At a crystalline moment in the latest presidential debate, Donald Trump and Joe Biden answered a question about people of color living next to chemical plants and oil refineries who appear to be getting sick. As is his way, Biden responded with empathy to have been there. He remembered growing up so close to Delaware refineries that when his mother drove him to school on a frosty morning, the windshield wipers smeared an oil stain on his windshield.
Trump also responded in his own way. “The families we are talking about are heavily employed and are making a lot of money,” he supposed. “More money than they ever made … a lot of money.”
These men were true to form, authentic in that exchange. On debate night and during the campaign, they offered voters a different choice between a red-hot president who put the bottom line before everything else and an inconspicuous Democrat who invited Americans to calm down and unite. Biden promised to speak frankly and soberly about the deadly pandemic, respect for the facts (if you don’t count your flaws), aspirations for racial justice and a resurgence of the truths of American democracy that Democrats said Trump was shattering.
And the nation took a turn, embracing at least the possibility of reconciliation in this deeply divided country. Will Americans accept Biden’s olive branch? The election was far from being a complete repudiation of the polarizing president. While Biden garnered the most votes of any presidential candidate in history, Trump garnered the second most votes, each with more than 70 million and about 4 million votes apart. Biden’s victory on Saturday, when Pennsylvania sealed his Electoral College victory, caused Trump to cry badly, refused to budge, and fueled a false feeling among his supporters that he was duped by a corrupt vote.
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After nearly five decades in public office, Biden was never going to be the most energizing candidate on the field. He didn’t have a concise catchphrase like “Hope and Change” to spark excitement. Boldness is not your thing, man. Rather, he tapped into the majority’s desire to stop the noise, reject the bleats on Twitter, turn the page from a period marked by confrontation, division and chaos, often driven by the White House itself. “That this grim era of demonization in America is beginning to end, here and now,” he told his excited crowd and the country in his victory speech Saturday night.
The Trump years had been too long for Republican Edward Drnach, 61, of Ellicott City, Maryland, who voted for a Democratic president for the first time.
“I just had it,” Drnach said of Trump. “Whether he says something stupid, or breaks ties with an ally, or kisses a dictator, I’ve had it, and all the bunch of things that go along with it, all of his family, and so on.”
It was also too much for Biden’s voter, Cynthia McDonald, in Sandy Springs, Georgia. “I want to wake up and not have this sense of doom,” said the 52-year-old consultant. “I just want to wake up and feel like there is an adult in charge.”
“It’s like a train accident that you can’t look away from,” he said. “Then you realize that you are not seeing the train crash. You’re on the damn train. ”At least part of Biden’s victory was fueled by an animosity toward Trump that was far greater than the rejection of Jimmy Carter or George HW Bush, the only other two elected incumbents to lose since Herbert Hoover in the Depression It was enough that the left swallowed its disappointment at its party’s choice of a conventional candidate and got behind it.
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PASSION GAMES
From the beginning, if anyone can remember a beginning, Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris clung to their consistent lead in opinion polls like a precious vase, wary of moving too much so it doesn’t slip and break. Campaigning in the midst of a pandemic, they were studiously aloof. In a throwback to the age of drive-ins, people gathered in and on their cars in fields and parking lots to hear Democrats speak, honking their horns in approval.
When Trump saw the Democratic events, he saw no respect for public guidelines; He only saw sparse crowds. His own events, often in states that suffered from heavy virus infections in the final days of the campaign, drew thousands, standing shoulder to shoulder. They came to see the leader who contracted Covid-19, appeared to ignore him, and then danced for their masked crowd and cheers.
Such passions swept across the vast American landscape in an explosion of banners across small town lawns and farmers’ fields; Geographically, at least, this was still Trump’s country. But posters, rallies and red caps are not votes. Americans overthrew Trump with the quiet passion of their votes. For all that, Trump’s country endures beyond the man himself in ways that cannot simply go backwards, culturally, politically or between neighbors.
