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Joe Biden remained confident Wednesday that his campaign was on track to win the White House, while Democrats and voters hoping for a blue wave were sober and disheartened by the election night results.
In a televised address from Wilmington, Delaware, Biden told reporters that he would not yet declare victory, but that he believed he would reach the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.
“My fellow Americans, yesterday once again demonstrated that democracy is the heart of this nation,” Biden said. “I am not here to declare that we won, but I am here to report that when the count is up, we believe it will be the winner,” Biden said.
“Senator [Kamala] Harris and I are on track to win more votes than any other ticket in history, ”Biden said, referring to his running mate, who stood next to him on the podium wearing a face mask. He said only three presidential campaigns had won against an incumbent in US history.
“When it’s finished, God willing, we’ll be the fourth,” he said. “This is a great achievement.”
The presidential race remained too close to be called Wednesday afternoon, a far cry from the landslide some pollsters predicted. The Democrats on the ballot had not achieved the setback in the Senate they aspired to, and they had not made the gains in the House that seemed to be at stake.
The Biden campaign insisted that the veteran Democrat appeared to be on his way to unseating Trump, as hundreds of thousands of pending mail-in votes continued to be counted in key states on the battlefield. In the face of Trump’s false claims of victory and efforts to launch legal battles to lower the vote count, his message turned defiant.
“Now every vote must be counted,” said Biden in Wilmington. “No one is going to take away our democracy… We, the people, will not be silenced. We the people will not be intimidated. We, the people, will not give up. “
Trump’s re-election campaign said it would call for a recount in Wisconsin, which was declared a victory for Biden on Wednesday. He also said he had filed a lawsuit to “stop the count” in Michigan, where the results were too close to be calculated, and in Pennsylvania, where the count was expected to last at least until Friday.
Biden’s campaign kicked off a new fundraising effort Wednesday for “the largest electoral protection effort ever.”
“To make sure every vote is counted, we are organizing the largest electoral protection effort ever. Because Donald Trump cannot decide the outcome of this election, the American people do, ”Biden tweeted.
If Biden is ultimately victorious, he probably won’t have a Democratic-controlled Senate to help turn political priorities into law. As with presidential-related states, key Senate elections had not been called Wednesday, but Democrats were on track to fall short of the three net seats they needed to remove the Senate from Republican control in the event of a a Biden win.
But the sad truth on Wednesday was that Democrats were on track to lose seats in the House of Representatives, contradicting widespread predictions that Democrats would strengthen their majority in that legislative chamber. And the Republicans seemed poised to narrowly retain control of the Senate. Together, those results suggested two years of legislative stalemate, even with a president like Biden, who has predicted that bipartisan deals are still within reach.
“I think one of the things Democrats need to pay attention to is that we are likely to win the presidency,” said Democratic strategist Dan Sena, who led his party’s Congressional campaign arm when Democrats took control of the House of Representatives in 2018..
“But along with that, we have now somehow inherited the similar challenges that we had after 2016 without the benefit of entering the electoral cycle where nothing is controlled. So the lessons should be as much ‘how does Biden try to unite the country?’ and then ‘how do we deal with some of the same issues that we had in 2016 and now have in 20?’ “
Sena pointed to House Democrats who just lost their seats, noting that they “probably outnumbered the president in their districts.” In other words, the landscape has not drastically changed in favor of the Democrats. Close victories will still be close.
Likewise, Democrats now have to grapple with the reality that in the best case of Biden winning the presidency, all of the previous obstacles to legislative or electoral victory will continue to exist.
Similarly, exit polls suggested that Republicans and Trump made some gains among women and Hispanic voters, a warning sign that Democrats did not in fact have a monopoly on that demographic, as some pollsters had suggested. .
“We inherited the benefits of hopefully winning the presidency, but now they also have the same 16 challenges with ‘how do you build a larger coalition, how do you defend this?’” Sena said. “And what are the lessons we really need to learn? I think those are going to be some tough questions. “
Still, despite falling short of the loftier hopes Democrats entered election night, Biden and his team wanted to maintain a high sense of optimism. Leading states like Wisconsin and Maine were called up for Biden on Wednesday, while mandatory wins like Michigan looked favorable for him.
The front page of Biden’s campaign website read “Keep the Faith.”
“You know how difficult it is to beat a sitting president,” said former Michigan Democratic Party Chairman Lon Johnson, emphasizing an effusive level of optimism. “It appears that, by all measures, he will have won the popular vote and this will be the most votes of any presidential candidate in the history of the United States. Are you kidding me? I am not a fisherman here. We have won “.
