Joe Biden

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Senator Lindsey Graham backs Trump, echoing baseless claims of election fraud – video

      by

      Republican senator Lindsey Graham has defended the Trump campaign’s baseless claim of irregularities during the election, saying the president’s team deserves the opportunity to make the case. “Democracy depends upon fair elections. President Trump’s team is going to have a chance to make a case regarding voting irregularities,” he said. “I’m going to stand with President Trump.” Graham’s comments come as presidential candidate Joe Biden took a lead over Trump in battleground Pennsylvania and Georgia, as ballots continue to be counted
      Trump campaign vows to keep fighting: ‘This election is not over’
      US election live updates: Biden edges toward victory with leads over Trump in Nevada and Pennsylvania More

    • 200 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      US election live updates: Biden edges toward victory with leads over Trump in Nevada and Pennsylvania

      by

      Key events

      Show

      2.20pm EST14:20
      Biden is poised for victory with leads in Pennsylvania and Nevada

      Live feed

      Show

      4.43pm EST16:43

      Let’s check in with Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former adviser who is now facing fraud charges over allegations he misused money that was meant to help build a wall along the US-Mexican border.
      Bannon has now lost his lawyer in the fraud case after suggesting Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, and FBI Director Christopher Wray should be beheaded.
      The Guardian’s Peter Beaumont reports:

      Speaking on his podcast, the War Room, which was distributed in video form on a number of social media outlets, the far-right provocateur appeared to endorse violence against Wray and the US’s most senior infectious diseases expert.
      ‘Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci … no I actually want to go a step farther but the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man,’ Bannon said.
      ‘I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. I’d put their heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats, you either get with the programme or you’re gone.’
      Twitter banned Bannon’s War Room account permanently, saying it had suspended the podcast account for violating its policy on the glorification of violence.
      The same video was on Facebook for about 10 hours before it was also removed.
      Later on Friday, William Burck, an attorney for Bannon in a fraud case in New York City, told a federal judge he was withdrawing. Bannon is accused of misappropriating money from a group which raised $2m from thousands of donors to build a wall on the border with Mexico, and has pleaded not guilty. Burck did not give a reason for his withdrawal.

      4.26pm EST16:26

      The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports from Philadelphia:
      The corner of 12th and Arch Street has become the epicenter of the political universe over the last few days as demonstrators have gathered to face off. The larger group has urged officials to “count every vote,” while a smaller pro-Trump group has cheered to “stop the steam.”
      At times, it’s felt a little tense as protesters have confronted one another and the anti-Trump crowd has drowned out pro-Trump surrogates like Pam Bondi and Corey Lewandowski.
      But on Friday the intersection had a notably different tone – the “count every vote” group essentially transformed into a large dance party. The celebration came as Joe Biden took a lead in the count for ballots in this key swing state.

      Sam Levine
      (@srl)
      More dancing pic.twitter.com/IQjaalnCEL

      November 6, 2020

      “It feels great to finally celebrate something,” said Ann Dixon, who said she hasn’t been following the incremental changes in vote totals because she wants “every vote to be counted and it’s not over til its over.” She said she was concerned, however, that Trump would try and drag out the vote count, which would divide the country more and more.
      Protesters young and old danced to a mix of music, which included Beyoncé, the Backstreet Boys, and Shakira.
      “I sort of debated whether or not I should come out and then I decided I should. It’s important to sort of celebrate despite having a bunch of work to still do moving forward,” said Rachel MacDonald. “I’m not really motivated by anger in the same way and so I decided I should come out and dance with everybody as well and not just yell,”
      She was there with her friend Hannah Chervitz, who was attending her first protest.
      “It’s nice to come out and channel all of this energy into something positive,” Chervitz said.

      4.09pm EST16:09

      MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki explained why his network, like the AP, has not yet called Pennsylvania for Joe Biden.

