Former vice president promises normalcy and unity
WASHINGTON » Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was elected the 46th president of the United States on Saturday, promising to restore political normalcy and a spirit of national unity to confront raging health and economic crises, and making Donald Trump a oneterm president after four years of tumult in the White House.
Biden’s victory amounted to a repudiation of Trump by millions of voters exhausted with his divisive conduct and chaotic administration, and was delivered by an unlikely alliance of women, people of color, old and young voters and a sliver of disaffected Republicans. Trump is only the third
elected president since World War II to lose reelection, and the first in more than a quarter- century.
The result also provided a history-making moment for Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris of California, who will become the first woman to serve as vice president.
With his triumph, Biden, who turns 78 later this month, fulfilled his decadeslong ambition in his third bid for the White House, becoming the oldest person elected president. A pillar of Washington who was first elected amid the Watergate scandal, and who prefers political consensus over combat, Biden will lead a nation and a Democratic Party that have become far more ideological since his arrival in the capital in 1973.
He offered a mainstream Democratic agenda, yet it was less his policy platform than his biography to which many voters gravitated. Seeking the nation’s highest office a half-century after his first campaign, Biden — a candidate in the late autumn of his career — presented his life of setback and recovery to voters as a parable for a wounded country.
Appea r in g Sat urday night before supporters at a drive-in rally in Wilmington, Delaware, and speaking against the din of enthusiastic honking, Biden claimed the presidency and called on the country to reunite after what he described as a toxic political interlude.
“Let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end here and now,” he said.
W it hout a dd re s si n g Trump, the president- elect spoke directly to the president’s supporters and said he recognized their disappointment.
“I’ve lost a couple of times myself,” he recalled of his past failures to win the presidency, before adding: “Now let’s give each other a chance.”
In a statement earlier in the day, Trump insisted “this election is far from over” and vowed that his campaign would “start prosecuting our case in court” but offered no details.
Biden’s victory, which came 48 years to the day after he was first elected to the U. S. Senate, set off jubilant celebrations in Democratic- leaning cities. In Washington, D.C., people streamed into the streets near the White House and cheered as cars bearing American f lags drove by honking.
“And when our very democracy was on the ballot in this election, with the very soul of America at stake and the world watching, you ushered in a new day for America,” Harris said.
The race, which concluded after four tense days of vote-counting in a handful of battleground states, was a singular referendum on Trump in a way no president’s reelection has been in modern times. He coveted the attention, and voters who either adored him or loathed him were eager to render judgment on his tenure. From the beginning to the end of the race, Biden made the president’s character central to his campaign.
This unrelenting focus propelled Biden to victory in historically Democratic strongholds in the industrial Midwest, with Biden forging a coalition of suburbanites and big- city residents to claim at least three states his party lost in 2016. With ballots still being counted in several states, Biden was leading Trump in the popular vote by more than 4 million votes.
Yet even as they turned Trump out of office, voters sent a more uncertain message about the left- of- center platform Biden ran on as Democrats lost seats in the House and made only modest gains in the Senate. The divided judgment — a rare example of ticket splitting in partisan times — demonstrated that, for many voters, their disdain for the president was as personal as it was political.
Even in defeat, though, Trump demonstrated his enduring appeal to many White voters and his intense popularity in rural areas, underscoring the deep national divisions that Biden has vowed to heal.
In his address Saturday, Biden saluted Black voters, recalling how they revived his campaign at “its lowest ebb,” in February, and vowed to honor their loyalty. He said the voters had made clear they wanted both parties “to cooperate in their interest” and said he would reach out to Republicans and Democrats alike.
The outcome of the race came into focus slowly as states and municipalities grappled with the legal and logistical challenges of voting in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. With an enormous backlog of early and mail-in votes, some states reported their totals in a halting fashion that in the early hours of Wednesday painted a misleadingly rosy picture for Trump.
But as the big cities of the Midwest and West began to report their totals, the advantage in the race shifted the electoral map in Biden’s favor. By Wednesday afternoon, the former vice president had rebuilt much of the so- called blue wall in the Midwest, reclaiming the historically Democratic battlegrounds of Wisconsin and Michigan that Trump carried four years ago. Saturday, with troves of ballots coming in from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, he took back Pennsylvania as well.
