Here’s what you’re experiencing:
From North Carolina:
Walking to the Farmer’s market in Durham NC and we hear screaming and cheers from 2 blocks away. I start crying because I know what it means. Everyone wants to hug but everyone is staying COVID happy. ♥️♥️♥️
From Buffalo, NY:
Joe Biden had one job: to get 270 electoral votes. He did it. Nothing succeeds like success and really nothing matters but success. Not margins or coalitions or really anything but the fact that he got it done. Excuses would be meaningless if he hadn’t; second-guessing and potshots from the bleachers are equally so.
This isn’t the end of anything. We can see from the results even of this victorious election what just some of those challenges will be. What this is is an opportunity to stop the knifing attacks on the body politic, the fabric of our government and our almost quarter millennium old republic. How much we can repair, how much we can shift the trajectory of the country away from the decay and opaque transformations that made Trump possible … that’s all in front of us and unknown.
A TPM reader in DC:
I’m a civil servant. Joe Biden’s victory feels like a war-time liberation.
A couple of reader emails, the first one fun, the second especially poignant. Both connect this day to the awful experience of election night 2016.
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A lot of people, including me, were misled by opinion polls into thinking that Democrats would make out like bandits in this election the way they did in 2018. As the “blue wave” has receded, many Democrats have gone to the opposite extreme and pronounced that outside of getting rid of Trump, the election must be counted as a failure. My own view is that the Democrats did about as well as could be expected given the political divisions in the country. Read More
As I’ve said many times, the President doesn’t need to concede. He has a warrant to exercise the executive powers of the United States until noon on January 20th when that warrant expires. He can board himself up in the White House and refuse to come out. But it doesn’t matter. That’s it. But that’s January 20th, more than two months from now. The modern presidency has a formal process called the transition, which goes back to 1963. That’s a matter of statutes and there a defeated incumbent President has some room to play games. Trump is already doing that.
As the dust starts to settle, I wanted to tell you – or in some cases remind you – that this Friday is the 20th Anniversary of TPM. This year we’ve got a lot planned mark the milestone. We note it every year. But twenty years is a big one and – candidly – in the charnel house of the news media business over the last two decades it’s one I’m pretty proud of. We’ll be telling you more on Friday. But for now I just want to say thanks to all the readers who’ve been with us since the beginning and since 2002 and 2006 and 2007 and 2011 and 2017 and really at every point along the way.
Those closest to President Trump know he’s a powerful man, with a powerful, but brittle, ego.
And they knew if he lost the election, he would need something to cling to in order to maintain some cushioning for his inevitable belief that he didn’t actually lose.
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