      MSNBC
      (@MSNBC)
      WATCH: @SteveKornacki details the outstanding ballots that remain to be counted in Pennsylvania.#TrackingKornacki #MSNBC2020 pic.twitter.com/epjmpGxRLh

      November 6, 2020

      Kornacki explained that there are about 200,000 ballots left to be counted in the state. About half of them are mail-in ballots, and half of them are provisional ballots.
      Mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania have been very favorable for Biden, as it appears most of Donald Trump’s supporters chose to vote in person. But some of those ballots may still be challenged.
      Historically, provisional ballots are also very favorable for Democrats, but so far, they have been a bit better for Trump. One explanation for this is that some of the president’s supporters received mail-in ballots but then chose to vote in person instead, so they received provisional ballots to allow election officials to confirm the vote was valid.
      But election analyst Nate Silver said he was skeptical of that analysis:

      Nate Silver
      (@NateSilver538)
      So, I am open-minded but not super persuaded by this. There are a handful of counties to have counted provisional ballots so far and those ballots indeed went for Trump, but they came from counties where the rest of the vote was *even stronger* for Trump.https://t.co/DXMdQJyfS5 https://t.co/h3gyCwCeNK

      November 6, 2020

      3.51pm EST15:51

      A Republican congressman is engaging in a Twitter battle with one of his new colleagues, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is a supporter of the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory.
      It all started when congressman Dan Crenshaw, a Republican of Texas, sent a tweet this afternoon, saying, “If Trump loses, he loses. It was never an impossible outcome and we must accept the final results when it is over.
      “But the unfortunate reality is that there is very little trust in the process, where irregularities have been flagrant and transparency lacking.”

      Dan Crenshaw
      (@DanCrenshawTX)
      If Trump loses, he loses. It was never an impossible outcome and we must accept the final results when it is over. But the unfortunate reality is that there is very little trust in the process, where irregularities have been flagrant and transparency lacking.

      November 6, 2020

      That second sentence looks past the fact that Donald Trump has worked diligently to sow distrust in the election results, and the president’s advisers have been allowed to view the vote count in multiple battleground states.
      But we’ll set that aside for a second. After Crenshaw sent that tweet, Greene, who is now a congresswoman-elect after winning her congressional race on Tuesday, replied, “The time to STAND UP for @realDonaldTrump is RIGHT NOW! Republicans can’t back down. This loser mindset is how the Democrats win.”

      Dan Crenshaw
      (@DanCrenshawTX)
      Did you even read past the first sentence? Or are you just purposely lying so you can talk tough? No one said give up. I literally said investigate every irregularity and use the courts. You’re a member of Congress now, Marjorie. Start acting like one. https://t.co/47a7Gqq4lH

      November 6, 2020

      Crenshaw responded by chastising Greene and urging her to live up to the office she has been elected to. “I literally said investigate every irregularity and use the courts,” Crenshaw said. “You’re a member of Congress now, Marjorie. Start acting like one.”
      That dust-up could preview some of the contentious conversations to come in the House Republican caucus once Greene is seated in January.

      3.40pm EST15:40

      The Guardian’s Tom Phillips reports from Rio de Janeiro:
      It is a US-born slur that was inspired by Honduras and has haunted Latin America for decades – a deprecatory way to describe politically volatile and economically puny backwaters ruled by erratic and venal autocrats.
      But on Friday, after Donald Trump’s alarming press conference at the White House yesterday, voices across the region, from Mexico to Uruguay, delighted in lobbing the insult back at their neighbours to the north.
      “Who’s the banana republic now?” wondered the frontpage headline of Colombia’s Publimetro, one of many Latin American newspapers whose editors thought the term perfectly captured the electoral turmoil playing out in the US.

      Tom Phillips
      (@tomphillipsin)
      “Who’s the banana republic now?” wonders Colombia’s @PublimetroCol 😬 pic.twitter.com/GGUUB1oUsT

      November 6, 2020

      Over the border in Venezuela, a columnist from the El Nacional agreed calling Trump’s behaviour “intemperate and foolish” and telling readers the US election seemed to be taking place “in a country at war, or a república bananera”.
      Merval Pereira, one of Brazil’s most prominent political commentators, called his daily column “Bananas americanas” and wrote: “This is a singular event in US democratic history which puts the country in the list of banana republics, an expression created by the Americans themselves.”
      The Latin American Twittersphere went bananas too, with the Uruguayan human rights defender Javier Palummo asking followers: “How do you say banana republic in American English?”

