The Daily - Special Episode: Joe Biden Wins the Presidency

Episode Date: November 7, 2020

After days of uncertainty, Joe Biden has been elected president, becoming the first candidate in more than a quarter of a century to beat an incumbent. His running mate, Kamala Harris, is the first woman and woman of color elected vice president.Mr. Biden’s win is set to be contested — President Trump said in a statement that “the election is far from over.”Today we host a roundtable of three Times political journalists who discuss the election results, Mr. Biden’s victory and Mr. Trump’s next move.Guest: Alexander Burns, a national political correspondent for The New York Times; Maggie Haberman, a White House correspondent for The Times; and Jim Rutenberg, a writer-at-large for The Times and The New York Times Magazine.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily Background reading: Mr. Biden achieved victory offering a message of healing and unity. He will return to Washington facing a daunting set of crises.He has spent his career devoted to institutions and relationships. Those are the tools he will rely on to govern a fractured nation.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is a special episode of The Daily. Today, Joe Biden is elected President of the United States, becoming the first candidate to beat an incumbent president in more than a quarter century, and making Kamala Harris the first woman and woman of color to become vice president. I spoke with my colleagues Alex Burns, Maggie Haberman, and Jim Rutenberg.

It's Saturday afternoon, November 7th. Alex, Maggie, Jim, thank you for joining us on kind of short notice. We now have President-elect Joe Biden. And I just want to take a moment and have you reflect on the significance of that call. It's been just about an hour to the minute or so since the New York Times called the race. And I wonder what you were all thinking when that happened. Well, to quote another recent president, Michael, they said this day would never come. The long, just endless wait, I think sort of gave the conclusion of this

election a bit of a feeling of anticlimax for the last couple days. And then when the call actually came, and there was really no suspense about what it was going to be by the time we got the answer. But when it finally came, I think it suddenly sort of jolted a lot of people, I think certainly me, back into the sense of this is a major moment in history. This is not just some sort of slow, inevitable process that will eventually yield some kind of clarity so that we can get sleep again. This is a really big deal. Presidents don't lose re-election often in this country. President Trump is only the third elected

president since World War II to be turned out of office by the voters. So this is a big deal, and it's a big deal that it's Joe Biden who beat him. Maggie? I think that's right. I think that one of the effects of the Trump presidency on a lot of people in the country, but certainly for the media that covers him the most closely, has been basically that he's like a smog blanket that covers everything. And so we've been watching this very slow process of how will Trump react? And today was one of those moments where it candidly didn't matter how he's going to react.

He's going to react the same way that he's reacted to everything, which is to keep trying to fight it. But there was an objective reality that intruded that he is not going to have a second term. Now, there will be some irony if he ends up losing by the same electoral vote margin that he won last time. And you'll have to forgive me, there's a lot of celebration going on around me in Brooklyn about Biden. Those are horns honking outside your door. Exactly. But I think that, I think Alex is right. I think that lost in sort of the minutiae of the latest baseless allegation about voter fraud made by the Trump campaign was the fact that he was a historically well-funded incumbent who is losing historically.

And Jim? Right. And I'll note just on that point Maggie just made that voter fraud and litigation over voter fraud can only swing an election when it's a tight margin. And that doesn't seem to be even if you were to win these cases, he wouldn't overcome that margin. But I find myself in this moment more just really eager to see how this last bit plays out. Because President Trump, as we speak, is saying that this election is not over. And that's a really hard case to make. But here he is making it and he's got a very ardent core of supporters. So I also find myself very eager to see how they respond, because a lot,

many, many millions of Americans, some 70 million plus, voted for him. So I'm very eager to see that last turn of this play. Well, we're going to talk more about that fight and about Trump's supporters and their reaction to this. But first, let's talk about how we got here. Alex, starting with you, explain to us how Biden finally got to 270, why this call was just made. Well, we were, as everybody I'm sure is very familiar with, we were sitting at sort of the same margin in the Electoral College for days. Biden with 253, Trump with rather less than that. And we were just waiting for one of four uncalled states that were just balanced on a knife's edge to tip one way or another. The one that finally fell was Pennsylvania.

tip one way or another. The one that finally fell was Pennsylvania. And this is a state where President Trump at the end of the night on election night was ahead by many hundreds of thousands of votes because he fared so well with in-person voting on election day. So if you woke up on Wednesday morning, and forgive me if I'm getting some of my time cues wrong here because it really is all blur at this point, but if you woke up on Wednesday morning and looked at the state of Pennsylvania, you would have seen the president ahead of Joe Biden by like 700,000 votes. And it was always a mirage because that reflected a total absence of the mail-in voting that Democrats so heavily favored. And so the last few days we have seen Biden chip away, or actually in some cases do more than chip away, really hack away at the president's lead. He overtook the president on