While Biden stopped short of claiming victory as the week unfolded, he appeared several times in his home state, Delaware, to express confidence that he could win, while urging patience as the nation awaited the results. Even as he sought to claim something of an electoral mandate, noting that he had earned more in the popular vote than any other candidate in history, Biden struck a tone of reconciliation.
It would soon be time, he said, “to unite, to heal, to come together as a nation.”
In the days after the election, Biden and his party faced a barrage of attacks from Trump. The president falsely claimed in a middle- of- the- night appearance at the White House on Wednesday that he had won the race and that Democrats were conjuring fraudulent votes to undermine him, a theme he renewed on Thursday evening in grievance-filled remarks conjuring up, with no evidence, a conspiracy to steal votes from him.
The president’s campaign aides adopted a tone of brash defiance as swing states fell to Biden, promising a flurry of legal action. But while Trump’s ire had the potential to foment political divisions, there was no indication that he could succeed with his seemingly improvisational legal strategy.
Through it all, the coronavirus and its ravages on the country hung over the election and shaped the choice for voters. Facing an electorate already fatigued by his aberrant conduct, the president effectively sealed his defeat by minimizing a pandemic that has created simultaneous health and economic crises.
Beginning with the outbreak of the virus in the country at the start of the year, through his own diagnosis last month and up to the last hours of the election, Trump disregarded his medical advisers and public opinion even as more than 230,000 people in the United States perished.
Biden, by contra st , sought to channel the dismay of those appalled by Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic. He offered himself as a safe harbor for a broad array of Americans, promising to guide the nation out of what he called the “dark winter” of the outbreak, rather than delivering a visionary message with bright ideological themes.
While the president ridiculed mask-wearing and insisted on continuing his large rallies, endangering his own staff members and supporters, Biden and Harris campaigned with caution, avoiding indoor events, insisting on social distancing and always wearing masks.
Convinced that he could win back the industrial Northern states that swung to Trump four years ago, Biden focused his energy on Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Biden triumphed in those states on the strength of overwhelming support from women, who voted in large numbers to repudiate Trump despite his last-minute pleas to “suburban housewives,” as he called them.
Many of the women who decided the president’s fate were politically moderate college- educated suburbanites, who made their presence felt as an electoral force first in the 2018 midterm elections, when a historic wave of female candidates and voters served as the driving force behind the Democratic sweep to power in the House.
Even aside from the pandemic, the 2020 campaign unfolded against a backdrop of national tumult unequaled in recent history, including the House’s vote to impeach the president less than a year ago, a national wave of protests over racial injustice last spring, spasms of civil unrest throughout the summer, the death of a Supreme Court justice in September and the hospitalization of Trump in October.
Along the way, Trump played to his conservative base, seeking to divide the nation over race and cultural flashpoints. He encouraged those fears, and the underlying social divisions that fostered them. And for months he sought to sow doubt over the legitimacy of the political process.
Biden, in response, offered a message of healing that appealed to Americans from far left to center right. He made common cause by promising relief from the unceasing invective and dishonesty of Trump’s presidency.
The former vice president also sought to demonstrate his differences with the president with his selection of Harris, 56, whose presence on the ticket as the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants stood in stark contrast to Trump’s relentless scapegoating of migrants and members of racial minority groups.
In an era when political differences have metastasized into tribal warfare, at least 74 million voters turned to a figure who has become known as the eulogist in chief for his empathy and friendships with Republicans and Democrats alike.
In a sign of how much Trump alienated traditional Republicans, a number of prominent members of the party endorsed Biden’s candidacy, including Cindy McCain, the widow of former Sen. John Mccain; the party’s other two presidential nominees this century, George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, declined to endorse Trump.
Yet for all his lofty language about uniting the country, Biden was a halting candidate who ran a cautious campaign, determined to ensure that the election became a referendum on Trump. The former vice president fully returned to the campaign trail only around Labor Day, and for weeks he limited his appearances to one state every other day or so. He went west of the Central time zone just once during the general election.
Biden will be pressed to swiftly secure and distribute a safe vaccine for the coronavirus, revive an economy that may be in even more dire shape in January than it is now, and address racial justice.