After a tortuous five days of methodical vote counting, county-by-county projections, and bizarre protests and conspiracy theories from President Donald Trump, all the major TV networks, cable companies, and print media outlets called the presidential election for Joe Biden late Saturday morning. (Vox’s Decision Desk, to its credit, got there 24 hours earlier.) Biden served as vice-president for the first Black president, Barack Obama, and will now bring the first female vice-president, Kamala Harris, with him to the White House. Not long before the announcement, Donald Trump, unsurprisingly, had tweeted “I WON THIS ELECTION BY A LOT!” but his quest to deny reality has little support from Republican leadership or even Fox News.
What remains to be determined: The final margin of Biden’s victory; control of the Senate, which will come down to a run-off for two seats in Georgia in January; and how much damage Trump can do as he’s dragged kicking and screaming out the door. But after four somewhat tortuous days in which the outcome seemed just a matter of time yet took its sweet time in arriving, the election is over.
The main drama in this intervening period was supplied by Fox News, whose aggressive call of Arizona for Biden on election night was a major turning point, yet was not followed until this morning by any major outlet other than the AP, which shared data with Fox. The call set off a huge blowback from the Trump campaign and also, according to reports, Fox viewers. Having made the Arizona decision, Fox theoretically could have called the whole election for Biden days ago, but after the controversy seemed reluctant to go first; in the end, they were the last TV station to call it for Biden.
Unless Democrats prevail in the Georgia runoffs, Biden will enter his presidency without the clear Senate control his party had dreamed of, and either way is likely to face deadlock with Senate Republicans and the grim prospect of negotiating with Mitch McConnell in order to get even small things done. For what it’s worth, the two men do have a history of getting along relatively well, but Biden’s election trail talk of being able to reach compromises with his opponents will be sorely tested.
In the meantime, the bizarre and destructive presidency of Donald Trump has two and a half months left to run. The president will doubtless continue to fruitlessly pursue litigation over remaining vote counts. He has reportedly instructed his team to go down fighting (although his aides are also reportedly talking of “interventions” and beginning to “back away”). He will likely never even admit that he lost this election. But between the coronavirus pandemic, which resisted Trump’s efforts to wish it away and continues to rage across the country, and the election, which he was never for one day favored to win in the polls, 2020 is the year when reality finally caught up with Donald Trump.