Friday. And we have really just been waiting since then for Biden's lead to reach a point where the Associated Press and the television networks would feel comfortable saying he has won that state. And that's what happened late Saturday morning. Shortly after that, Nevada also was called in Joe Biden's favor. Another similar case where Biden sort of held a small but steady lead in that state with a whole lot of uncounted ballots. But as the last tranche of ballots started to get processed, it became inescapably clear that the remaining vote was going to favor Biden. So even though he's only ahead in the state of Nevada by 20-something thousand votes, that margin is getting bigger and there's not a whole lot left for the president to potentially pick up a handful

of votes here and there. Right. And I think, Alex, if I'm doing my math correct on those four states, you mentioned two, and that leaves Arizona and Georgia. So very quickly, what is the state of things there? Well, Arizona is the one state where Joe Biden's lead is shrinking, that he has been ahead by a margin of some tens of thousands of votes for several days. But because of the sequence in which they count ballots and the geography of it, that lead is coming down. He is still favored to hold the state in the end, but it's just too tight right now for that to be called. State of Georgia, Biden is ahead by 4,000-some votes over President Trump. He is expected to have a good chance of holding on to that state at the end of the day.

And those two states, you know, we shouldn't be surprised that they are the two that are still uncalled here because those are two states that have not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in this century. And if Biden holds onto one of them at the end of the day, it's a significant achievement, a significant change to the electoral map. If he holds both of them, really breaks the Republican grip on the South and the Southwest. That is a major shift in the way the electoral map works in our presidential races. Okay. So Jim, back to this fight that you were talking about, let's talk about the Republican efforts to dispute this, to hold back what has now been a call or to put it in doubt. It seems like it's centered around Pennsylvania for obvious reasons,

given the decisiveness of the state and the closeness of the race there despite the call. So tell us about the Trump legal strategy in Pennsylvania and what's going on there. As in all things, Trump's strategy, once again, is a strong term because it's been such a shambolic effort, but it's been an intensive effort. There have been so many lawsuits filed in Pennsylvania, some leading into the actual

election day, and now a lot, like at least six by my count coming out of it. And they kind of follow a couple different tracks, and none of them is gaining any real traction from what I can tell. One is about the deadline. Pennsylvania decided and was under actually state court approval and or orders to count ballots that were sent on Election Day, had postmarks on Election Day, but came up to three days later. Under normal Pennsylvania state law, pre-pandemic, the election officials have to have them by 8 p.m. of election day. Trump has been attacking this decision. It's been part of his PR strategy. The truth is, it's a minuscule number of votes in terms of the total and won't come close to eating into what we think Biden's margin is going to be. Then there are a bunch of cases about observers. Then there are a bunch of cases about observers.

President Trump has been calling for weeks ahead of the election for his supporters to get out there and become observers at polls to watch, look out for fraud, because of course there's going to be fraud because President Trump's been kind of paving the ground for this for months, if not years, that any loss could only be due to fraud. The observers have been in the polling places as is kind of traditional. But President Trump has argued, his lawyers have argued, Republicans have argued that those observers haven't gotten close enough to the action and they've gone to court to get their observers close. And they've succeeded in Philadelphia, but it's really, again, academic. They have sort of misled about the true nature of what's going on in Philadelphia,

where there's one big counting center at the convention center downtown there. So they're trying to say, well, our supporters, our observers are being blocked. They're not being allowed in. This is not true. And in one funny moment, lawyers for the president went before a judge to try to make this case. And the judge said, how many observers are in there? Do you have any in there? And the lawyer had to say, well, there's a non-zero number of our observers in there. So that's the picture. All these things are being appealed. They all seem like almost nuisance lawsuits at this point. Okay. And Maggie, what are you hearing from the campaign about the logic of some of these, hearing from the campaign about the logic of some of these, as Jim's calling them, kind of shampolic lawsuits, the thinking and the hope here? So I think that Jim accurately described

what this process has been. It's worth noting, Michael, that just as the race was being called, Rudy Giuliani was supposed to be holding a press conference in Pennsylvania, announcing some instances of fraud that I'm not even sure that press conference in Pennsylvania, announcing some instances of fraud that I'm not even sure that press conference ever happened. But this was a press conference that was put on, you know, outside of the normal campaign channels and advisors weren't happy about it. But look, advisors have been pretty clear with each other. I mean, most of the political professionals with each other and with the president, that there's not much of a legal case here. This is a president who has a very long history of conflating legal issues with PR issues. And that's basically what's happening right now.

