From California to Washington DC, supporters of Joe Biden took to the streets, banging pots and honking their car horns after the former vice-president, alongside his running mate Kamala Harris, claimed the White House with victory over Donald Trump
The path to Joe Biden’s victory: five days in five minutes – video highlights More
Joe Biden is the next president of the United States – and Kamala Harris has made history, becoming the first woman, and the first woman of color, to be elected vice-president. The pair shattered previous records, winning more votes in the presidential race than any candidates in American history.
The American people have disavowed four years of a thuggish presidency. They have chosen decency over dysfunction, fact over fiction, truth over lies and empathy over cruelty. They have rejected the last four years of ugliness, divisiveness, racism and sustained assaults on constitutional democracy. And even as Trump makes baseless and dangerous claims of fraud and plots legal challenges, it is clear that 75 million Americans are moving on.
But now, the real work begins.
Removing Trump from the White House is one thing – fixing America is quite another. There is a danger that progressives and liberals invest too much faith in Trump’s departure and too little in what will be needed to address the deep-rooted problems that will remain in place once he leaves Pennsylvania Avenue. Once the celebrations – spontaneous, glorious and moving – die down, there will need to be a recognition that America was broken long before it elected Trump, and his departure is no guarantee that the country will mend. Many of the systemic issues that afflict the US predate Trump.
Two eight-year Democratic presidencies over the last 30 years have not significantly tackled these problems: a stark racial wealth gap, worsening school segregation, corrosive inequality, a climate crisis and a democratic deficit at the heart of America’s electoral college are but some of the systemic issues that confront the new president.
And while the election may have delivered defeat for Donald Trump, it did not deliver a resounding blow to Trumpism. And possibly not even Trump. About 70 million Americans took a good look at the last four years of racism, mendacity and cruelty – and voted for another four. He recorded the highest ever vote by a Republican presidential candidate.
Biden fought this campaign on a pledge to save the soul of the nation and return the country to normalcy. His bet was that Americans would look back at four years when the country was roiled, stressed, bruised and sometimes, literally, beaten – and would decide to course-correct. That did not happen. Seventy million Americans wanted it all over again.
In the months leading to the election there was a hope that the last four years were an aberration, a passing nightmare from which the country would awake and from which they would return to normalcy. The result of the election makes that seem unlikely. As the writer Fintan O’Toole said last week in a brilliant essay in the New York Review of Books:
The Trump presidency has been no nightmare. It has been daylight delinquency, its transgressions of democratic values on lurid display in all their corruption and cruelty and deadly incompetence. There can be no awakening because the Republicans did not sleep through all of this.
They saw it all and let it happen. In electoral terms, moreover, it turns out that they were broadly right. There was no revulsion among the party base. The faithful not only witnessed his behavior, they heard Trump say, repeatedly, that he would not accept the result of the vote. They embraced that authoritarianism with renewed enthusiasm. The assault on democracy now has a genuine, highly engaged, democratic movement behind it.
And, despite the Biden victory, the Democrats failed to get control of state legislatures across the country. Every 10 years, following a census, the outcome of state races dictate the shape of redistricting lines for congressional districts. The Republicans successfully targeted a wealth of states in 2010 after Obama’s victory and managed to draw up outrageously gerrymandered states.
This was no secret. The conservative political strategist Karl Rove outlined in the Wall Street Journal the plan to win majorities in state legislatures. “He who controls redistricting can control Congress,” read the subhead to Rove’s column. And they did.
This year the Democrats fought back – and lost. They targeted both chambers in Arizona, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Kansas. In Iowa and Michigan they targeted the state houses and in Minnesota the senate. Unless late votes in Arizona change the Republican lead in the race for both legislatures (highly unlikely) then the Democrats will not have flipped a single state chamber.
And then there’s the US Senate.
The re-election of Trump’s allies, Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, suggest that the Republican leadership that enabled Trump during his presidency was rewarded, not punished, for their loyalty. While the balance of power in the Senate won’t be determined until January, by two runoff elections in Georgia in races that were too close to call, the threat of a divided Congress means a Biden administration could face gridlock that weakens its ability to make progressive change.
Despite those electoral shortcomings, we welcome the opportunity to refocus our journalism on the opportunities that lie ahead for America: the opportunity to fix a broken healthcare system, to restore role of science in government, to repair global alliances, and to address the corrosive racial bias in our schools, criminal justice system, housing and other institutions.
We will continue to highlight corrosive inequality, and we will interrogate why America’s racial wealth gap continues to get worse. In 2016, Pew estimated the median wealth for black households was $17,100, 10 times worse than that for white households. We will report on the economic transition needed to stem climate change, and illustrate how it affects communities of color first, and hardest. And we will continue to question the unchecked power of corporations and big tech.