      3.29pm EST15:29

      The Guardian’s Tom Phillips reports from Rio de Janeiro:
      One of Donald Trump’s most devoted international disciples, the Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, now seems to be decoupling from his political idol.
      Bolsonaro has been one of Trump’s loudest cheerleaders and revels in being portrayed as South America’s “tropical Trump”. Last year Brazil’s far-right leader was reported to have told his fellow populist: “I love you”.
      But on Friday morning, with a Trump defeat looking increasingly likely, Bolsonaro appeared to jump ship. “I’m not the most important person in Brazil just as Trump isn’t the most important person in the world, as he’s said himself,” he told an event in southern Brazil. “The most important person is God.”
      To hammer his point home Bolsonaro later posted a video of those comments to his Twitter feed, where he has 6.6 million followers. Despite Bolsonaro’s admiration for Trump, the US president is reportedly not one of them.

      3.16pm EST15:16

      Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, held another press conference as the margin in the race for his state’s 16 electoral votes remains razor-thin.
      “We will get it right, and we will defend the integrity of our elections,” Raffensperger said, promising an “open and transparent” vote-counting process.
      Raffensperger once again acknowledged that, with a margin this small, a recount was all but certain in the state.
      The Republican official defended the integrity of the vote-count, saying he was committed to ensuring trust in the process.
      As of now, Joe Biden leads Donald Trump by 1,603 votes in Georgia, out of nearly 5 million ballots cast in the state.

      3.07pm EST15:07

      The Guardian’s Sam Levin reports from Los Angeles:
      Jackie Lacey, the Los Angeles district attorney, was ousted by her progressive challenger, in one of the most closely watched criminal justice races in the US this year.
      George Gascón, the former police chief and district attorney of San Francisco, won the race to lead the Los Angeles prosecutors’ office with more than 53% of the vote. Black Lives Matter LA and other activist groups played a major role in the heated contest, having protested Lacey’s policies for years. More

    • 188 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      What's happening in Pennsylvania? The state that may be about to tip the US election

