Putting All That Malarkey Behind Us
The view from inside the Biden bunker.
Florida was looking Trumpier than ever, and early on Tuesday night there was little that Joe Biden’s campaign staffers could do but sit and wait. The former vice-president’s campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, had warned them this might happen. The campaign would love to get a kill shot early in the evening with the Sun Belt states, she’d said, but they weren’t necessary to get Biden to 270 electoral votes. Still, by the time a brief window of optimism about Ohio’s suburbs started to close, the early results were feeling like “real gut punches,” in the words of one top Biden ally who was in touch with the inner circle throughout the night.
Gathered inside their war room in Wilmington, most of Biden’s top advisers had spent a few days steeling themselves for this moment, a few hours into Election Night, when the map of Florida was shifting from pink to a more aggressive
shade of red. For months, they had thought it might be close. It’s Florida! It’s always close! But the warning signs, especially in the state’s southern tip, had recently been unmissable, even while their internal data showed Biden earning 51 percent of Florida’s early vote. It’s why they had dispatched their theoretical campaign closer, Barack Obama, to Miami the previous day. And it’s part of the reason why, when O’Malley Dillon and senior adviser-slash-lawyer Bob Bauer briefed reporters on Tuesday morning, they went out of their way to remind the journalists that while it would be nice to have Florida in the exVP’s column, he didn’t really need it. If it came down to it, he could always rely on flipping the upper midwestern states Donald Trump had shockingly won in 2016, and they had reason for optimism there. They’d also heard reports of high turnout in Philadelphia, and they thought they had won Pennsylvania’s early vote by a massive two-to-one margin—though they knew they wouldn’t get a final result there for a while. (And anyway, O’Malley Dillon said that morning, Biden didn’t need Pennsylvania, either. Not with so many states in play.) The advisers even started the night with cake, a continuation of a long-running inside joke turned superstition that had begun nine months earlier. During the primary, after Biden did better than expected in Nevada’s Democratic caucuses on Bauer’s birthday, Biden aides ordered sheet cakes for the next few primary nights, too, which Biden mostly won, and now staffers at watch parties up and down the coast were showing off their sheet cakes decorated with happy birthday, bob.
It was at this point—with Michigan and Wisconsin looking good but Florida likely gone and Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas looking tough—that Biden’s socially distanced brain trust dug in for a long count. “This was the hard part,” one senior Democratic official remembered a few hours later. “We had been telling everyone the message was ‘This would not get a decision for a few days.’ But we had never experienced it.”
No one had. At least not on this scale— not even Biden, who has been in public life for nearly half a century, or the presidential campaign and White House veterans who were at this moment sitting at separate desks, divided by tall sheets of plexiglass, wearing N95 masks.
Biden, still at home with his wife, Jill, was planning to get into his Secret Service– protected motorcade, ride over to a gathering of supporters, and address the nation at around 11 p.m. But this tight group—led by O’Malley Dillon and including Bauer and other senior Biden aides like Anita Dunn, Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Bruce Reed, and Ron Klain—decided to hold off on a speech. No real battlegrounds had yet fallen in their direction, and since it was clear the final results might now take a while, they figured Biden would need to settle the waters considering Trump’s likely antics, which might include a baseless declaration of victory. “It’s a matter of when does the VP address the nation, and calm the nation, and do the opposite of what Trump was going to do?” explained one senior Democrat. They decided to wait for some clarity. Their hourly video calls with the legal boiler room in D.C. and the analytics bunker in Philadelphia had been flying by.
Texas—always a long shot—was looking grimmer for Biden, and the combination of pending losses there and in Florida had already gotten talking heads chattering about a possibly dramatic Democratic underperformance with much-needed Latino voters. But Biden’s data and Florida teams were convinced that this was a mirage and that Trump had simply overperformed both along the border in South Texas and in Miami-Dade County, with Cuban Americans convinced Biden was a secret socialist. They didn’t represent a voting bloc at all in places like Arizona or Nevada. Meanwhile, promising votes were still coming in across the country— particularly in those “blue wall” states— giving members of the inner circle reason for optimism.
