Joe Biden held a thin Electoral College edge over Donald Trump, 224-213, as the sun rose on this day after the presidential election of 2020.
Biden also led Trump by roughly 2.6 million in the national popular vote, although Democrats who remember 2016 know how meaningless that can be.
But we can’t yet know who will occupy the Oval Office, come January.
We were warned, over and over, that it would take longer than one night — hours, days, maybe more — to determine which candidate had gained the 270 Electoral votes needed to claim victory.
Biden spoke to an early morning, drive-in crowd in Wilmington DL, asking his supporters to “keep the faith” as the vote-counting went on.
Trump made a White House appearance that began at 2:21 a.m., claiming the election was somehow being stolen, vowing to take it to the Supreme Court and saying:
“We will win this. And as far as I’m concerned, we have won it.”
A glance at the election map reveals a pattern mostly familiar:
A great swath of Republican red runs across the middle of the country, from Florida and the coastal South (though Georgia and North Carolina remained too close to call), across the Deep South and Texas, all the way to the Canada border of the inland Northwest.
This ocean of red is framed by Democratic blue in the Northeast, reaching as far south as Virginia, and the West Coast, hooking inland, across too-close-to-call Nevada and Arizona to New Mexico and Colorado, and including Illinois and Minnesota.
Except for solid-red Ohio, the industrial Midwest (including Pennsylvania (leaning red) and Michigan and Wisconsin (leaning blue) were still undetermined, as was Alaska (leaning red).
President Trump has been saying for months that he wanted and expected a final decision on election night. He’s been virtually alone in that view, because it has so rarely been true in the past, and he has no power to force the issue.
Even in a typical, less chaotic, election year, ballot counting goes past election night. Results aren’t official until states certify them, sometimes weeks after voting is complete.
In any event, most of the so-called “battleground” states turned out to be just that.
In the first battleground of the night, Florida, the presidential leads swung back and forth, sometimes minute-by-minute, in the end going to Trump.
As expected, the enormous early voter turnout spurred by Trump’s break-the-rules presidency and surly personality was a major factor in the way things shook out.
But it didn’t go Biden’s way; a hoped-for “Blue Wave” never materialized. Many observers blamed pollsters for a performance even worse than in 2016, which encouraged unwarranted optimism among Democrats.
The widespread early vote, combined with distinct shifts against Trump in the suburbs, especially among women, plus an unusually good turnout by younger voters, boosted Biden’s popular-vote tally.
But it’s the Electoral College that counts, and at the end of the night the only advice that counted was: have patience.
