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Joe Biden has been elected the 46th president of the United States, defeating President Trump with a campaign that focused on healing the country’s divisions and defeating the coronavirus pandemic.
Biden’s victory was narrower than most observers predicted, and Republicans appear to be in a strong position to retain control of the Senate. But Biden was able to reverse three key states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, that Trump had won four years ago, giving him the necessary margin to win the Electoral College. Biden also appears to be in a good position to increase his lead, possibly winning Arizona, Nevada and Georgia, where votes are still being counted.
Trump has so far refused to budge and has made unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud. But the Associated Press has concluded that Biden has reached the 270-vote threshold necessary for victory. Unlike Trump in 2016, Biden also won the popular vote and had the most votes cast.
Biden called his campaign a “battle for the soul of the nation” and based it on an attempt to regain the confidence of white working-class voters. The former vice president presented himself as a unifier who would lower the temperature of political disputes after Trump’s divisive term.
“It’s time for Donald Trump to pack his bags and go home,” Biden said at a rally in Cleveland on Monday. “We are done with the chaos, we are done with the tweets, the anger, the hatred, the failure, the irresponsibility.”
The victory culminates a political career that began 50 years ago when Biden was elected to the New Castle County Council in Delaware. He became one of the youngest senators in modern history, winning the election at age 29. Biden will turn 78 later this month, making him the oldest president in US history when he takes office in January.
California Senator Kamala Harris, who will become vice president, will become the first woman to hold that position, as well as the first African American and the first Asian American.
Meanwhile, Trump becomes the first president to lose re-election since George HW Bush in 1992, and only the fourth in the past century.
Biden criticized Trump’s failure to control the coronavirus, which has cost more than 230,000 American lives. He also said that due to the pandemic, Trump would be the first president in 90 years to lose jobs over the course of a four-year term.
Biden led national polls throughout the campaign, but his supporters remained eager to the end, given his narrower leads in key states. They were right to be concerned: The polls were wrong again, severely underestimating Trump’s appeal just as they had in 2016. But this time, Biden had enough margin for error to emerge with victory.
Nothing was easy for Biden, starting with the Democratic primary. Biden ran as the most eligible candidate against Trump and invoked his close relationship with President Obama. As his competitors raced to the left on issues like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, Biden stayed in the center.
But although Biden led the polls, he suffered a near total collapse when the vote began. After a fourth-place finish at Iowa and a fifth-place finish at New Hampshire, he seemed left for dead. But a timely endorsement from Rep. Jim Clyburn sparked a comeback in South Carolina, as black voters led Biden to victory. Several moderate candidates supported his campaign, and Biden handily defeated Senator Bernie Sanders on Super Tuesday, effectively blocking the nomination.
The campaign was quickly overtaken by the pandemic, which triggered shutdowns across the country in March. For many weeks, Biden rarely appeared in public, campaigning only through Zoom. In one of the most shocking images of the campaign, Biden attended a Memorial Day service in Delaware wearing a black mask.
The mask became a political symbol in this unusual campaign year. Trump often refused to wear one and scoffed at those who did as “politically correct.” The White House took a lax approach to masking, assuming the evidence would be enough to keep the president and his advisers safe. The contrast between Trump’s recklessness and Biden’s caution was underscored on October 2, when Trump tested positive for the virus. More than 30 White House employees and associates also tested positive, many related to a rose garden celebration of the appointment of Judge Amy Coney Barrett.
For Biden’s campaign, the pandemic meant much less door-to-door scrutiny and the absence of traditional mass gatherings. The Democratic National Convention was held online and Biden held a series of car rallies in the final days of the campaign.
The campaign was also disrupted by mass protests following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police on May 25. As Trump spoke of using the National Guard to quell uprisings in various cities, Biden met with the Floyd family.
Biden, who lost his first wife and daughter in a car accident and son Beau to cancer, has long connected through grief and empathy. In his convention speech, Biden reflected on meeting Floyd’s six-year-old daughter, Gianna.
“When I leaned over to talk to her, she looked me in the eye and said, ‘Dad, it changed the world,'” Biden said. “His words sank deep into my heart.”
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