But we can’t do this on our own. We need your support to carry on this essential work. We rely to an ever greater extent on our readers, both for the moral force to continue doing journalism at a time like this, and for the financial strength to facilitate that reporting.
We’re all in this together. We are driven by your incredible support, and are animated by your passions and interests. We would love it if you can continue to be part of that. You can contribute to the Guardian from as little as $1. It may not seem like much but it means an enormous amount to us. Thank you. More
Joe Biden has been elected the 46th US president, signalling a return to political norms in America after four years of raucous populism and administrative turmoil under Donald Trump.
Thousands of Americans took to the streets, cheering, banging pots and pans and honking car horns to celebrate the outcome after four anxious days of waiting for votes to be counted. Trump was at his golf course in Virginia when the result was announced and refused to concede.
Biden claimed the victory in the state where he was born, Pennsylvania, whose 20 electoral college votes put him over the threshold of 270. He had more than 74m votes in total, higher than any other presidential candidate in history.
The former senator and vice-president said he was “honored and humbled” by the people’s verdict. “With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation,” he said in a statement. “It’s time for America to unite. And to heal.
“We are the United States of America. And there’s nothing we can’t do, if we do it together.”
Biden was due to address the nation from Wilmington, Delaware, on Saturday evening.
From Atlanta to New York, from Philadelphia to Washington, there were spontaneous explosions of joy. A crowd gathered on Black Lives Matter Plaza outside the White House, cheering and holding balloons depicting Trump’s face and hair. One person brandished a sign that, quoting Trump on his reality TV show The Apprentice, proclaimed: “You’re fired!”
In Times Square, New York, people danced, whooped and punched the air at the realisation Trump would be consigned to the history books as an impeached one-term president. More
Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal attorney, was holding a press conference baselessly disputing the legitimacy of the US presidential election when news filtered through that Joe Biden had been declared the winner.
‘Who was it called by?’ Giuliani asked, referring to the broadcast news networks. ‘All of them,’ replied a reporter. The former New York City mayor insisted the result could not be called until the Trump campaign’s legal challenges had gone to court.
The path to Joe Biden’s victory: five days in five minutes – video highlights
US election live: Joe Biden wins and says ‘It’s time for America to unite’
Rudy Giuliani: from hero of 9/11 to leader of Trump’s last stand More
Philadelphia County, PennsylvaniaThis county, the state’s most populous with more than 1.5 million inhabitants, is coterminous with the city of Philadelphia. Residents cast about 750,000 votes in the election, favouring Biden over Trump by 81%-18%. It was 30,000 pro-Biden votes from the county, declared at about 9am on Friday, that overturned Trump’s state-wide lead, which on Tuesday night had looked impregnable.The shift, potentially worth 20 electoral college votes, added vital momentum to the Democratic candidate’s push for the White House. The county is at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement – it is about 43% African American and 45% white. Supporters were involved in protests against the police killings of George Floyd in Minnesota and a local man, Walter Wallace, who was shot in October.Trump repeatedly dismissed nationwide BLM protests, insulted and mocked demonstrators, and sent troops to suppress them. Now they paid him back. Exit polls show African-Americans in Pennsylvania, representing 8% of all voters, backed Biden by 92%-6%. The Hispanic/Latino community, 4% of all voters, backed him by 78%-18%. Although the two minorities’ total numbers were relatively small, so was Biden’s margin of victory.Clayton County, Georgia More
As news broke that Joe Biden had defeated Donald Trump in the race for the White House, cities across the US saw wild celebrations from supporters of the Democratic nominee for president.
In Philadelphia, the biggest city in Pennsylvania, the state where Biden was born and which sealed his electoral college victory, celebrations erupted outside the convention center where votes were being counted.
Donna Widmann, a teacher who helped get her students and their families registered to vote, told the Guardian she had not been able to stop crying.
“I remember four years ago, watching, you know, on 21 January 2017, him getting inaugurated,” she said, referring to Trump’s installation as the 45th president after his shock victory over Hillary Clinton. “And just crying … just watching [Barack] Obama leave and just crying. I feel like so much, so much emotion has happened in the past four years, man, and it just feels really good – like I can’t stop crying.”
Windmann, who was holding a sign saying Trump should “take the L”, said she was “psyched” for her students and her families to know they made a difference.
Alice Sukhina, who is from Ukraine, said she had volunteered for the Biden campaign. She had not been able to see her family in four years, she said, adding that she had sent them messages saying that the wait would soon be over.
“I am overwhelmed with happiness,” she said. “I’m just so ready to get some real progressive things done. I’m ready to push the platform of Democrats to the left.”
Marissa Babnew said she was “utterly excited for the first time in a very long time” and added: “I’ve had a lot of close experiences with this pandemic because of my work, and I’m finally feeling hopeful.”
In Manhattan, where Trump made his fortune in real estate but where he remains a highly controversial and deeply divisive figure, crowds flocked to public spaces including Washington Square Park.