      by

      Joe Biden appeared to be on the verge of victory in the US presidential election on Friday morning, passing Donald Trump in the vote tally in the key state of Pennsylvania.
      Would a Pennsylvania win absolutely make Biden president-elect?
      Yes, it would. A win in Pennsylvania would bring Biden to 284 electoral votes, beyond the 270 threshold needed to win. He would not need to win any further states, and he could even afford to lose Arizona (11 electoral votes), where the margin separating the candidates has narrowed after an early call in Biden’s favor.
      Why hasn’t the race been called?
      It might be called at any moment. At least one high-profile election decisions clearinghouse, Decisions Desk HQ, had already declared Biden to be president-elect. The thousands of votes remaining to be counted in Pennsylvania were coming from heavily Democratic areas, and Biden’s lead in the state was expected to grow.
      The major television networks and the Associated Press, on whose decision desk the Guardian relies, were expected to declare victory for Biden after an anticipated growth in his lead in Pennsylvania to somewhere beyond half a percentage point.
      Biden could be summarily declared president-elect at any moment.
      “The Associated Press continues to count votes in the presidential election and has not declared a winner,” the news organization said at just after noon eastern time.
      When will the race be called?
      At the rate Pennsylvania has been counting, Biden is likely to grow a significant lead over the course of the day on Friday, and the race might be called at any time.
      Does Trump still have a path?
      Not really. If Trump loses Pennsylvania, he loses the election. Trump is now behind in Pennsylvania, and the votes remaining to be counted come from areas where Biden has been getting 75% of the vote or better. The more votes are counted, the greater Biden’s lead becomes.
      Can Trump do anything to stop this?
      It’s an extreme long shot. The Trump campaign is pursuing lawsuits in multiple states in an attempt to have various batches of ballots thrown out. For example, Trump has joined a case before the supreme court that could potentially reverse a decision allowing ballots received after election day in Pennsylvania (but postmarked by election day) to be counted.
      The problem for Trump is that most of the legal claims his team is advancing appear to be weak, and several have already been thrown out of court. Another problem for Trump: the total number of ballots challenged by his lawsuits does not appear to be anywhere close to large enough to flip the result in any state.
      The Trump campaign has said it will formally request a recount in Wisconsin and may do so in other states, but recounts in major US elections rarely move the tally by more than a few hundred votes, not nearly enough to make a difference.
      What other variables are in play?
      The basic point to understand is that every last avenue to re-election for Trump has been pretty much closed off. But because it’s Trump, who appears ready to try anything to stay in power, the question is worth exploring.
      The multi-stage nature of the electoral college, in which voters in each state pick a winner and then state legislatures appoint “electors” who cast 538 total ballots for president, could allow some opportunity for foul play, although it’s extremely unlikely.
      There has been some wild talk among some Republicans about trying to get a Republican-controlled legislature in a state such as Pennsylvania to ignore the will of the voters and appoint a slate of electors that favors Trump instead of Biden. The Republican leaders of both chambers of the state legislature, however, have adamantly knocked down the idea.
      Trump has loudly called on supporters to “defend” the election, and some have brought guns to rallies outside ballot-counting sites. It’s not clear how such tensions might develop as the realization of Trump’s probable loss sinks in.
      The attorney general, William Barr, has been wholly offstage since before election day. It’s possible that Trump’s justice department could yet make some kind of coordinated legal play against the election.
      But owing to the decentralized nature of US elections, that would be exceedingly difficult. Unlike in the 2000 election, when the entire race came down to one state, Florida, and a legal challenge by Republicans succeeded in halting a recount, this year there are multiple states contributing to a Biden victory and he does not need a recount to win. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Philadelphia mayor tells Trump to accept he lost – video

      by

      Jim Kenney tells a press conference that Donald Trump should ‘put his big boy pants on’, acknowledge his defeat and congratulate Joe Biden as the winner of the US presidential election. It could take several days to complete the count in Philadelphia, but Biden has so far won 81% of the votes. Around 40,000 are still to be counted. Trump has continued to tweet baseless allegations of voter fraud
      US election live: Biden on brink of beating Trump with growing lead in Nevada and Pennsylvania
      Trump v Biden – full results as they come in More

    • 188 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on the election endgame: end Trump’s war on the truth | Editorial