And then there was Arizona, a traditionally red state the Biden campaign had been hoping to capture in order to keep as many paths open to 270 electoral votes as possible, while shutting down Trump’s hopes of keeping his 2016 coalition together. For a few days, allies on the ground in Arizona had been sending Biden’s advisers news that sounded pretty good, especially when it came to Latino voters and pissed-off suburbanites who liked John McCain. The news got even better as the first results trickled in. “I felt confident, and they felt confident, that Arizona was going to deliver,” Phoenixarea congressman Ruben Gallego told me. “When the first big [data] drop went down, there was huge relief.”
The exhale came at 11:20, when Fox News called Arizona for Biden, a sign not only that he was holding his own with Latinos but that Trump was in for more serious trouble than the TV networks were saying out loud—especially with the Midwest slipping out of his grasp. “It was not the complete and utter repudiation that we were looking for, but it’s a win,” one top Biden-campaign ally remembered thinking at the time. It didn’t matter that no one aside from Fox was calling Arizona quite yet or that Biden was still technically far from the 270 mark. “We fucking won.”
I t felt a lot later than it was. The campaign had been planning for a few weeks, in fact, for Trump to go crazy right around now. Biden’s team had long been confident of winning the race, but O’Malley Dillon had been insisting for a while that it would be closer than public polling was suggesting and that the campaign had to work till the final vote was counted. Still, as the weekly all-staff calls became daily in the final stretch, aides couldn’t help but start to feel cautiously optimistic, especially after this Sunday’s call, when they were invited to patch in a family member or a loved one to hear the Bidens, Kamala Harris, and her husband, Doug Emhoff, thank the staffers.
Meanwhile, veteran operative Stephanie Cutter had quietly been leading a team to lay the legal and political groundwork so Biden’s forces wouldn’t be taken by surprise if Trump falsely claimed victory, prepping a legal fund to combat the expected court challenges Republicans would throw up in desperation and working out the politics of how to publicly discuss what Trump was doing. Biden’s lawyers, led by general counsel Dana Remus, Bauer, and others, like election-law guru Marc Elias, prepped for suits in each of the battlegrounds.
The first step, though, was Biden’s speech, delivered to a parking lot full of fans’ honking cars around 12:45 on Wednesday morning. “We believe we’re on track to win this election,” he said. But “we’re going to have to be patient.”
the morning, it was the lawyers’ game. With Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada looking as though they’d rejected the president and with Georgia looking back within reach, the Trump team’s desperation burst into public view, and senior Democrats began hearing that his aides were trying to lean on the TV networks to stop them from calling any more states for Biden; they were furious that Fox had called Arizona so early. Biden’s camp formally launched its legal fund, and O’Malley Dillon and Bauer felt comfortable going even further, arranging another media briefing to keep the momentum going and to make clear that the die was cast. “Joe Biden is on track to win this election, and he will be the next president of the United States,” the campaign manager said a little after 10 a.m. “We’re winning the election, we’ve won the election, and we’re going to defend that election,” added the former Obama White House counsel. If Trump does try to go to the Supreme Court, he continued, “he will be in for one of the most embarrassing defeats a president ever suffered before the highest court of the land.”
On thursday afternoon, as Pennsylvania and Georgia narrowed, Biden and Harris made a show of attending long briefings on the coronavirus and the economy, while Trump was nowhere to be seen. That night, after Trump baselessly cried fraud from the White House briefing room, the Secret Service made plans to beef up its protection of Biden, starting to ramp up to the level it would reach for a president-elect, even though the race was not yet formally called. Democrats close to the campaign openly spoke of celebrating as soon as Philadelphia’s outstanding votes pushed Biden ahead in the deciding state—the one where he had based his campaign headquarters and where he had grown up.
When that happened, finally, early on Friday, Trump’s campaign team was quick to issue a statement insisting the race wasn’t over and hinting at more legal challenges. But Biden’s team had long before seen enough. “As we said on July 19th, the American people will decide this election,” said Andrew Bates, Biden’s rapid-response director. “And the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.”