What the commentators said
Like many Americans, I was hankering for a Biden landslide, said Lili Loofbourow on Slate. “The results needed to be definitive, and they needed to be a rebuke.” Although we were wary of believing the polls after the “trauma of 2016”, it really did seem that people were ready to show Trump the door. But regardless of what happens next, it’s clear America hasn’t repudiated Trumpism. That’s “a blow to the gut”.
The lingering support for Trump is not so surprising, said Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal. Yes, he’s a deeply flawed character with no respect for conventions or the truth, but he has delivered on conservative priorities by rebalancing the judiciary, boosting the economy and slashing regulations. His opponent, meanwhile, is “a candidate who sits smiling and slightly bewildered atop a party that, in its radical programme, its emerging leaders and its ideological associations, represents a sustained challenge to the shared ideals that have sustained the United States through its history”. The president’s strong showing among Hispanic voters, who tend to favour traditional family values, shows that Trumpism is not just about “angry white men”, said Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. The election results suggest the Republicans under his tenure have been transformed into “a genuine working-class coalition”.
“Elections are meant to resolve differences,” said Edward Luce in the FT, but this one has settled little. If Biden eventually wins, he’ll inherit a bitterly divided nation that will be hard to govern, especially if, as seems likely, the Republicans retain control of the Senate. If Trump wins, it will be the second time he has done so with a minority of the popular vote, thanks to an electoral college system that gives outsized influence to small, rural states. “The American people have spoken. And it is a cacophonous noise.” The US has become so rigidly polarised that its political process now seems incapable of delivering decisive outcomes, agreed Ross Douthat in The New York Times. Everything leads “back towards stalemate”.