The bolt of panic shot through liberal America within minutes of the polls closing in Miami.
Democrats had calculated that as the first results came in from Florida cities, they should expect Joe Biden to take an early lead. After that it would be a close fight as votes piled up for Donald Trump in more conservative parts of the state.
Still, Democrats were buoyant. Opinion polls had Biden with the edge in Florida. If the former vice-president could nail the state, the election would probably be settled before California even finished voting. Trump had almost no path to victory that did not include Florida.
Then Miami-Dade county declared the result of nearly one million early votes shortly after 7pm.
Biden was nine points behind the president in a county that Hillary Clinton won by a 30-point margin in 2016. Far from fighting from behind, Trump was ahead right out of the starting gate.
Eventually, Biden pulled off a slim victory in Miami-Dade but the result was still a huge swing to Trump that helped deliver him Florida. The former chair of the county Democratic party, Joe Garcia, called it “a bloodbath”.
Twitter churned with expletives. Alarmed messages flew on social-media groups speculating as to what it meant that Biden was performing worse than Clinton, with the ever-present nightmare of her 2016 defeat hanging over proceedings. Permutations were calculated and recalculated. In bars not shut because of coronavirus, stunned Democrats ordered stiff drinks and settled in for a long night.
Meanwhile, Trump and his more excitable followers took it as an omen and readied themselves to declare victory.
So began an extraordinary few days in perhaps the most remarkable American presidential election week of modern times. Election day saw the president and his supporters start out believing they had repeated the astonishing upset of 2016. By the end of the week, Americans were subjected to the unusual spectacle of their president trashing his own country’s electoral system as corrupt and undemocratic.
In 2000, the world was introduced to the import of hanging chads to the US democratic process. Twenty years later, Americans with a vote, and many hundreds of millions more in foreign lands with no say but a strong interest in the outcome, have been steeped in the demographics and voting patterns of key counties from Philadelphia to Las Vegas and Atlanta as they rode a rollercoaster of results.
Even before the first vote was counted, the 2020 election was setting records. More than 100 million people had already voted before election day because of coronavirus, making it the first election in US history where more voters cast their ballot before the election than on the day.
Through it all, America’s deeply flawed electoral system – cumbersome, weighted in favour of conservative regions, and sometimes corrupt in its administration if not in the ways Trump meant – proved resilient. The votes went on being counted and results declared.
For a very short while, Democrats told themselves the Miami-Dade disaster was down to the significant numbers of Cuban Americans who wouldn’t like Biden because Barack Obama eased up on Fidel Castro. It would surely be different in parts of Florida where Hispanics with other ancestries lived, the kind Trump had insulted, and where colonies of retired people must be sick of his mishandling of coronavirus.
Those delusions didn’t last long. An hour into the Florida count, Biden had pulled narrowly ahead but that was of little comfort to Democrats because it was clearly not enough to overcome results awaited from areas that favoured Trump. The New York Times gave the president a 95% chance of winning Florida as the president did well with the state’s Puerto Rican population and the elderly.
Stunned liberals were gripped by visions of 2016 as they began to realise that the foundations of their belief in a “blue wave” sweeping the country in a repudiation of Trump were looking shaky.
This time it’s different
For months, opinion polls had assured Democrats that this time it would be different. They showed Biden commanding double-digit leads in three key midwestern states – Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – that Trump won in 2016 by less than one percent of the vote. Taking back those states would be enough to deliver Biden the White House so long as he also won every state Clinton took four years ago.
Some Democrats felt so confident in what once again proved to be worthless opinion polling that they began predicting that even Texas would swing their way, just as Clinton had done in a similar fit of hubris, amid excitable talk of a landslide.
But on the night, Florida popped that delusion and Biden’s supporters braced for rocky days ahead.
Americans were repeatedly forewarned that early results in key states would make it look as if Trump were winning on the night because local election laws required that postal ballots be processed and counted only after the walk-in votes.
That would have made little difference in any other year but this was the age of coronavirus and mail-in votes made up a significant part of the count. They also leaned heavily toward Biden after Trump told his supporters that postal balloting would be rigged.
Some Democrats took a deep breath and tried to keep their nerve. Others, burned by the nightmare of four years ago, were consumed by a doom-laden sense of deja vu.
Republicans, on the other hand, were heartened. Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said that the number of the president’s supporters who voted was up and that was a good sign.
“We feel very good about where we’re turning out,” he said.
Miller was right about the increased turnout for Trump, if not its impact.
The president used his favourite medium, Twitter, to proclaim that prospects for his re-election were “looking really good all over the country”.
At the official Republican “victory party” in Des Moines, Iowa, hundreds of Trump supporters celebrated by refusing to wear masks. Police on the door openly proclaimed their loyalty to the president.
Excitement at the Florida result was compounded by the count in Iowa, a state that twice voted for Obama but swung heavily to Trump in 2016. The now notorious polls said it would be a close contest this year, as would the election for one of the state’s seats in the US Senate held by Joni Ernst.
But long before midnight, it was clear that Trump had won Iowa by more than eight points and Ernst also scored a decisive victory.
