THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2020 N P9
litically resonant, he suggested to an ad-
viser that he was less comfortable with
the implied comparison between himself
and those men. Mr. Biden had a difficult
time, he said, seeing himself as the next
Lincoln or Roosevelt.
Party Unity, of a Kind
The pandemic alone might not have
shifted the political landscape in Mr. Bi-
den’s favor had he not managed a feat the
previous Democratic nominee, Hillary
Clinton, could not: persuading Demo-
crats to lock arms with him after a bruis-
ing primary.
Mr. Biden, however, had advantages
that Mrs. Clinton did not, starting with a
genial relationship with his chief oppo-
nent, Senator Bernie Sanders of Ver-
mont.
As the Democratic contest neared its
end, Mr. Biden quickly took steps to ac-
commodate his former rivals on the left.
Days after Senator Elizabeth Warren of
Massachusetts ended her campaign in
early March, Mr. Biden called to tell her
he was adopting one of her key proposals
on bankruptcy reform. And when Mr.
Sanders withdrew from the race, Mr. Bi-
den agreed to create a set of policy task
forces to formulate a shared governing
agenda.
Representative Kathy Castor of Flor-
ida, a Democrat who sat on Mr. Biden’s
climate task force, said the difference
from 2016 was stark: “That was just so
divisive back then, from the Democratic
convention in Philadelphia through the
election,” she said. “You can’t have Dem-
ocrats fighting Democrats.”
But Mr. Biden did not budge on the
overall ideological thrust of his cam-
paign. On the contrary, he and his close
advisers felt vindicated in their assess-
ment of the Democratic Party as a cen-
ter-left coalition, rather than one of the
activist left. Though he added a handful
of progressive policy hands to his cam-
paign staff, Mr. Biden’s inner circle was
dominated by relative centrists for
whom the Sanders ethos of democratic
socialism held little appeal.
Perhaps most prominent among those
advisers was Valerie Biden Owens, Mr.
Biden’s sister and longtime counselor,
who stressed during internal delibera-
tions that the campaign should be carefulabout attacking the wealthy as a political
tactic. After all, Ms. Owens argued, many
working-class people aspire to be rich.
“The Democratic Party is not what
people may think it is on Twitter,” said
Representative Brendan Boyle of Penn-
sylvania, a Biden supporter from day
one who recalled telling the former vice
president as much last year. “It’s still
working-class African-Americans,
whites and Latinos. And he was always
true to that.”
Over the summer, Mr. Biden chose a
running mate who he hoped would rec-
oncile the competing pressures on his
candidacy: to excite his own party with-
out creating new vulnerabilities that Re-
publicans might be able to exploit. He
settled on Senator Kamala Harris of Cali-
fornia, completing his ticket with a
choice that was at once groundbreaking
and cautious — a younger woman of col-
or who largely shared his own pragmatic
political instincts.
He wound up with a message and pol-
icy agenda that left Mr. Trump with only
limited avenues for attack, and benefited
from the president’s lack of interest in
learning details. When Mr. Trump
sensed vulnerabilities in the Democratic
platform, he never devised a critique
deeper than one-liner jibes seemingly
made for Fox News. His attacks on Mr.
Biden’s climate plans, for instance, in-
cluded claims that Democrats would
force buildings to have tiny windows.
If Mr. Biden’s approach held up
throughout the campaign, it left enor-
mous unanswered questions for him to
confront later on. In some cases, Mr. Bi-
den and his advisers deliberately opted
to suppress rather than resolve Demo-
cratic disagreements until after the elec-
tion.
The most prominent example was Mr.
Biden’s evasive response to Justice Amy
Coney Barrett’s elevation to the Su-
preme Court. As other Democrats raised
a cry of support for overhauling the fed-
eral judiciary, Mr. Biden spent weeks re-
fusing to state his own position, eventu-
ally proposing a commission to study ju-
dicial reforms as a temporary salve.
The rush to seat Justice Barrett
opened his eyes more to the hardball tac-
tics of today’s Senate Republicans, said
one adviser. But in private, Mr. Biden has
continued to express unease about try-
ing to expand the high court, and he is
still more intrigued by broader judicial
reforms than simply adding justices.
One lawmaker said Steve Ricchetti, a
former chief of staff to Mr. Biden, had
been candid last summer about the cam-
paign’s dilatory approach to the party’s
internal divisions. Asked privately how
Mr. Biden intended to handle the left, Mr.
Ricchetti acknowledged that it would be
a challenge over the long term.
For the moment, he said, getting
through Nov. 3 was the only goal.Blue Wall and Blue Line
The most perilous moment of the race
for Mr. Biden may have come in late Au-
gust, when a season of racial-justice pro-
tests had given way to spasms of vandal-
ism and arson in a handful of politically
important states. In Wisconsin, after the
shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, by
a police officer in Kenosha, rioting
erupted in the suburban city — and Mr.Trump went on the attack.
At the Republican nominating conven-
tion, the president and his allies pounded
Mr. Biden for a week with false or over-
stated attacks, linking him both to out-
right criminals and to left-wing activists
who had taken up “defund the police” as
a slogan. Mr. Biden had disavowed the
idea, but Republicans persisted.
The onslaught posed a distinctive
challenge to Mr. Biden, threatening to
weaken his coalition of racial minorities,
young liberals and moderate whites. Mr.
Trump began a scare campaign aimed in
part at white women, telling them he
would “save your suburbs” from what he
portrayed as looting mobs that Mr. Biden
would not control.