Uptown, in Washington Heights, two friends, both actors, celebrated in Bennett Park, the sight of a key battle in the American revolutionary war.
“Our long national nightmare is over,” said Paul DeBoy, happily quoting Gerald Ford’s famous message to the nation after the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974.
Ward Duffy said the cheering out of apartment block windows, banging of pots and pans, and cars honking in the streets represented “a different celebration than this summer’s respectful salutes to frontline workers” during the coronavirus pandemic.
“This had a visceral explosion of relief and joy,” he said.
Cheering, honking and banging of pots and pans erupted in Harlem too. More
Donald Trump refused to formally concede the US election on Saturday, even as senior Republicans began to distance themselves from him, and as recriminations were reported among aides to a man doomed to go down as an impeached, one-term president.
Before the race was called, Trump continued to tweet his defiance and to attract censure for making baseless claims about voter fraud and his supposed victory. He also went to his course in Virginia to play golf. While he played, a defiant statement was issued in his name.
“The simple fact is this election is far from over,” Trump insisted. “Joe Biden has not been certified as the winner of any states, let alone any of the highly contested states headed for mandatory recounts, or states where our campaign has valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the ultimate victor.”
The statement was of a piece with previous tweets and statements since the election on Tuesday – angry, refusing to admit defeat and alleging improprieties by his opponent without providing evidence.
“The American people are entitled to an honest election,” Trump said. “That means counting all legal ballots, and not counting any illegal ballots. This is the only way to ensure the public has full confidence in our election.
“It remains shocking that the Biden campaign refuses to agree with this basic principle and wants ballots counted even if they are fraudulent, manufactured or cast by ineligible or deceased voters. Only a party engaged in wrongdoing would unlawfully keep observers out of the count room – and then fight in court to block their access.”
None of what Trump alleged has been proved to be true. Nonetheless, Republican legal challenges in key states are set to continue. Leading the effort to marshal a legal force like that which led the party to victory in the 2000 Florida recount were Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr and his younger brother Eric Trump, and Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor recently seen apparently trying to seduce a young actor posing as a reporter in Sacha Baron Cohen’s second Borat movie.
“Beginning Monday,” Trump added, “our campaign will start prosecuting our case in court to ensure election laws are fully upheld and the rightful winner is seated. So what is Biden hiding? I will not rest until the American people have the honest vote count they deserve and that Democracy demands.”
Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, has largely stayed quiet. Nowhere to be seen is an army of lawyers of the size – and skill – Trump will need. The failure to assemble a coherent legal team, and to raise as much as $60m to fund attempts to stop vote counts in some swing states and continue them in others, was in many ways a reflection of previous failures among the small circle of mostly family advisers Trump has kept around him.
“What a campaign needs to do to staff one statewide recount, let alone multiple recounts, is overwhelming,” Benjamin Ginsberg, a top Republican lawyer who was national counsel to George W Bush in 2000 and 2004, told CNN.
“Bush v Gore was one state [Florida]. We put out a call and hundreds of lawyers, political operatives and many others responded. Even with that, it taxed the party to its limits to do just one state. It is at best unproven that the Trump campaign can command the sort of infrastructure they would really need to pull this off.”
The legal challenge to Biden’s victory was placed in the hands of Jay Sekulow, who defended the president during the Mueller investigation and the impeachment process, and Giuliani, who went to Philadelphia to publicly demand Republican operatives be granted greater oversight over the Pennsylvania count.
Among experts dismissing Trump’s legal moves was James Baker, who led the effort for Bush in Florida which wrested the White House from Al Gore.
It was reported this week that Kushner was placing calls from the Trump war room, in search of his own version of Baker, a former chief of staff, treasury secretary and secretary of state. Baker has backed Trump. But he told the New York Times that 20 years ago, “We never said don’t count the votes. That’s a very hard decision to defend in a democracy.”
Trump advisers have reportedly raised the prospect of defeat. According to the Washington Post, some have advocated that the president offer public remarks committing to a peaceful transfer of power. One senior aide, however, said there had been no discussion of a formal concession.
Some supporters in the media have begun to back away. Late on Friday, the Fox News host Laura Ingraham, an ardent loyalist, advised the president to “accept defeat”, should it come, with “grace and composure”. Ingraham also railed at “failed” consultants and campaign officials who “blew through hundreds of millions of dollars without the legal apparatus in place to challenge what we all knew was coming.
“Why aren’t the best lawyers in America on television night after night explaining the president’s legal claims?” she asked. More
On 20 January 2021, Joseph R Biden Jr will take the oath of office as the 46th president of the United States. The crucial deciding votes will long have been counted. Challenges in the courts will have been dismissed. His victory in the election will not have been in doubt.
