felt uplifting for one night.

Every presidential election is historic, but this one perhaps especially so. The first female vice president. The end of one of the most tumultuous administrations in American history. But despite today’s events, the future is not rosy for Democrats. Biden will have real trouble enacting any kind of legislative agenda if Democrats don’t win two runoff elections for Senate in Georgia in January. And Republicans did well in state-level elections that control redistricting, enabling them to draw favorable House and state legislature maps for the next decade.

This speech really set a tone and represented a major shift from the rhetoric we’ve gotten from Trump for the last four years. Even though we’ve heard similar thoughts from Biden throughout the campaign, it’s obviously different when he is president-elect and giving a glimpse of what we can expect for the next four years. What a shift we have ahead.

The main thing I’m struck by in the speeches tonight is something fairly simple and obvious — the change in tone. Harris and Biden both gave standard-order political speeches. But it’s a pretty stark reminder of what this election meant for many voters, and how things will change under a Biden presidency. To state the obvious, even if the divisions and polarization remain, politics is going to feel very different come January.

A big takeaway from this speech for me was the emphasis on Harris as a part of the ticket and the new administration. This reflects the growing power of the vice presidency, a trend that’s been building since the 1970s, and also Biden’s awareness, I think, that he doesn’t totally reflect the demographics of his party in ways that have become more important in recent years.

The 2008 and 2016 acceptance speeches felt like the potential beginnings of new eras in American politics. But this feels much more like the end of a tumultuous era than a beginning. Even 1992, the last defeat of an incumbent president, felt like a potential era of change because of a new generation of leadership. But this is much more of a return to the old style, and it’s even being sold that way.

Biden mentioned Native Americans as he listed off the groups he received support from, and as things may play out in Arizona, that group could be the difference between him winning and losing the state’s electoral votes. Currently, Biden leads there by about 19,000 votes, but in the three counties that overlap the lands of the Navajo Nation and Hopi Tribe in northeastern Arizona, Biden edged out Trump by a little more than 22,000 votes. We’ll see where Arizona ends up as it has another 100,000 or so votes to count, but it’s possible that support among American Indian communities in Arizona might make the difference there.

We are hearing a lot of religious rhetoric from Biden tonight, which isn’t a surprise — he’s a Catholic, as Clare mentioned, and he’s also made religion a much more central part of his campaign than many Democrats do. It’s interesting in the context of the Democratic Party’s changing demographics, though. The largest part of his religious coalition may end up being people with no religious affiliation at all. Given their strong support for Biden this year, though, I doubt many will mind!

Universal mask-wearing by the large Biden clan is a symbol of how he will lead differently on that issue.

I’ve been monitoring many of the “Stop the Steal” Facebook groups that have cropped up this week, which attract tens of thousands of users and are chock full of misinformation about unsupported claims of voter fraud, partly spurred by Trump’s claims in the same vein. It’s worth noting that a common theme in these groups are supporters saying they will not accept the election results until they “hear it from Trump.” Trump’s silence only allows the distrust to simmer.

The Washington Post wrote about some of the executive actions Biden might take right as he enters office. They include:

• Ending the Trump-era ban on people coming to the U.S. from some majority-Muslim nations.
• Reinstating the DACA program that protected some undocumented immigrants from deportation.
• Reentering the United States in the Paris climate accords.

As you can tell from his speech tonight, COVID-19 mitigation is also going to be a big Biden priority.

I guess I have a brand, because my phone is exploding from everyone I know texting me about Biden talking about mandates. Maybe I should send him a copy of my book. In terms of the answer about whether we snap back to normal, I think that Biden’s use of the mandate idea is actually a way of side-stepping that question. As I note in my work, presidents use this idea when they’re embattled and struggling with legitimacy. I’m not sure how this will play out, but I don’t think polarization is going to end in the next 74 days. However, Biden is using that rhetoric, it seems, to define his presidency as a crisis presidency. He just mentioned Lincoln and FDR. These were not moments when the nation was united and at peace; they were challenging and incredibly divided times. But national leaders worked to address those problems because they were so pressing and the country depended on it.

Biden is citing a common Eucharistic hymn in his speech. He’s a Catholic, don’t forget!

All presidents since 1976 combined served less than 8 years in Congress. Biden will enter with the longest experience in Congress ever for a president: 36 years, not including 8 years as vice president. He has a long history of dealmaking ties to Senate leaders. But his presidency will be a test of whether that experience still helps pass legislation in a polarized era.

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.

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.

To that point, Sarah, on how much of a snap back to normal there will be. Here’s pretty-run-of-the-mill Republican Sen. Marco Rubio:

We’re not getting a snap back.

There is no going back to normal, Sarah. Everyone says they want politicians to work together and cooperate. But when you push people on that, what they really want is the other party to compromise. And therein lies the rub.

Biden is pushing hard here on the rhetoric of American togetherness and unity. But partisanship is strong, it’s been around longer than Trump, and, as Julia points out, it has an impact on how we perceive reality and what is actually happening. Although maybe this part of the speech should be seen more as a message to Mitch McConnell than to the American people — “It’s time to stop blocking each other politically for points.”

