Biden campaign expresses cautious optimism on sentimental election day

Cautious optimism and sentimentality were the major themes in the early hours of Tuesday evening at Joe Biden’s election night event in Wilmington, Delaware.

Joe Biden returns to childhood home in Scranton: ‘From this house to the White House’

Read more

As the Biden campaign prepared its outdoor election night party at a convention center in the chilly and blustery Delaware air, campaign officials and event organisers refrained from signaling any overwhelming sense of buoyancy or dread about the former vice-president’s chances of ousting Donald Trump.

Biden, the former vice-president and Democratic nominee for president, spent his day in his home state, going to church, visiting local voters and his childhood home. Biden’s surrogates, meanwhile, had fanned out across the country in an attempt to extend the Biden campaign’s polling lead in swing states or other states that traditionally lean Republican.

Campaign officials pointed to record-breaking voter turnout as a positive sign for the Biden campaign. More than 100 million Americans voted early, a record.

“As many of you know, we have seen record enthusiasm for turnout across this country, especially for Democrats,” the Biden campaign manager, Jenn O’Malley Dillon, said Tuesday. “We think roughly a hundred million people have voted early, most of them for Vice-President Biden and Senator Harris.”

Top advisers to Biden would only say that he planned to address supporters and the press gathered at the election night gathering later on in the evening. He planned to watch the election results from his home in Delaware.

Early in the evening Democrats said they were happy with how smoothly voting had generally gone across the country throughout the day.

“The polls were opening well this morning. Minimal issues and disruptions and the issues that arise are being addressed,” Biden campaign lawyer Bob Bauer said in a briefing with reporters earlier in the day.

Among Democratic political veterans, the most optimistic among them would only publicly predict a close race on election night.

“I think you’re looking at a very divided, very close election. I mean, Donald Trump won by 75,000 votes in three states last time. Can you pull that off two elections in a row with that sort of closeness?” William Daley, former White House chief of staff to Barack Obama, said in an interview on Monday.

“And losing by 3m popular vote? There’s a tipping point where I think you lose by four then I think it’s pretty hard to make that up and pull off what he was able to four years ago. So like I say, all I’m willing to predict is it’s going to be a very close election and they’ll probably go very late.”

For days, elected officials, veteran Democratic operatives, and rank-and-file Democrats have expressed a mixture of optimism and trepidation. They have been optimistic in the majority of polls showing Biden as the heavy favorite to win the election. At the same time though, the memory of four years ago when Hillary Clinton lost to Trump despite polls showing her as the all but certain favorite of the race lingered.

“I’m going to be urging people to stay calm, have faith in the system,” the Delaware senator Chris Coons, a longtime Biden ally, said of election night during an interview on Monday. But, Coons said, he also planned to urge supporters to keep “fighting like hell to make sure every ballot gets counted.”

For days, election analysts suggested that the winner might not be apparent Tuesday night. As a result, businesses across the US have been boarding up storefronts in case protests broke out.

“I think you’ll see a lot of tension and the tension is rooted in the anxiety created by a president who has been the most divisive president in my lifetime,” Coons said.

Across Wilmington, however, only a few storefronts had boarded their windows.

O’Malley Dillon on Tuesday stressed that Biden could only come out and address supporters without declaring victory or conceding defeat.

“Our expectation is he’s going to address the American people tonight and that’s what we’re focused on,” O’Malley Dillon said.