Jann Simon roared her approval.
“Trump is a winner! We’re not going to let them steal it from us. I never took any notice of the polls after what happened with Hillary. Trump had a big victory here tonight. They said he would lose Iowa. It’s going to be the same in the rest of the country. I’m expecting a red wave,” she said.
Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, a close Trump ally, proclaimed that the Democrats were now history in her state.
“We have proven without a doubt that Iowa is a red state,” she said.
There was despair among Iowa’s Democrats. Laura Hubka, chair of the party in Howard County, which had the largest swing from Obama to Trump in the US four years ago, feared that the election was about to turn into a repeat of 2016. “This feels all too familiar,” she said.
Hubka blamed the violence of some of the Black Lives Matter protests and calls to defund the police for strengthening Trump’s support in rural Iowa.
‘Frankly, we did win this election’
After Florida, attention shifted to the upper midwest where Biden needed victories if he was to win the presidency. Opinion polls gave him a shot at Ohio. With two-thirds of the vote counted, the former vice-president had a small lead – a good sign in a state that swung from Obama to a significant Trump victory four years ago.
But that didn’t last long as Trump pulled ahead. Democrats waited for the promised swing the other way as the postal votes were counted in some of Ohio’s biggest counties, which include cities such as Cleveland and Cincinnati.
Not long after midnight, Ohio was called for Trump by eight points. In three hours it had lurched from a Biden lead to a victory for the president. This was back to front from how Democrats were told the count would unfold.
The numbers were not looking great for Biden either in the key midwestern states he had to win. Before long he was falling hundreds of thousands of votes behind in Pennsylvania. Don’t panic, Democratic leaders said. The numbers are in Biden’s favour even if they don’t look like it. But that part of the country hoping to be rid of Trump was nervous and losing confidence.
As far as the president was concerned, it was all over. At 2am on Wednesday, he appeared at the White House to declare victory and demand a halt to the counting of votes.
“Frankly, we did win this election,” he said.
“We want all voting to stop,” he added, in what appeared to be a claim that ballots were being cast against him illegally.
Twitter added a warning to Trump’s tweets after he began claiming the election was being “stolen from him”.
“We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!” he tweeted.
Biden, on the other hand, urged patience.
“As I’ve said all along, it’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who’s won this election,” he said. “That’s the decision of the American people. But I’m optimistic about this outcome.”
On a tough night, the first really good piece of news for Biden came at 3am when the Associated Press called Arizona for him. A win in the former Republican stronghold eased the pressure to take Pennsylvania because he could still reach the White House if he carried Wisconsin and Michigan as well, although that was far from certain. The loss of Arizona also boxed Trump in to a much narrower path to holding on to power.
A brighter dawn
As dawn broke, Democratic expectations were shifting. Talk of a blue wave had fallen away. Winning control of the US Senate was looking a challenge. But the prospects of ousting the president were picking up, and Democrats were comforted by the knowledge that dumping Trump had always been the most important victory.
Biden’s vote ticked up in Wisconsin and Michigan as finally the results began following the predicted pattern of giving Trump the lead initially but then surging for the Democrat as the cities emerged to keep alive his bid for the White House.
One of the major challenges for Trump’s campaign was to find the extra votes to offset increased Democratic turnout in the cities. The president’s vote did go up in rural Wisconsin and Michigan but the increased urban support for Biden, led by a surge in African American and young voters in cities such as Detroit and Milwaukee, was too much for Trump to overcome.
Wade Mahlstadt, a 25-year-old who works for a company that makes breathalysers, turned out to vote for the first time because he wanted rid of Trump.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone in my age group, let alone this many people in my age group, be this involved and participate with it,” he said. “I think it’s gonna make an impact because there’s a lot of us, and a lot of younger people don’t usually care to vote or want to be involved.”
Black voters were instrumental in places in keeping Biden’s hopes of election alive, particularly as other parts of the coalition the Democrats were counting on failed to materialise. The party said it expected a big surge in white women, particularly in the suburbs, away from Trump and to Biden. But that did not happen in the numbers the Democrats hoped.
Still, the president also marginally increased his support among black men, according to an NBC exit poll, and Trump gained among Hispanic voters too, particularly Mexican Americans in rural Texas and Puerto Ricans in Florida.
Americans watched fascinated and nerve-racked as pieces of the electoral puzzle emerged and then faded. North Carolina was in play for a while but then swung more assuredly to Trump. Nevada took its place as the key to the White House for a time because in tandem with Arizona it would provide enough electoral college votes for Biden not to have to worry about Pennsylvania. All the while, Georgia was edging the Democrat’s way.
As Trump’s prospects of re-election imploded, he took to the White House press podium on Thursday evening to give the most extraordinary statement of a presidency not short on jaw-dropping moments. He intended it as a battle cry, but the 17 remarkable minutes felt more like a death rattle as Trump looked winded by the wave of results going against him. Lacking his usual fire, the president painted himself as the victim of a vast conspiracy.
“If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us,” he began.
Trump accused opinion pollsters of getting it “knowingly wrong” in order to influence voters against him. Other outright falsehoods followed.
