 | | Erin Schaff/The New York Times |
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The New York Times has called the race in Pennsylvania for Joe Biden, and with it, the presidency of the United States. He has defeated Donald Trump, who becomes the country’s first one-term commander in chief in nearly three decades. |
It was the culmination of a race that Mr. Biden entered, he often said, only after being outraged by the sight of white nationalists marching in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. The episode appeared to harden his resolution to mount a centrist campaign that would reject extremism and pull the country together. |
CNN was the first network to call the race this morning, with The Associated Press and others soon following. “With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation,” the Biden campaign said in a statement heralding the triumph. |
But it’s not exactly the victory that polls had predicted, or that Democrats had envisioned. Mr. Trump may have lost, but Trumpism is far from dead. And, not surprisingly, he is so far continuing to dispute Mr. Biden’s win; there’s little guarantee of a smooth transition. |
So as the nation confronts a pandemic and an economic crisis, it’s also facing down a crisis of consensus. Rather than expanding on their sweeping victories in the 2018 midterms, Democrats are on pace to lose seats in the House, and face an uphill battle to gaining control of the Senate. While Mr. Biden won more popular votes than any presidential candidate in history, Mr. Trump earned the second-most. |
Mr. Biden had centered his entire campaign on a promise to unite the country. Accepting the Democratic nomination in August, he pledged to “restore the soul of America.” But after this week’s election, Americans are just as split as ever on what that soul contains. |
“I don’t think there is any question that the results reveal the continuation of some of the stratification of the country,” said Guy Cecil, the chairman of Priorities USA, a Democratic political action committee. |
Only a small fraction of voters — 5 percent, according to early exit poll results — decided whom they would support in the immediate run-up to the election. Partisan allegiances were even stronger than four years ago: Well over 90 percent of Democrats and Republicans voted for their party’s nominee. |
In Philadelphia on Friday night, as elections officials counted votes at the city’s convention center, a symbolic scene unfolded outside, with Trump supporters gathered on one side of a police barricade, demanding an end to the count, and Mr. Biden’s backers gathered just steps away. Some on the Biden side were playing music out of amplifiers; soon, a rig of amps had materialized on the Trump side, and a different soundtrack began to blare there. |
In nearby Scranton, Pa., our correspondent Sabrina Tavernise spoke to voters and got a front-row view of the political polarization. Sammy Diana, a 55-year-old Trump supporter, described himself as “sick to my stomach” as the results rolled in yesterday, and refused to accept their legitimacy. “I definitely, definitely, definitely believe it was fixed. Dead people voted,” he said, echoing some of the unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud made by Mr. Trump and his allies. |
Still, almost all voters in Tuesday’s election — 96 percent, according to the preliminary results of The Associated Press’s VoteCast survey — said that bridging the country’s divides should be at least a somewhat important priority for the next president. Among the roughly four in five voters who said this was very important, most cast ballots for Mr. Biden. His focus on unity was evidently not misplaced. |
The surest way a leader can pull a divided country together, especially if he or she isn’t a dynamic speaker or a movement figure, is by winning resoundingly, then sweeping into power amid an inevitable air of consensus. Instead, Biden and his Democratic allies in Congress will face a Republican Party feeling emboldened, with a base of support that has only grown in the past four years. After presiding over a chaotic four years as president, Mr. Trump may go down in history as more successful at building a reliable base of Republican supporters than at governing. |
Should Mr. Biden face a divided Congress when he steps into the Oval Office, taking big legislative steps forward will be difficult. If campaigns are waged in poetry and governing is done in prose, Mr. Biden is swiftly moving into the prosaic stage. Discourses on national healing may soon dissolve in favor of a hard-nosed focus on partisan politics. |
While Mr. Biden was famous during his years in the Senate for establishing mutual respect across the aisle and forging alliances with Republicans, those days may be gone. |
“Yes, we can put political pressure on Republican senators; yes, we can launch national campaigns to pass legislation,” Mr. Cecil said. “But ultimately, if we’re just judging Mitch McConnell by history, he has shown very little interest in working together.” |
He added, “We should put all that we can into the two Georgia Senate races and see if we can pull them off.” |
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