Joe Biden bullish but down-ballot races deliver disappointment for Democrats

Joe Biden remained confident on Wednesday that his campaign was on track to win the White House, while Democrats and voters who had been hoping for a blue wave were left sobered and disheartened by election night results.

In a televised address from Wilmington, Delaware, Biden told reporters that he would not yet declare victory, but he believed he would hit the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.

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“My fellow Americans, yesterday once again proved democracy is the heartbeat of this nation,” Biden said. “I’m not here to declare that we won, but I am here to report that when the count is finished, we believe will be the winner,” Biden said.

“Senator [Kamala] Harris and I are on track to win more votes that any other ticket in history,” Biden said, referring to his running mate, who stood next to him at the podium wearing a face mask. He said only three presidential campaigns had won against an incumbent in US history.

“When it’s finished, God willing, we’ll be the fourth,” he said. “This is a major achievement.”

The race for the presidency remained too close to call on Wednesday afternoon – a far cry from the landslide that some pollsters predicted. Democrats down the ballot had not pulled off the upset in the Senate they were aiming for, and had not made the gains in the House that had seemed on the cards.

The Biden campaign insisted the veteran Democrat appeared on track to oust Trump, as hundreds of thousands of outstanding mail-in votes continued to be counted in key battleground states. In the face of Trump’s false claims of victory and efforts to launch legal battles to the curtail the vote counting, its messaging became defiant.

“Now every vote must be counted,” Biden said in Wilmington. “No one’s going to take our democracy away from us … We the people will not be silenced. We the people will not be bullied. We the people will not surrender.”

Trump’s re-election campaign said it would call for a recount in Wisconsin, which was declared a win for Biden on Wednesday. It also said it had filed a lawsuit to “halt counting” in Michigan, where the results were too close to call, and in Pennsylvania, where counting was expected to last until Friday at least.

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The Biden campaign began a fresh fundraising effort on Wednesday for “the largest election protection effort ever assembled”.

“To make sure every vote is counted, we’re setting up the largest election protection effort ever assembled. Because Donald Trump doesn’t get to decide the outcome of this election – the American people do,” Biden tweeted.

If Biden does ultimately emerge victorious, he will probably not have a Democratic-controlled Senate to help move policy priorities into law. As with states concerning the presidency, key Senate races had not been called on Wednesday, but Democrats were on track to fall short of the net three seats they needed to flip the Senate from Republican control in the event of a Biden victory.

But the sobering truth on Wednesday was that Democrats were on track to lose seats in the House of Representatives, contradicting widespread predictions that Democrats would reinforce their majority in that legislative chamber. And Republicans looked on track to very narrowly retain control of the Senate. Together, those outcomes suggested two years of legislative gridlock, even with a president like Biden, who has predicted that bipartisan agreements are still in reach.

“I think one of the things that Democrats have to pay attention to is that we’re likely to win the presidency,” said Democratic strategist Dan Sena, who ran his party’s congressional campaign arm when Democrats took control of the House of Representatives in 2018.

“But along with that we have now inherited in some ways the similar challenges we had after 2016 without the benefit of going into the election cycle where you don’t control anything. So the lessons have to be both ‘how does Biden try and unite the country?’ and then ‘how do we deal with some of the same problems we had in 2016 that we now have in 20?’”

Sena pointed to the House Democrats who just lost their seats, noting that they “probably outperformed the president in their districts”. In other words, the landscape has not shifted dramatically in Democrats’ favor. Hard-fought victories will still be hard-fought.

Likewise, Democrats now have to grapple with the reality that in the best-case scenario for them of Biden winning the presidency, all the previous hurdles for legislative or electoral victory will still be there.

Similarly, exit polling suggested that Republicans and Trump made some gains among women and Hispanic voters, a warning sign that Democrats did not in fact have a monopoly on those demographics as some pollsters had suggested.

“We inherit the benefits of hopefully winning the presidency but now you also have the same challenges of 16 with ‘how do you build a larger coalition, how do you defend this?’” Sena said. “And what are the lessons that we really need to learn? I think those are going to be some tough questions.”

Still, despite falling far short of the loftier hopes Democrats entered election night with, Biden and his team wanted to retain a high sense of optimism. Outstanding states like Wisconsin and Maine were called for Biden on Wednesday, while must-wins like Michigan seemed favorable for him.

The front of the Biden campaign’s website read “keep the faith”.

“You know how hard it is to beat an incumbent president,” said the former Michigan Democratic party chairman Lon Johnson, stressing an effusive level of optimism. “It looks like by all measures he’ll have won the popular vote and this’ll be the most votes of any presidential candidate in the history of America. Are you kidding me? I’m not a doom and gloomer here. We’ve won.”