“There are now only a few states yet to be decided in the presidential race. The voting apparatus of those states are run, in all cases, by Democrats,” he claimed. Except that in almost all of those states, Republicans were in charge of running the election.
Trump alleged a conspiracy of ballots cast after election day, secret counting rooms, votes magically appearing from nowhere.
“We were winning in all the key locations by a lot, actually. And then our numbers started miraculously getting whittled away in secret,” he said. “It’s a corrupt system, and it makes people corrupt even if they aren’t by nature.”
Then he sounded almost plaintive as he appealed to the country to understand that this wasn’t about him. He was thinking of America.
“It’s not a question of who wins. Republican, Democrat; Joe, myself. We can’t let that happen to our country. We can’t be disgraced by having something like this happen,” he said.
Trump said the election would be decided by the courts but the prospect of the result being overturned looked increasingly dim. Conventional legal opinion had it that even a supreme court now top heavy with conservatives would be unlikely to nullify the results in enough states to change the outcome.
The US television networks cut away from the speech long before the president finished speaking because they said they weren’t prepared to broadcast a litany of lies. But much of the country couldn’t take their eyes off Trump’s Shakespearean performance.
The president’s son, Don Junior, called in a tweet for his father to “go to total war over this election” but the few protests in support of Trump’s claims about the vote did not suggest much of an appetite for a showdown.
The mayor of Philadelphia, Jim Kenney, expressed the derision felt in large parts of the country at Trump’s claim the election was being stolen.
“I think what the president needs to do is, frankly, put his big boy pants on,” he said. “He needs to acknowledge the fact that he has lost, and he needs to congratulate the winner.”
Black votes mattered
In the early hours of Friday, Georgia finally shifted to a Biden majority. If it held, the former vice president would be the first Democrat to win the state since 1992, overturning a majority of more than 200,000 for Trump four years ago.
The late surge in favour of Biden came from Atlanta and other major cities and their suburbs, partly as a consequence of the shifting demographics of southern states that has been remaking local political coalitions and elections for years but is now having a national impact.
But the president’s narrow defeat in Georgia was also substantially thanks to the efforts of one woman, Stacey Abrams, who was denied victory in the 2018 race for state governor by what looked to a lot of people like voter suppression by her Republican opponent, who also happened to be in charge of the election as secretary of state.
Abrams responded to that defeat by organising to mobilise voters, and to protect their ballots, which paid off for Biden.
Arizona also exacted a revenge of sorts on Trump for his repeated disparaging of the state’s late senator, John McCain, which surely cost the president votes in a state he lost by a narrow margin.
By Friday evening, Biden was entertaining the satisfying prospect of winning all four of the states still in play as he continued to strengthen albeit still narrow leads in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona. If he does take all four, he will win exactly the same number of electoral college votes as Trump four years ago: 306.
Biden had hoped to be making an acceptance speech late on Friday to thank the American people for electing him president. But with no definitive result he instead told them victory was certain and to hang on in there.
“Look, we both know tensions can be high after a tough election. One like we’ve had. But we need to remember we have to remain calm, patient. Let the process work out as we count all the votes,” he said. “Democracy works. Your vote will be counted. I don’t care how hard people try to stop it, I will not let it happen.”
Trumpism after Trump
As victory crept closer, it represented something different to the triumph many Democrats imagined on election day.
Biden’s campaign has been a success in its primary goal of the downfall of Donald Trump. He built an electoral coalition to reconstruct the midwestern blue wall and won states no Democrat had taken in years.
But relief that the end was in sight for what good numbers of Americans regard as the worst presidency ever was tinged with a realisation that the Democrats’ failure to win control of the Senate – unless they can pick up the two Georgia run-off seats in January – will dash the promise of public health insurance, the green new deal and the fantasy of packing the supreme court by adding more sympathetic justices.
If the supreme court strikes down Obamacare, depriving millions of Americans of subsidised health coverage, President Biden could struggle to replace it. The Republicans will also have a veto over who is in his cabinet.
The failure of the blue wave also killed any illusions that the election would mark a popular repudiation of Trump. Although Biden won the popular vote by more than four million, Trump’s own tally actually increased on 2016.
The election confirmed that the schism revealed by Trump’s election four years ago is as deep, perhaps deeper, than ever. Trump will soon be out of the White House but Trumpism is by no means dead.
For the Republican establishment, continued control of the Senate gives its Republican leader Mitch McConnell the opportunity to constrain the Biden administration, limiting its ability to chalk up legislative successes, while the party organises to take back the presidency in 2024 with a less volatile candidate.
However, there may be one major obstacle to that plan. Trump.
Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s former acting chief of staff now serving as US special envoy for Northern Ireland, said he expected him to run again in 2024 despite losing to Biden.
“I would absolutely expect the president to stay involved in politics and would absolutely put him on the shortlist of people who are likely to run in 2024,” he told an Irish thinktank.
Mulvaney was apparently doing more than speculating. CNN reported that Trump is already discussing a potential 2024 run with some of his aides. If Trump has his way, he’ll be back.