In the past, Sarah, urges for unity often came from the candidate who conceded. That’s traditionally part of a concession speech: Get behind our president, work together. But I don’t know if we’ll get that from Trump.

Something you’d mentioned earlier, Julia, was whether Biden’s appeals to bipartisanship or red states and blue states would ring hollow. It’s hard to tell in the moment here, of course, but it is something I wonder about. Is someone who voted for Trump even watching this? Can politics go back to “normal’? I’m not so sure.

Right, Micah, and I think there’s a good chance that the economy will be in even worse shape by January, when Biden takes office, unless a stimulus bill somehow passes by then. But on the other hand, Biden does have a number of fairly obvious moves he can make via executive action, which he can do as soon as he becomes president — reinstating DACA, for example.

I think Biden is defining his mandate here, and I’m impressed he included rooting out systemic racism in his mandate. That’s a strong move for him.

To your second question Micah, Biden will have to contend with a historic recession. But he’ll also have to contend with the perceptions of that recession. In October, the vast majority of Republicans believed the economy was doing well while only 8 percent of Democrats did. Under a Democratic president, I’m going to guess those numbers flip in short order.

Those are the basics, but I think Democrats and, in particular, the progressive wing want to see some real change. The honeymoon period will likely be short before both Biden and Harris’s feet are held to the fire by the left.

Micah, I guess the question comes down to whether the election said something specific about those things. Any president would be expected to address these major national issues. I guess you could say that the election was a referendum, to some degree, on the incumbent administration’s approach to those issues.

Two intertwined and thankless mandates, Micah.

Let’s talk about mandates. Julia has written about how real mandates are a bit of a myth, but doesn’t Biden have two sorta obvious and thankless mandates?

1. Get the novel coronavirus pandemic under control.
2. Help get the economy back on track (to the extent that presidents have any influence on the economy).

Biden’s explicitly thanking the Black community seems pretty significant to me. Obama was always caught in a bind when it came to talking about the Black community’s support — it was almost that he didn’t want to remind people too much of the historic nature of his presidency. He wanted to be president to all people. Biden, as an older white man, is perversely, given more latitude to talk about race.

Dan, I think we’re moving past the point of red states and blue states when the even more consequential divide is between rural America and urban America. And rural America is becoming even more red, and urban America is becoming even more blue. It will make it even harder for Republicans in Congress to have any room to work with Democrats, given who they represent and the kinds of primary challenges they’d face if they started being more bipartisan.

Exactly right, Chris: Biden’s thanking and crediting of Black Americans for rescuing his campaign could not be more true. Remember how poorly he did in Iowa and New Hampshire?

Biden recognizing the support he got from African American community, which put him over the top in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Milwaukee. Also helped him immensely during the primary in South Carolina.

Biden will likely begin his term with the lowest expectations of any recent president-elect. It will be easy to not act like Trump and to be empathetic, which were the main differentiators raised in the campaign. He’ll certainly be expected to address COVID-19, but that might be achieved in the public mind merely by taking it more seriously (as he has during the campaign). Although there was a large policy agenda, a tied or opposition-dominated Senate will diminish policy expectations.

And, Clare, this speech is a stark contrast to Trump’s rhetoric of singling out “Democrat-run” cities and states when discussing everything from protests to COVID-19 outbreaks.

“I am humbled by the trust and confidence you’ve placed in me … who doesn’t see red states and blue states.” Biden is basically repeating what he said the other night, and, as Dan noted, echoing Obama. And I guess you can’t blame him; his Obama echo has been one of his strongest campaign strategies.

In talking about seeing not “red states and blue states but the United States,” Biden calls back to Obama’s famous 2004 convention speech. But like Obama, he is unlikely to find much bipartisan cooperation in Congress, whatever his rhetoric.

Some other, less meaningful firsts for this administration: Biden is the first president from the state of Delaware. And Harris is the first Democratic vice president or president from the West.

Delaware residents are called Delawareans? 😬

Harris mentioned her mother, who emigrated to the United States at the age of 19. This is a few years old, but this Pew report highlights second-generation Americans, who are distinct in their political and personal outlooks from both their immigrant parents and other Americans who are not the children of immigrants.

I love how Biden almost seems surprised to see that certain petiole have shown up for maybe the most exciting thing to happen in modern Delaware history.

Oh wow, Biden had some pep in his step walking up to the podium! He did a little run.

Harris also mentioned the record numbers that turned out to vote, and, boy, does that look to be the case — we are at about 150 million total votes in the presidential race. But with many votes left to be counted, it looks like this election will set a record for turnout among the voting-eligible population in elections since 1971, when the voting age was lowered to 18. As things stand, just over 62 percent of the voting-eligible population has turned out, but that number will likely climb to 63 or 64 percent in the coming days, especially as California completes its tally. The previous post-1971 high was 61.6 percent in 2008, according to data from the United States Elections Project.