      by

      Since he took office Donald Trump has posed a grave threat to democracy. His wild, relentless post-poll fight against reality this week has shown just how dangerous he can be. Designed to give his supporters a rationale for their anger over losing the popular vote, the falsehoods raised troubling questions about when, and how, Mr Trump will leave the White House.The bad news is that it won’t be anytime soon. Democracy in America is rare in giving a president more than 10 weeks of power after losing an election. Mr Trump is using this time to ratchet up the rhetoric to a fever pitch, seeding the idea that society is irreconcilably at odds with itself. This is profoundly damaging to America, a fact that cable networks have thankfully and belatedly woken up to after election day. Around the world former democracies are slipping into autocracy. The United States is not immune.The fact is Mr Trump will lose the popular vote by millions of votes and only America’s outdated electoral college has saved him from a crushing defeat. The president should be preparing to leave the White House, not be instructing his lawyers. Perhaps Mr Trump cannot afford to lose. Presidential immunity from prosecution vanishes once Mr Trump leaves office, a consideration that may weigh heavily given the ongoing investigations by the New York district attorney into reported“protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization”. Mr Trump denies any wrongdoing.For months it has been obvious that Mr Trump would claim victory and fraud should he lose the election. He has refused to say he would accept a peaceful transfer of power. The polls, he claimed, could not be trusted. Without a shred of shame, Mr Trump appears willing to challenge the validity of the vote in any state he loses, seeking to undermine the electoral process and ultimately invalidate it.This is a dangerous moment. There’s no evidence of widespread illegal votes in any state. Yet a fully fledged constitutional crisis over the process of counting ballots is on the cards because Mr Trump is demanding recounts and court cases while conditioning his base to view the election in existential terms. Last year, in an influential and prescient analysis, Ohio University’s Edward B Foley wargamed how a quarrel over mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania could lead to a disputed result in the 2020 presidential election.The most frightening scenario, said Prof Foley, was “where the dispute remains unresolved on January 20, 2021, the date for the inauguration of the new presidential term, and the military is uncertain as to who is entitled to receive the nuclear codes as commander-in-chief”. This ends with the US attorney general, William Barr, announcing that it is legally sound for Mr Trump to be recognised as re-elected for a second term while Democrats call for nationwide protests to dislodge the squatters in the White House. It would be better to avoid such a predicament rather than plan to get into it.Republicans must not be seduced by Mr Trump into manipulating the electoral system, through political and legal battles, to defy the popular will for partisan advantage. The Grand Old Party has profited from voter suppression and gerrymandering to keep an emerging Democratic majority at bay. But these darker impulses have given rise to Mr Trump and an unhealthy reliance on a shrinking coalition of overwhelmingly white Christian voters paranoid about losing power.Joe Biden looks to have done enough to win the White House. He will have his work cut out when he gets there, needing to rebuild the US government’s credibility after Trumpism hollowed out its institutions. That means offering hope to a country that faces a pandemic and an economic recession. He will have to reassert America’s role as the global problem-solver. Under Mr Trump the “indispensable nation” disappeared when it was needed the most. By any reasonable standard Mr Biden should not have to continue to run against Mr Trump. He must be allowed to get on with running America. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      The left urgently needs to lose its inferiority complex | Andy Beckett