Biden will take over with an entrenched conservative majority on the Supreme Court and a reformed federal judiciary with Trump’s lifetime appointments. He inherits the immigration barriers that were created both from politics and from the steel girders that make up Trump’s imposing yet unfinished border wall. Biden is preparing to take office in a pandemic that won’t turn into a dime simply because he takes it seriously and doesn’t look down on the experts.
Trump also gave a voice to a large and aggrieved minority simmering with their own resentments, often over a government they feel has left them behind. These resentments don’t go away overnight. They may only be exacerbated by the defeat of the leader who seemed to have the backing of those who had elected him four years ago, the leader who used lockdown aggression as a means to get what he wants. Some dared to hope otherwise.
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“Joe Biden is a good man who wants the best for everyone in this country,” said Gabriella Cochrane, a 54-year-old corporate recruiter from Virginia Beach, Virginia, who voted for him. “Not the richest. It is not the whitest. For everyone. His reassuring presence is what this country needs right now. “
PIVOTS FORWARD
Regardless of the hurdles Biden faces with Congress, prepare for a change of style that will also come with a change of substance, at least in areas where a new president can flip a switch.
The rollback of the White House environmental regulation is over. Hello again, Paris climate agreement. Wearing masks from the bully’s pulpit will be encouraged, never ridiculed. Goodbye to the tsunami of tweets from the White House – more than 22,000 of them from Trump since he took office.
Biden’s ego is as substantial as any normal politician’s, and his way of diverting attention to others is not a unique grace in politics. His path only stands out because common graces completely disappeared in the Trump era. In a Quinnipiac poll shortly before the election, a strong majority said that Biden has a sense of decency and Trump does not. The Democrat takes office with the support of dozens of Republicans who served as national security officials, US prosecutors, governors and legislators, part of a larger group of ordinary Americans who traditionally also vote for Republican presidents, but not this time. they made.
However, that twist does not indicate a smooth sailing in Washington, where widespread toxicity in the country promises epic showdowns across the entire spectrum of policies: taxes, immigration, trade, foreign affairs and more.
Biden’s broad coalition of college graduates, women, urban and suburban voters, youth and African-Americans prevailed over Trump’s core white voters without a college degree, rural voters and religious conservatives, according to the AP VoteCast, a national poll of the electorate. Both sides entered the fight entrenched: about three-quarters said they knew from the beginning which candidate they backed.
Then there’s the pandemic, which has disrupted much of American life and may ultimately have cost Trump the presidency. The election exposed how close to home the crisis has come: About 1 in 5 voters said a close friend or family member died from the virus and about 2 in 5 said their home lost a job or income due to to this, according to AP VoteCast. Trump got tangled up with scientists and didn’t tell the public everything he knew: that the virus was airborne, that young people could get infected, that the virus was far more deadly than seasonal flu.
He closed the campaign exasperated by all the attention that continues to be paid to “Covid, Covid, Covid” as the virus spreads, hospitals in critical points are struggling to accommodate the sick and the death toll has exceeded 236,000.
Biden brings a different approach to the crisis simply by acknowledging its severity, promising to be guided by public health authorities, and promising that Americans will finally hear the truth about it from the White House.
It has not come up with a federal action plan that is markedly different from what the country has seen. Still, more than 4 in 10 voters named the pandemic their dominant problem, more than those primarily motivated by the economy, Trump’s strong suit in public opinion.
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The man nicknamed Sleepy Joe by Trump may represent a cure for another type of condition: Trump’s fatigue.
That’s what Carla Dundes, a retired professional oboist, is hoping for who got so tired of Trump honking his own horn.
So tired of obsessively following political news, virus infection figures, polls, the latest count of ballots received in the mail on her county website from her home in the Pittsburgh suburb of Mount Lebanon. She’s sick of feeling centered alone when behind her Steinway piano, her instrument of choice these days.
“I want my life back,” he said. At a rally in Orlando, Florida, at the end of the campaign, Barack Obama paid a rare compliment to his former vice president and Harris. He said they are people you can ignore for days.
“You are not going to have to think about them every day,” he said. “You won’t have to worry about the crazy things they are going to say, what they are going to tweet. They will just be too busy doing the job. It just won’t be that strenuous. They can get on with their lives. “
People honked their horns.
.