Like other liberals of his generation,
Mr. Biden saw danger in the Kenosha ri-
ots. Recalling the riots in American cities
after the assassinations of the 1960s, he
telephoned an adviser, saying he wanted
to denounce the violence and asking a
question: What had Robert F. Kennedy
said to cool tempers in the aftermath of
the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s mur-
der?
Mr. Biden flew to Pittsburgh the fol-
lowing Monday to head off Mr. Trump’s
attacks: In a 24-minute speech, he re-
affirmed his support for police reform
while sternly denouncing civil unrest.
“Looting,” he said, “is not protesting.”
“We need justice in America. We need
safety in America,” Mr. Biden said.
The Biden campaign turned a clip
from the speech into a television ad and
ran it at saturation levels across the elec-
toral map, countering Mr. Trump’s
claims that a Democratic administration
would unleash violent anarchy.
“Joe has always been someone who
was able to hold two thoughts together at
the same time about law enforcement
and racial justice,” said Senator Chris
Coons of Delaware.
And once again, Mr. Biden benefited
from his opponent’s impulse toward in-
citement and division. At the very mo-
ment Democrats feared voters might see
Mr. Trump as a fearless steward of public
safety, the president also spoke out in de-
fense of people sowing chaos on the
right.
Mr. Trump would do so again in his
first debate with Mr. Biden, marring his
law-and-order message by declining to
denounce an extremist group on the far
right.Counting to 270
That moment after Kenosha was all
the more important to Mr. Biden because
of its resonance across the Midwest, the
region he prized above all others. It was
the band of states stretching from Min-
nesota across to Pennsylvania, Mr. Bi-
den believed, that was likeliest to make
him the next president.
His top lieutenants shared that assess-
ment.
During a marathon Zoom session in
May, after the campaign’s first major
round of polling in the general election,
Mr. Biden and his high command spent
hours poring over the electoral map. By
the end, they had hammered out their
priorities: They would focus on three
Great Lakes states Mr. Trump flipped in
2016 — Wisconsin, Michigan and Penn-
sylvania — plus Arizona, Florida andNorth Carolina. The campaign was skep-
tical of its chances in Florida and saw two
other Sun Belt states, Georgia and Texas,
as intriguing — but difficult and expen-
sive to compete in.
When Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris re-
turned to the campaign trail, that map
guided their activities and their advertis-
ing strategy. They lunged at a few long-
er-shot targets, sending Ms. Harris on a
last-minute trip to Texas, while Mr. Biden
returned to Ohio, where polls showed
him being competitive. Neither state
wound up being close on election night.
More fruitful was an aggressive late
play for Georgia, a rapidly diversifying
state where suburban voters appeared
to be swinging hard toward Democrats.
In October, Mr. Biden’s pollster, John An-
zalone, determined that the former vice
president had a better chance to win
there than in North Carolina and even
Florida, and Mr. Biden embarked on his
trip to Atlanta and Warm Springs. Ms.
Harris visited the state repeatedly, and
on the eve of the election the campaign
decided to send former President Barack
Obama to Georgia rather than North
Carolina to make one last push there.
As the results began coming in on
Tuesday, a tense mood took hold across
much of the Biden campaign. In the first
states to report, Florida and North Car-
olina, Mr. Trump was faring several
points better than Democratic polling
had forecast, and considerably ahead of
most surveys conducted by the media.
The Biden campaign publicly project-
ed composure, in contrast to Mr. Trump’s
erratic behavior on Twitter and during
late-night remarks from the East Room.
Greg Schultz, Mr. Biden’s former cam-
paign manager during the Democratic
primaries, held a call with key support-
ers to offer reassurance, insisting that
the early returns in the suburbs of Ohio
were a good omen for the nearby swing
states. But to some agitated listeners it
was not a convincing presentation.
Mr. Biden’s inner circle grew increas-
ingly unnerved as the night wore on and
it became clear that the president was
running stronger than expected. Jill Bi-
den, former Senator Christopher Dodd of
Connecticut and an array of Biden advis-
ers telephoned Democrats around the
country to learn more about the vote
count and whether Mr. Biden was in dan-
ger of losing.
Within a matter of hours, Mr. Biden’s
fortunes had improved as the big cities of
the North reported their votes. It would
take until Saturday, when Pennsylvania
was called in his favor, to confirm that
Mr. Biden had won more than the 270
Electoral College votes required to claim
the presidency. The Blue Wall was stand-
ing again for Democrats, and Mr. Biden
could also prevail in the once-red states
of Arizona and Georgia.
For all the Democratic jubilation at Mr.
Trump’s loss, Mr. Biden may not entirely
share that feeling of pure delight. Rahm
Emanuel, who served as Mr. Obama’s
chief of staff during the Great Recession,
said he warned Mr. Biden recently that
his reward for winning would be fleeting.
“You’re the dog that caught the car,”
Mr. Emanuel said, alluding to what
awaited Mr. Biden in the Oval Office.
The man who would soon be presi-
dent-elect responded: “Ain’t that the
truth.”A RECKONINGProtests erupted in Minneapolis, above, after the police killing of George Floyd.
VICTOR J. BLUE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESRUNNING MATEMr. Biden selected Senator Kamala Harris, a one-time rival, to join his ticket.
SYLVIA JARRUS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESELECTION DAYA rally in Pittsburgh. Pennsylvania’s 20 Electoral College votes clinched victory.
ERIN SCHAFF/THE NEW YORK TIMESOTTUMWA, IOWAMr. Biden used speeches about national unity and healing on the campaign trail.
JORDAN GALE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESAMR ALFIKY/THE NEW YORK TIMES