      by

      This week Joe Biden – few people’s idea of an outstanding candidate – won the biggest presidential vote in United States history. Seven times in the last eight such contests, the Democrats have got more votes than the Republicans.
      You could see this latest popular-vote victory as further confirmation of a theory that’s been promoted by some political scientists and journalists for a quarter of a century, most notably in The Emerging Democratic Majority, a 2002 book by John B Judis and Ruy Teixeira. The theory says that American social trends, which are making much of the country more diverse, urban and better educated – all characteristics associated with voting Democrat – are slowly but inexorably shifting the US away from the Republicans.
      This might sound like liberal wishful thinking, but it’s a view that has also been held by senior Republicans. In 2012, Senator Lindsey Graham warned his party: “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” Combined with the horror that many Americans feel at Donald Trump and how disastrously he has governed, this long-term leftward drift was widely expected this week to become an irresistible electoral force.
      Instead, it met a series of seemingly immovable objects. First, Trump’s infamous aversion to ever being “a loser”. Second, his immense and again underrated appeal to conservative voters. Third, his party’s reluctance, which has intensified dramatically since the early 1990s, to accept any Democratic president as legitimate. Fourth, the Republicans’ willingness to use gerrymandering and voter suppression to tilt elections in their favour. And finally, the US’s rickety old election system itself: the electoral college and the system for choosing the Senate, with their seemingly ever stronger pro-Republican biases.
      The result was deadlock – a weirdly frenzied deadlock in keeping with the mania of Trump’s presidency. Even if Biden eventually wins with some comfort, as looks increasingly possible, the result in the electoral college will probably be close, late and contested enough to be misrepresented as “a fraud” by Trump and millions of other rightwing Americans for decades to come. And the Republicans will probably have enough senators to seriously obstruct any Biden presidency.
      Once more, the great Democratic breakthrough seems to have been postponed. Particularly left-leaning and anxious Biden supporters may be tempted to quote the melancholy Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
      Watching from Britain, it is possible to see the past few days as a uniquely American saga. If you can temporarily forget about the implications for the entire planet, you can even follow it as a sort of political box set, an addictive multi-level drama to binge on as our national lockdown and our greyer politics grind on.
      But to exoticise this crisis is a mistake. Versions of the American battle, between left-leaning parties backed by rising social groups such as the young on the one side and entrenched rightwing governments backed by older voters on the other, are under way in other countries. They will decide what sort of societies many western democracies become: how they distribute their assets and liabilities between the generations; how they respond to long-term threats such as the climate emergency.
      In Britain, the 2017 and 2019 elections and the Brexit referendum exposed and left unresolved many of the same divisions as the current US election. And the Conservatives have become almost as aggressive as the Republicans in their efforts to prolong their dominance, launching culture wars, suspending parliament and gaming the electoral system, for example, by making it harder to register to vote.
      Like the US, Britain has an admired old constitution (though ours is unwritten) that has proved easier for a shameless government to work around than many political traditionalists expected. And, as in the US, Britain’s two main parties currently have similar levels of support. Whenever our next general election comes, the third hung parliament since 2010 is a distinct possibility. Britons shaking their heads at the US’s election chaos probably shouldn’t gloat.
      What can the left do about these deadlocks? One obvious but difficult solution is to reform the electoral systems that are biased against them – or at least make many more voters uncomfortable with how unfair these systems are. Another solution is to have more charismatic leaders, more effective election campaigns and more popular policies than the right. That’s a tall order, but stubborn rightwing ascendancies have been broken in Britain and the US before: by Labour in 1945, 1964 and 1997; by the Democrats in 1960, 1992 and 2008.
      The enemies of conservatism also need to shed their inferiority complex. After Trump was elected, many liberals and leftists argued that he would be impossible to beat in 2020, as an incumbent with supposedly so much dark charisma. When Trump took an early lead this week, the same pessimistic mindset spread an expectation that Biden would be defeated, despite the well-known fact that many Democratic votes would be counted last. And once Biden went ahead, the pessimists started predicting that any presidency of his would be doomed before it began, and that Trump could even win next time.
      Some of this pessimism may turn out to be justified. But it also suits the right’s political narrative: that they are the US and the west’s natural rulers, and that any periods of government by anyone else are temporary aberrations.
      Twenty years ago, the Republicans captured the presidency in even more contentious circumstances, through the supreme court. George W Bush went on to govern as if he had decisively won. He was re-elected. The Democrats, and liberals and leftists everywhere, could learn from that.
      • Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Donald Trump's malignant spell could soon be broken | Jonathan Freedland