While the irresolution of election night seemed to hold the possibility of repeating the trauma of 2016, when all the ballots are finally counted Biden’s victory will represent a substantial rejection of Donald Trump.
Early in the morning after the election, after Trump tweeted, “A big WIN!”, he stepped before the Klieg lights at the White House to make good on his promise not to accept the judgment of the voters if he might lose. He staged his own coronation by press conference. “This is a fraud on the American public, this is an embarrassment to our country, we were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election,” he proclaimed. He acted as though he could wave away the votes that were still being counted, just as votes have always been counted in the hours and days after an election. Trump declared: “We’ll be going to the US supreme court – we want all voting to stop.”
Trump speaks of the supreme court as his personal instrument, like he talks of “my generals”, as when he ordered Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, to march in uniform in his Praetorian Guard through the teargas aimed at racial justice demonstrators in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, to stand in front of St John’s Church brandishing a Bible whipped from Ivanka Trump’s Max Mara handbag.
“I think this will end up in the supreme court,” Trump said last month about the election when he appointed Amy Coney Barrett, the rightwing ideologue, to the court. The justices are expected to perform as employees of the Trump Organization. Even if he cannot force them to sign non-disclosure agreements, which he imposes on White House staff, he expects more than the three on whom he has bestowed his favor by naming them to the court to demonstrate their unswerving loyalty and maintain his power.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe sent a team to view the American election, a routine exercise they have performed nine previous times. But this time they were shocked by what they observed. “Nobody – no politician, no elected official, nobody – should limit the people’s right to vote,” said Michael Georg Link, a member of the German parliament who led the group. “Baseless allegations of systematic deficiencies, notably by the incumbent president, including on election night, harm public trust in democratic institutions.”
Trump’s actions to stop or suspend the counting of votes and to certify the results is precisely the classic transgression for which the US has rebuked tinpot dictators, including in the state department’s annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. Trump’s call specifically flies in the face of Article 23 (b) of the American Convention on Human Rights, of the Organization of American States, to which the US is a signatory, which guarantees the right “to vote and to be elected in genuine periodic elections, which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and by secret ballot that guarantees the free expression of the will of the voters”.
Trump’s election suppression effort bears a curious and striking similarity to that of the lunatic “magician” president of the Gambia, Yahya Jammeh, who in 2016 rejected the results of an election he lost, called for it to be nullified, and appealed to judges he appointed to the supreme court to rescue him. Awaiting their ruling, he deployed troops in the capital. Like Trump, he attacked freedom of the press, demonized migrants, was accused of sexually assaulting women, and advocated snake-oil remedies for diseases. Under the pressure of international condemnation, including from the African Union and the United Nations security council, he was forced to give up the presidency and flee.
On Wednesday afternoon, 4 November, minutes before the Wisconsin elections commission announced that Biden had won the state, Trump’s campaign filed a court complaint demanding a recount. He has also called for stopping the vote counting in Pennsylvania and Georgia, where he was momentarily ahead, and to continue the counting in Nevada and Arizona, where he was behind.
Trump may ultimately try to hang his cases on the infamous Bush v Gore decision that handed the presidency by US supreme court fiat to George W Bush. In the contested Florida recount of 2000, the court ruled that the Florida supreme court had exceeded its authority in interpreting state law by calling for a statewide recount. The ruling written by Antonin Scalia cited the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause, asserting that recounting the votes would cause “irreparable harm” to Bush by casting “a needless and unjustified cloud” over his legitimate election. He also stated that Bush v Gore should never be considered as a precedent for any future decision. Later, he privately confessed that his opinion was, “as we say in Brooklyn, a piece of shit”.
Three of the lawyers working for the Bush campaign in the Florida contest now sit on the supreme court: John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. The week before the election, on 26 October, Kavanaugh repeatedly cited Bush v Gore in a “shadow docket” case, Democratic National Committee v Wisconsin state legislature, which vacated a federal appeals court decision that had extended a ballot deadline in Wisconsin. As though he had coordinated with the Trump campaign, Kavanaugh translated its talking points into his concurrence, arguing against counting votes past election night because there would be “chaos and suspicions of impropriety … if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election”. (Justice Elena Kagan pointed out the absurdity of Kavanaugh’s illogic: there could be no election result to “flip” until the ballots were counted.)
If Trump is hanging the outcome of the election on Bush v Gore, it is a slender, brittle reed that, regardless of the fact that it was never supposed to be cited again, depends upon the counting of the votes in the first place.
One after another, the states’ ballots will be counted. The results will be known. They will be certified. And Biden will be declared the winner. Trump’s attempt to crown himself king will be his last failed reality show. Instead, he will be the first president since Benjamin Harrison to have lost the popular vote for president twice, the first time paradoxically as the winner but the second as the natural loser. Trump will soon be, as the poet Wallace Stevens wrote, “the Emperor of Ice Cream”.
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth More
