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Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. has defeated Donald Trump to become the 46th president of the United States, ousting the incumbent on a promise to unify and repair a nation reeling from a worsening pandemic, a faltering economy and deep political divisions.
Joe Biden’s victory came after the Associated Press, CNN and NBC showed him winning Pennsylvania and garnering more than the 270 Electoral College votes needed to secure the presidency. Trump tried to undermine the outcome, baselessly accusing Democrats of trying to steal the election and claim victory before the race was called.
Biden’s running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, 56, becomes the first black and Indian-American woman to serve as vice president, a glimpse of the upcoming generational shift in the party.
The 77-year-old Biden will become the oldest president-elect in American history and the first to topple a sitting commander-in-chief after a stint since Bill Clinton defeated George HW Bush in 1992.
Biden won 284 votes in the Electoral College, according to the AP, which had previously called Arizona for Democrat. Several other networks have yet to call Arizona, leaving Biden with 273 Electoral College votes in his tally, still enough to claim the presidency.
But the incoming president’s goal of uniting the country will be hampered by Trump’s unfounded fraud allegations and control of the US Senate in the air, pending two rounds in Georgia in January.
If Republicans occupy the Senate, Biden’s agenda of tax increases for the rich and corporations and climate-friendly energy policies could be hampered in Congress. The Democrats maintained control of the House of Representatives.
Biden reclaimed the battlefield states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the so-called Blue Wall that handed over the presidency to Trump in 2016. Encouraged by the historic turnout, Biden garnered 4 million more votes than Trump nationwide, up to Saturday morning, winning by minus 74 million votes to Trump’s 70 million.
Trump challenges the results
Trump tried to question the result, citing widespread voting irregularities without evidence and filing lawsuits to challenge the vote count in some key states where it was behind.
“I WON THIS ELECTION, BY FAR!” Triumph tweeted Saturday morning. I was at Trump National Golf Club Washington, DC, in Sterling, Virginia, when the networks called the race for Biden.
So far, none of Trump’s demands have gained traction or shown that the election results can be overturned.
Biden garnered enough support to sideline one of the most unconventional and polarizing presidents in American history, a man who cultivated fierce loyalty among his supporters, who had begun to shout, “We love you! ” at his campaign rallies, while equating his political rivals and the media with enemies of the state.
Given how narrow Biden’s margins were, Trump could have won a second term were it not for his widely criticized response to the coronavirus pandemic and the economic fallout. The president used to reflect at rallies on how he had won the election before the virus hit the United States earlier this year.
Trump consistently downplayed the threat of the virus and discouraged even the simplest public health measures to curb its spread, turning the wearing of masks into a political problem. For voters, seeing Trump, his wife, and their youngest son infected with Covid-19 in early October marked their inability to protect the nation as a whole.
Biden has promised that fighting the outbreak in the United States will be his top priority, along with repairing a battered economy. He has proposed a $ 3.5 trillion plan that relies heavily on deficit spending to create jobs, although a plan of that size would likely meet resistance in a Republican-led Senate. More than 9.7 million Americans have become ill and more than 236,000 have died since February.
The president-elect has said he can erase some of Trump’s most controversial decisions on his own, without congressional approval. He plans to rejoin the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organization and reverse the rollbacks of Trump’s environmental regulations. It says it will also end the immigration ban of several predominantly Muslim nations and restore the rights of asylum seekers.
Voters responded to Biden’s relative humility and his conventional approach to the campaign, which reflects his 47 years in public life. Biden surrounded himself with many of the same advisers from his past campaigns, and his administration would likely include at least some veterans from Barack Obama’s White House, where Biden was vice president.
On the airwaves, Americans saw one-sided competition: In August and September, the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee surpassed the Trump team by more than $ 289 million, prompting a massive publicity effort.
Biden faces the Republican Senate
Faced with a likely Republican majority in the Senate, Biden would have to build on long-standing relationships with top Republicans in Congress for any chance of passing important legislation or having his preferred cabinet confirmed. That could prove difficult in a Washington that bears little resemblance to when Biden first entered politics in 1972.
The presidency marks an unexpected high point for Biden’s five-decade political career. The former Delaware senator’s two previous presidential runs in 1988 and 2008 collapsed in the primaries. After serving as Obama’s vice president, he passed up the opportunity to run again in 2016 following the death of his son Beau Biden and when Democrats rallied around Hillary Clinton.
Biden entered the Democratic primary in April 2019 as the favorite. He ran with a message of unity, often saying he ran because of Trump’s response to the 2017 white supremacist rally and counter-protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, when the president said there were “very good people on both sides.”
Until Biden’s victory was secured, Democrats feared he would fall short, as did Clinton in 2016. Once again, public polls appeared to exaggerate Biden’s strength in hotly contested states, as Biden was forced to obtain narrow victories on battlefields like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Party operatives were concerned about Biden’s light travel schedule during the final leg of the campaign. Some helpers feared Biden’s operation didn’t get Black and Latino voters excited enough to get them to the polls.
Harris will be a key advisor
Biden’s choice of Harris seemed designed to counter criticism that he was a backward candidate in a party aimed at the future. Harris, a California senator and former California attorney general, drew younger and minority voters to the campaign. Biden promised that she would have the same access to the Oval Office that he had as vice president, and would be the last to offer advice after a meeting.
Harris challenged Biden in the primaries after gaining national fame by questioning Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Attorney General William Barr at their confirmation hearings. If Biden, who will turn 82 in 2024, decides not to seek a second term, he will almost certainly run again.
Ultimately, it was the coronavirus that reduced Trump’s chance of a second term. Even after recovering from his attack with the virus, Trump attacked leading infectious disease experts such as Anthony Fauci, a member of his own coronavirus task force. Polls routinely showed voters misjudged Trump’s response to the pandemic.
As Trump held a series of rallies filled with unmasked supporters, Biden urged Americans to heed warnings from scientists and medical experts to maintain social distancing and cover their faces in public.
After canceling all in-person campaign events when the coronavirus swept the US in March, Biden then resumed travel after Labor Day and set out to wear a mask in public. His events were small and socially distant, and he held rallies of hundreds of people honking in support.
Biden turned the race into a referendum on Trump, and the president tried to caricature Biden as a corrupt politician who had been through his prime and who was too weak to keep the far left wing of his party at bay. The president coined a mocking nickname for Biden, “Sleepy Joe”, much like his nickname “Crooked Hillary” in 2016.
Trump was better able to define Clinton, whose campaign was overshadowed by controversy over the handling of her emails while she was secretary of state. A letter in late October from then-FBI Director James Comey may have cemented Trump’s victory.
But attempts by Trump associates to smear Biden as corrupt failed. A week before the election, 55% of voters surveyed in a CNN poll said they viewed the former vice president favorably.
Still, many of the same challenges that sank the Trump presidency – namely, a resurgent pandemic that is holding back America’s economic recovery – could overwhelm the rest of Biden’s agenda.
It will face a series of cascading crises even beyond the pandemic: race riots, accelerating climate change, and a possible Supreme Court ruling that could eviscerate Obamacare, a policy it has vowed to follow.
Biden will likely have to continue dealing with Trump, who shows no signs of quietly leaving the White House. DM
By Jordan Fabian and Tyler Pager for Bloomberg
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