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 J. Trump a one-term president after four years of tumult in the White House.
\nMr. Biden\u2019s victory amounted to a repudiation of Mr. Trump by millions of voters exhausted with his divisive conduct and chaotic administration, and was delivered by an unlikely alliance of women, people of colour, old and young voters and a sliver of disaffected Republicans. Mr. Trump is only the third elected president since World War II to lose re-election, and the first in more than a quarter-century.
\nThe result also provided a history-making moment for Mr. Biden\u2019s running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, who will become the first woman to serve as vice president.
\nWith his triumph, Mr. Biden, who turns 78 later this month, fulfilled his decades-long 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, Mr. Biden will lead a nation and a Democratic Party that have become far more ideological since his arrival in the capital in 1973.
\nHe offered a mainstream Democratic agenda, yet it was less his policy platform than his biography to which many voters gravitated. Seeking the nation\u2019s highest office a half-century after his first campaign, Mr. Biden \u2014 a candidate in the late autumn of his career \u2014 presented his life of setback and recovery to voters as a parable for a wounded country.
\nIn a brief statement issued after Pennsylvania delivered the crucial electoral votes for victory, Mr. Biden called for healing and unity. \u201cWith the campaign over, it\u2019s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s time for America to unite. And to heal. We are the United States of America. And there\u2019s nothing we can\u2019t do, if we do it together.\u201d Mr. Biden planned to address the nation Saturday night.
\nIn his own statement, Mr. Trump insisted \u201cthis election is far from over\u201d and vowed that his campaign would \u201cstart prosecuting our case in court\u201d but offered no details.
\nMr. Biden\u2019s victory, which came 48 years to the day after he was first elected to the United States Senate, set off jubilant celebrations in Democratic-leaning cities. In Washington, where Mr. Trump was despised by the city\u2019s liberal residents, people streamed into the streets near the White House and cheered as cars bearing American flags drove by honking.
\nThe race, which concluded after four tense days of vote-counting in a handful of battlegrounds, was a singular referendum on Mr. Trump in a way no president\u2019s re-election 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, Mr. Biden made the president\u2019s character central to his campaign.
\nThis unrelenting focus propelled Mr. Biden to victory in historically Democratic strongholds in the industrial Midwest with Mr. 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, Mr. Biden was leading Mr. Trump in the popular vote by more than four million votes.
\nYet even as they turned Mr. Trump out of office, voters sent a more uncertain message about the left-of-centre platform Mr. Biden ran on as Democrats lost seats in the House and made only modest gains in the Senate. The divided judgment \u2014 a rare example of ticket splitting in partisan times \u2014 demonstrated that, for many voters, their disdain for the president was as personal as it was political.
\nEven in defeat, though, Mr. Trump demonstrated his enduring appeal to many white voters and his intense popularity in rural areas, underscoring the deep national divisions that Mr. Biden has vowed to heal.
\nThe 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 Mr. Trump.
\nBut as the big cities of the Midwest and West began to report their totals, the advantage in the race shifted the electoral map in Mr. Biden\u2019s favour. 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 Mr. Trump carried four years ago. And on Saturday, with troves of ballots coming in from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, he took back Pennsylvania as well. As if that was not enough, Biden also won Nevada, with its 6 Electoral College votes, on Saturday.
\nWhile Mr. 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, Mr. Biden struck a tone of reconciliation.
\nIt would soon be time, he said, \u201cto unite, to heal, to come together as a nation.\u201d
\nIn the days after the election, Mr. Biden and his party faced a barrage of attacks from Mr. 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.
\nThe president\u2019s campaign aides adopted a tone of brash defiance as swing states fell to Mr. Biden, promising a flurry of legal action. But while Mr. Trump\u2019s ire had the potential to foment political divisions, there was no indication that he could succeed with his seemingly improvisational legal strategy.
\nThrough 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.
\nBeginning 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, he disregarded his medical advisers and public opinion even as over 230,000 people in the United States perished.
\nMr. Biden, by contrast, sought to channel the dismay of those appalled by Mr. Trump\u2019s mismanagement of the pandemic. He offered himself as a safe harbour for a broad array of Americans, promising to guide the nation out of what he called the \u201cdark winter\u201d of the outbreak, rather than delivering a visionary message with bright ideological themes.
\nWhile the president ridiculed mask-wearing and insisted on continuing his large rallies, endangering his own staff members and supporters, Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris campaigned with caution, avoiding indoor events, insisting on social distancing and always wearing masks.
