As the nation awoke the morning after Election Day, reactions seemed to suggest Democrats had lost nearly every office in the land. Numerous news stories recorded “huge Democratic disappointment.” How, many Democrats asked, could we be losing House seats and fail to take back the Senate? And with Biden running behind in early returns, many began to worry that far-left critics were correct: Biden had lost because he had “run the most plodding and forgettable presidential campaign in recent memory.”
What a difference a few days — and a few million mail-in ballots — make.
It is now clear that Biden has won the White House. Biden’s remarkable campaign will be increasingly regarded in coming days, and by posterity, as something of a miracle, among the best and most important in American history.
For starters, Biden is the first challenger to beat an incumbent president in a true two-person race in nearly a century — since Franklin Roosevelt beat Herbert Hoover in 1932. (Reagan 1980 and Clinton 1992 included third-party candidates).
Biden also received the most popular votes of any candidate in history, nearly 75 million (at this writing), and at least 4.2 million more than Donald Trump. Biden carried Georgia, which had not voted Democratic since 1992. He won Arizona, which has voted Republican in all but one race since 1952. And Biden carried the “blue wall” states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania that Trump carried in 2016. All told, Biden is set to win 306 Electoral College votes to Trump’s 232.
Not only that, but Biden was running against by far the most ruthless, win-at-all-costs, nihilistic president in American history.
Supported by thousands of disturbingly supine Republican officeholders, one of the country’s two great major parties was turned into an army of cowering enablers. Add to that Fox News, social media propaganda and other news organizations that amplified the president’s misleading statements, and Trump was able to assemble a powerful political culture free of facts. In short, Trump was willing to risk tearing the nation apart to win.
Yet Biden still beat him. It is how Biden won that matters most.
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