      by

      Barring a twist inconceivable even by the standards of 2020, we will soon know the result of the US presidential election – and it will almost certainly be a cause for rejoicing. Donald Trump, the man who has haunted the world’s dreams and sparked a thousand nightmares, has all but lost. On 20 January 2021, he will probably leave the White House – or be removed if necessary. The Trump presidency, a shameful chapter in the history of the republic, will soon be over.
      True, it is taking longer than we might have liked. There was to be no swift moment of euphoria and elation, an unambiguous landslide announced on election night with a drumroll and fireworks display. Instead, thanks to a pandemic that meant two in three Democrats voted by slower-to-count mail-in ballots, it’s set to be a win in increments, a verdict delivered in slow motion. Nor was there the hoped-for “blue wave” that might have carried the Democrats to a majority in the US Senate (though there is, just, a way that could yet happen). As a result, it will be hard for Joe Biden to do what so urgently needs to be done, whether that’s tackling the climate crisis, racial injustice, economic inequality, America’s parlous infrastructure or its dysfunctional and vulnerable electoral machinery. And it is glumly true that even if Trump is banished from the Oval Office, Trumpism will live on in the United States.
      And yet none of that should obscure the main event that has taken place this week. It’s a form of progressive masochism to search for the defeat contained in a victory. Because a victory is what this will be.
      Recall the shock and disgust that millions – perhaps billions – have felt these past four years, as Trump sank to ever lower depths. When he was ripping children from their parents and keeping them in cages; when he was blithely exchanging “love letters” with the murderous thug that rules the slave state of North Korea; when he was coercing Ukraine to dig up dirt on Biden, or else lose the funds it needed to defend itself against Vladimir Putin, the high crime for which he was impeached; when he was denying the reality of the coronavirus, insisting it would just melt away, thereby leaving more than 235,000 Americans to their fate and their deaths – when he was doing all that, what did his opponents long for? The wish, sometimes uttered to the heavens, was not complicated: they wanted Trump’s defeat and ejection from power. Few attached the rider that it would only count if the Democrats could also pick up a Senate seat in North Carolina.
      Nor does it seem as though any defeat for Trump will be tentative or partial, even if the delayed result might make it feel that way. Joe Biden crushed him in this contest. He beat him in the popular vote by a huge margin, four million at last count, with that figure only growing as the final result is tallied. Yes, in a high-turnout election, Trump got more votes than he did in 2016 – but Biden got more votes than any presidential candidate in history, more even than the once-in-a-generation phenomenon that was Barack Obama.
      What’s more, Biden looks to have done something extremely difficult and vanishingly rare, taking on and defeating a first-term president. That would ensure that Donald Trump becomes only the third elected president since Herbert Hoover in 1932 to try and fail to win re-election. Trump would take his place alongside Jimmy Carter and George Bush the elder in the small club of rejected, one-term presidents. As it happens, both those men were gracious in defeat and admirable in retirement, but Trump won’t see them that way. He’ll regard them as stone-cold losers. And he’s about to be one of them, his place taken by a decent, empathic man with the first ever female vice-president at his side.
      It’s worth bearing all that in mind when you hear the predictable complaints that Biden was too “centrist”, or that Bernie Sanders would have done better. It could be argued that Biden outperformed the rest of his party, pulling ahead even as Democrats lost seats in the House and failed to make great gains in the Senate. Note that Trump’s prime attack line – that “far left” Democrats were itching to impose “socialism” on America – cut through in this campaign, clearly alarming Cuban and Venezuelan voters in Florida, for example. But it was a hard label to stick on a lifelong pragmatist like Joe Biden: most Americans just didn’t buy it.
      What it adds up to is not perhaps the across-the-board repudiation of Trump and the congressional Republicans who enabled him these past four years. But it does count as an emphatic rejection of what Trump did as a first-term president – and, if it holds, the prevention of all the horror he would have unleashed if he had won a second.
      It means that a majority of Americans have said no to the constant stream of insults, abuse and lies – more than 22,000 since Trump took office, according to the Washington Post. They have said no to a man who was a misinformation super-spreader, who called journalists “enemies of the people” and denounced inconvenient truths as “fake news”. They have said no to a man who suggested people should guard against Covid by injecting themselves with disinfectant; who dismissed science in favour of Fox News; who dismissed the word of his own intelligence agencies, preferring conspiracy theories picked up on Twitter.
      They have said no to a president who saw white supremacists and neo-Nazis march in Charlottesville in 2017, and declared that they included some “very fine people”. They have said no to a man who referred to one black congresswoman as “low IQ” and suggested four others, all US citizens, should “go back home”. They have said no to the man who refused to disavow the far-right groups who worship him, telling those racist extremists instead to “stand back and stand by”. They have said no to the man who trashed America’s allies, who withdrew the US from the Paris climate agreement, and who grovelled to every strongman and dictator on the planet.
      The next few weeks will be perilous. Trump will not concede; he will continue to deny the legitimacy of this result. His performance on Thursday night was perhaps his lowest and darkest yet, groundlessly telling Americans they could have no faith in their most solemn democratic rite: the election of a president. As he leaves, he will scorch the earth and poison the soil.
      But all of that is to remind us why it was so essential, for America and the world, that he be defeated. And why, even though it may have arrived slowly and without the fanfare so many of us wanted, this will be a moment to savour. A dark force is being expelled from the most powerful office in the world – and at long last, we can glimpse the light.
      • Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist More