Echoes of 2016 as talk of a landslide quickly proved unfounded
As Florida slipped from the Democrats’ sights and evidence of a surprising new base of Trump support emerged, Biden’s team knew race would be tight
Florida was the signal. Democrats went into election night with their eyes fixed on the state, knowing it was likely to be called early given state officials counted postal ballots as they arrived.
Turn Florida blue and Donald Trump was done. No Republican had lost the state and won the White House in generations. And after that, who knows?
Perhaps a Joe Biden landslide.
It took just hours to prove how misguided those ambitions had been. As polls closed on the east coast and counts began to flood in, Mr Trump pulled into a lead in Florida.
And not even a narrow lead. Soon the president was three percentage points up, in part thanks to what fast emerged as one of the stories of the night.
Mr Trump was making big inroads with Latino voters. That was clearest in Miami-dade County, a community at Florida’s southern tip with many Cubans and Venezuelans.
Mr Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, ended up winning the county by just seven percentage points. Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee, had taken it by 30.
That proved part of a trend. Exit polls showed Mr Trump increasing his 2016 vote share with Latino men and also African-american men – successes that had gone a little under the radar during the campaign.
The president’s fierce anti-socialist rhetoric and tough stance on Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan leader, may have helped with the former. As for the latter, the president’s team had long talked up their support among African-American men.
Mr Trump’s strength in Florida – the state was swiftly called for him – revealed another trend that would be repeated over and over again during election night. A trend that is all too familiar.
The eve of election polls had Mr Biden way out in front. He was leading the nationwide race by around eight points. He was ahead in almost every key battleground. That proved illusory.
In state after state as actual votes started being counted it was clear that the US president was far outperforming what had been expected of him judging by the polls.
First there were the southern states. For weeks the Democrats had been talking up their hopes of historic, politics-changing gains in Republican strongholds in the Deep South.
Could they win Texas, finally? Nope. Mr Trump ended up six points ahead with almost all the votes counted, despite a flurry of polls indicating the race had been neck-and-neck.
How about Georgia and North Carolina? There Mr Biden performed better. But with counting ongoing yesterday, neither was a guaranteed win. Again, polls had put him ahead in both.
As Tuesday evening turned into Wednesday morning it was clear the blowout Biden landslide was not going to happen. Trumpism, the “America First” doctrine that had worked in 2016, still appealed to many voters.
If Mr Biden’s campaign had hoped the president’s handling of Covid-19, the virus which has killed 230,000 in America and, via lockdowns crashed the economy, would lead to a nationwide rebuke, they were wrong.
Focus then turned to two parts of the country. Out west, Arizona and Nevada – the former held by Republicans, the latter by Democrats – had been a focus throughout the race. Here Mr Biden fared roughly as expected. He was up in both states going into the election; with most votes counted afterwards he was indeed up. But the results hung in the balance.
And then there was the Rust Belt. This cluster of states in America’s north-east quarter, a region that got its nickname because it is dotted with abandoned factories from long-gone industrial glory, won it for Mr Trump in 2016.
In that race he had turned the traditional Democratic states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin red by the narrowest of margins – the reason he was in the White House.
Joe Biden, an old white man from Pennsylvania with blue collar links and moderate politics, won his party’s nomination in no small part because he was deemed best placed to win back these states.
Polls had put him streaks ahead there before Tuesday: Double digits in Wisconsin, a comfortable margin in Michigan and a slimmer lead in Pennsylvania. The polls were wrong.
As the sun rose yesterday with all eyes on the states, whose counts were slower due to state rules saying they could not open postal ballots before election day, it was clear Mr Biden had not won by a mile after all.
The Trump strategy for this race had always been to excite his core base of supporters so much that they drove out in historic numbers in their attempts to get him a second term. That proved at least half right. With
The en masse abandonment of white working class voters from the Trump train did not materialise
ballots still being counted yesterday, the president had secured more than 67 million votes nationwide, up from 2016, when he won 63 million.
The en masse abandonment of white working class voters or the over-65s from the Trump train did not materialise, despite being predicted.
That told in the Rust Belt, where Mr Trump had managed to turn the contests in those three states – dubbed Mr Biden’s “blue wall” – into razortight races.
But if there was not a Biden blowout, as counts ticked up throughout yesterday the Democrat’s confidence of victory grew. Postal ballots turned Michigan and Wisconsin his way as the afternoon approached.
Exit polls revealed he had eaten into Mr Trump’s support with white men, showing Mr Biden winning 40 per cent of that demographic nationwide – a big increase from Mrs Clinton’s 32 per cent.
Should Mr Biden win, that will be a major part of the reason. Scores of male voters in the Rust Belt put off by Mrs Clinton in 2016 had ticked the box for “Middle Class Joe” in 2020.
As evening approached in Washington DC, both candidates still had pathways to the White House.
Mr Biden knew if he flipped Arizona, held Nevada and reclaimed Michigan and Wisconsin he would almost certainly be elected America’s 46th president.
Mr Trump too still had a path, albeit a narrower one. His team was targeting victories in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona to secure him a second term.
Legal challenges loomed. An official result could be days away. But as the sun dipped in the US capital, most election experts said you would rather be where Mr Biden was sitting.