Speaking in Wilmington, Delaware, on Wednesday afternoon, Joe Biden said, “It’s clear that we are winning enough states to reach two hundred and seventy electoral votes needed to win the Presidency. I’m not here to declare that we’ve won, but I am here to report when the count is finished we believe we will be the winners.” The former Vice-President has ground for his confidence. Earlier in the afternoon, the Associated Press called Wisconsin for him. CNN also called Michigan for him. Nevada also seems to be heading in his direction. That effectively means that Biden needs to pick up only Arizona or Georgia or Pennsylvania—all states where there are still a lot of uncounted ballots—to get to two hundred and seventy Electoral College votes.
Fox News and the Associated Press have already called Arizona for Biden, who is ahead by about ninety-three thousand votes, with more than eighty-five per cent of the count in. However, the Arizona Republic reported on Wednesday that there were at least six hundred thousand ballots still to be counted. On Wednesday afternoon, Donald Trump was leading by more than three hundred thousand votes in Pennsylvania, but there were still many hundreds of thousands to be counted, mostly from Democratic districts. “To my eye, Biden is likely hitting the targets he needs in PA counties to be on track to finish ahead,” Dave Wasserman, an electoral analyst at the nonpartisan newsletter Cook Political Report commented on Twitter. In Georgia, Trump was leading by close to eighty thousand votes, with more than two hundred thousand outstanding, many of them from the Democratic-leaning metro-Atlanta area, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
Until we get more information from Arizona and Pennsylvania, nobody should jump to any conclusions. But there is a reason that the betting markets have installed Biden as the prohibitive favorite and some people on Wall Street are already hailing the return of divided government, with Trump returning to Palm Beach. By the time all the ballots are counted, it looks like Biden could have received as many as seventy-five million votes, easily eclipsing Barack Obama’s total of 69.5 million in 2008. It also looks like he will have expanded Hillary Clinton’s margin in the popular vote, which was 2.1 percentage points. If he runs this margin up to three points, it will be just one point short of Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney, in 2012. And nobody said that race was a squeaker. To be sure, Trump also increased the number of votes he got compared with 2016. By the end of the count, he could reach seventy million. Buoyed by his performance in many parts of the country, Republican candidates for the Senate and House also did better than expected. It’s a matter of profound regret that the election didn’t result in a more overwhelming repudiation of Trump. And the prospect of Mitch McConnell staying on as Senate Majority Leader is a ghastly one.
But Presidential elections are monumentally important in their own right, and narrow victories are sometimes more consequential than large ones. If Al Gore had carried Florida in 2000, it’s pretty certain that the invasion of Iraq wouldn’t have taken place, and the world would look quite different. If, in 2016, Hillary Clinton had picked up another eighty thousand votes between Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Trump would have been deprived of the White House bully pulpit, which he has used to further divide and inflame the country for the past four years, all while gravely undermining America’s standing in the world.
The success that Trump has enjoyed in his destructive project was clearly reflected in the election returns. Broadly speaking, he did very well in “Trump areas”—white rural counties, depressed areas, exurbs—and he did badly in urban and suburban areas. The story of the election can largely be told through two counties: Arizona’s Maricopa County, which includes much of Phoenix and its sprawling suburbs, and Ohio’s Mahoning County, which includes parts of Youngstown.
For decades, Maricopa County was a bastion of Sun Belt conservatism: it had voted Republican in every election since the nineteen-fifties; Barry Goldwater started out there; until a few years ago, the sheriff Joe Arpaio, the fiercely anti-immigrant lawman, was perhaps its best-known resident. Over the years, though, the county has grown enormously and become far more diverse—today, about a third of its population is Latino. In 2016, Trump carried it by 3.4 percentage points. This year, with eighty-six per cent of the vote counted, Biden is leading him 52.3 per cent to 46.3 per cent. If this lead holds up in the final vote count, Maricopa County could well prove pivotal for Biden’s success.
Mahoning County is on the other end of the political spectrum. About eighty per cent white, it was for decades a center of steel manufacturing and a Democratic stronghold. The last time it went Republican was 1972. In 2016, Trump cut the Democratic margin dramatically, to 3.3 percentage points. In 2018, when General Motors announced that it was closing its Lordstown assembly plant, the area’s biggest industrial employer, he castigated the company and vowed to save it. On Tuesday, he carried the county by more than two thousand votes.
Trump’s success in Mahoning County was far from isolated. In many other parts of the Midwest and the South, he consolidated or expanded his support. As my colleague Susan B. Glasser noted, the election results confirmed Trump’s overwhelming dominance over the Republican Party. Any prospect of a post-election U-turn by the G.O.P. has evaporated. It was a victory for Trumpism, if not for Trump.
And not just among whites, although they remain the overwhelming component of Trump’s base. The results from Miami-Dade County, where Trump shrank Clinton’s 2016 lead by more than twenty points, and from some heavily Latino counties in Texas, where he cut the margin by nearly thirty points, were striking. Among Latino men as a whole, Trump got more than a third of the vote, according to an exit poll from Edison Research, conducted for a consortium of news organizations. Among Black men, he got eighteen per cent.
Right-wing populism and the cult of the strongman is an international phenomenon, of course. If there was any remaining doubt about the potency of Trump’s particular brand of this noxious brew, particularly to men, this election has dispelled it. Blatant incompetence, corruption, racism, and cruelty are no barrier to popularity. Fortified by slanted media coverage and outright conspiracy theories fed to them by their social-media algorithms, many of Trump’s supporters embrace these attributes or dismiss them as fake news. They also warm to his message of economic nationalism and his targeting of the other.
International experience suggests that the most effective way to fend off these populist movements is to assemble a broad coalition against them, which Biden set out to do. Questions will be raised about his campaign—and also about the campaigns of some other Democratic candidates, who lost despite having raised huge sums of money. With the Republicans looking likely to retain control of the Senate, it’s now unclear how much, if any, of Biden’s expansive policy platform will be possible to enact. Because these proposals include an urgently needed stimulus package and many important long-term reforms—including investing in green energy, expanding child care, and reversing Trump’s tax cuts for the rich—this is a grave setback for the country.
Many inquests lie ahead. Right now, though, the focus is on the outcome of the Presidential election. If all the votes are duly counted, and the courts do their job, Trump may well be denied the reëlection victory that was afforded to some of his international counterparts, such as India’s Narendra Modi and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. That will be something worth celebrating.