\nConvinced that he could win back the industrial Northern states that swung to Mr. Trump four years ago, Mr. Biden focused his energy on Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden triumphed in those states on the strength of overwhelming support from women, who voted in large numbers to repudiate Mr. Trump despite his last-minute pleas to \u201csuburban housewives,\u201d as he called them.
\nMany of the women who decided the president\u2019s 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.
\nEven aside from the pandemic, the 2020 campaign unfolded against a backdrop of national tumult unequalled in recent history, including the House\u2019s 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 Mr. Trump in October.
\nAlong the way, Mr. Trump played to his conservative base, seeking to divide the nation over race and cultural flash points. 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.
\nMr. Biden, in response, offered a message of healing that appealed to Americans from far left to centre right. He made common cause by promising relief from the unceasing invective and dishonesty of Mr. Trump\u2019s presidency.
\nThe former vice president also sought to demonstrate his differences with the president with his selection of Ms. Harris, 56, whose presence on the ticket as the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants stood in stark contrast to Mr. Trump\u2019s relentless scapegoating of migrants and members of racial-minority groups.
\nMr. Biden will be only the second Catholic to attain the presidency, along with John F. Kennedy.
\nIn 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.
\nIn a sign of how much Mr. Trump alienated traditional Republicans, a number of prominent members of the party endorsed Mr. Biden\u2019s candidacy, including Cindy McCain, the widow of former Senator John McCain; the party\u2019s other two presidential nominees this century, George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, declined to endorse Mr. Trump.
\nYet for all his lofty language about uniting the country, Mr. Biden was a halting candidate who ran a cautious campaign, determined to ensure that the election became a referendum on Mr. Trump. The former vice president fully returned to the campaign trail only around Labour 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.
\nAs he prepares to take the oath of office on Inauguration Day on January 20, he will return to Washington confronting a daunting set of crises. Mr. 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 and policing issues that this year prompted some of the largest protests in American history.
\nAnd he will do so with a Congress that is far more polarized than the Senate he left over a decade ago, with many Republicans having embraced Mr. Trump\u2019s nativist brand of populism and Democrats increasingly responsive to an energized left. If Mr. Biden cannot bridge that divide as president and elicit some cooperation from the G.O.P., he will face immense pressure from his party\u2019s progressive wing to abandon conciliation for a posture of combat.
\nMr. Biden has held out hope about working with Republican lawmakers while declining to support his party\u2019s most ambitious goals, like single-payer health care and the Green New Deal; he has resisted structural changes such as adding justices to the Supreme Court.
\nThis irked his party\u2019s base but made it difficult for Republicans, from Mr. Trump down the ballot, to portray him as an extremist. Mr. Biden was largely absent from the appeals of G.O.P. candidates, who instead used their advertising to insist that the Democratic Party would be in the hands of more polarizing figures on the left such as Senator Bernie Sanders.
\nUnlike the last two Democrats who defeated incumbents after voters tired of Republican leadership, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, Mr. Biden will not arrive in the capital as a youthful outsider. Instead, he will fill out a Democratic leadership triumvirate, which includes Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer, of lawmakers who are 70 or older.
\nMr. Biden alluded to himself during the campaign as a transitional figure who would bring the country out of a crisis and then make way for a new generation. But he has privately rejected suggestions that he commit to serving just a single term, viewing that as an instant guarantee of lame-duck status.
\nOne of the most significant tests of Mr. Biden\u2019s presidency will be in how he navigates the widening divisions in his party.
\nHe may enjoy a honeymoon, though, because of both the scale of the problems he is grappling with and the president he defeated.
\nThis election represented the culmination of nearly four years of activism organized around opposing Mr. Trump, a movement that began with the Women\u2019s March the day after his inauguration. Indeed, Mr. Biden\u2019s election appeared less the unique achievement of a political standard-bearer than the apex of a political wave touched off by the 2016 election \u2014 one that Mr. Biden rode more than he directed it.
\nBut Mr. Trump\u2019s job approval rating never hit 50 percent and, when the Coronavirus spread nationwide and Mr. Biden effectively claimed the Democratic nomination in March, the president\u2019s hopes of running with a booming economy and against a far-left opponent evaporated at once.
\nStill, many Democrats were nervous and some Republicans were defiantly optimistic going into the election, both still gripped by Mr. Trump\u2019s shocker four years ago. And well into the night Tuesday, it seemed as if the president might be able to do it again. But four days later, after a year of trial in America and four turbulent years of the Trump administration, victory was in hand for Mr. Biden.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 J. Trump a one-term president after four years of tumult in the White House. Mr. Biden\u2019s victory amounted to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":245652,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=245651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245651\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/245652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=245651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=245651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=245651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}