There's an effort to just kick up as much dust as possible. They are all generally candid that they're going to march ahead because this is what the candidate wants to do. And they don't think that it will change the outcome. They have told the president over the last couple of days that it's very unlikely this is going to change the outcome. But this is the plan for now, and it'll go on until it doesn't go on anymore. So are there any meaningful efforts in any of the other remaining battleground states

to dispute this outcome that we should know about? Well, the fraud arguments are sputtering to nothing. But that is a backdrop for the president where he might have the best shot at some victories is in recounts. He will almost certainly have a recount in Georgia. That doesn't change the electoral college balance. We'll see what happens in Nevada and Arizona. But, you know, the model for President

Trump is Florida. And Florida was an election that at the time of the recount between Gore and Bush, we're talking hundreds of votes, hundreds of votes. So this is all thousands. So again, every expert is saying it would be highly unlikely that some recount scenario, even in Pennsylvania, would change a result. Got it. And just to exhaust all possibilities and scenarios here, Alex, there's one I've heard about, mentioned a few times, I just want to run by you, which is that the president, those around him, could try to seek to persuade the electors in the electoralctoral College to not abide by the popular vote in a place like Pennsylvania? Is that a real thing? Is that just something you read about on the internet, a kind of last-ditch pipe dream? I think last-ditch pipe dream is the right way to think about that. There's the sort of fantasy where individual electors who have been designated to choose Joe Biden as the president suddenly come to their senses and vote for President Trump

instead. That will not happen at all. These people are chosen specifically to vote for Joe Biden. You know, there's another scenario that some people have floated where a Republican state legislature would intervene and overrule the popular vote in their state and send a slate of Trump electors to Washington. And you have already heard Republican state legislative leaders in a couple places, including Pennsylvania, say, no, we're not going to do that. I do think that you're likely to see some of those folks carry

out the kind of sort of PR-minded voter fraud investigations that Jim was alluding to in order to give the president some cover for his defeat, give him something to latch onto. But no, I would not, nobody should be looking at the balance in the Electoral College and worry that that is not actually the outcome we will get when they vote at the end of December. That is not actually the outcome we will get when they vote at the end of December. So if this legal challenge is essentially frivolous and the White House ultimately knows it, then should we see these lawsuits and these threats as ultimately a political strategy? And then what is the political strategy? It's not a strategy.

I just want to intervene there. This is not a strategy. This is an effort. This is an expression of frustration? This is an expression of trying to bend something to your will that you can't bend to your will. And this is what the president has tried to do over and over, over four years. We have seen it successful more often, frankly, than I would have imagined. But he's reaching the limits of what he can do here. This is, one advisor said to me, something the president wants to do. He wants people out there, quote unquote, fighting. He wants his fighters

out there. This is why they have David Bossie, the head of Citizens United, who's not a lawyer, as their point person of a legal effort that they have known for months they might have to do and that they had like no preparation for. Jared Kushner was scouring around for, and I quote, a Jim Baker type as recently as two days ago, three days ago. Pretty late in the game to be doing that if this was an actual strategy. So what this is... Right, and that's a reference to the kind of person that George W. Bush had in 2000, a very serious kind of figure of gravity leading his legal strategy. Correct. That's just not where we're at. So this is basically an approach to try to change events

and throw everything at it that you can and see what happens. But this is why most people who have been through elections before are pretty realistic in their conversations with each other and with people outside the campaign that this is just that. This is a way to get the president to a place of acceptance, whether he actually ever verbalizes that or not. But Alex, many, many Americans appear to be convinced that this election was stolen. So even if this isn't a strategy, as Maggie just said, I wonder if that matters in terms of implications for the country. I think it has the potential to matter if the president really continues to escalate

in the coming weeks. That, you know, there is clearly a minority of the country that is inclined to believe the things that he says, or at least to take his side in any dispute. But we've not really seen that put to the test in a scenario where the president is treated, to put it bluntly, as a loser, that he's not this sort of fearsome political magician who can find his way out of any trap, as he has been treated by so many people for the last four years, but that he's a guy who is one of very few presidents ever to get voted out of the White House by a majority of the electorate. So I do think that it has the potential to complicate Joe Biden's job in governing. I think it has the potential to really poison the internal conversation in the Republican Party about its future. Does it have the potential to affect the transfer of power? Maybe, in as much as it affects the way the president's own appointees operate.

So I don't think any of this is irrelevant. I don't think it's unimportant. But it's not a strategy for changing the outcome of the way the American people have voted. Well, I wonder how much this approach by the president benefits from and is kind of enabled by the results and the way these last few days have played out. And just follow this with me for a minute. Despite all this ultimately playing out more or less the way we anticipated, right, the red mirage, the mail ballots breaking for Biden, I think something about the closeness of the race in key states and the time it has taken to count all the ballots leaves the result feeling like something less than a total repud moment of a unfair election, a stolen election, because this does not feel like a story in which the Trump base of support has gone away. In some cases, in some states, it's actually a story of that base growing based on the numbers that he

got. What do you guys think? You know, a period, another period we should kind of think about here is 2008, when Sarah Palin, after she and McCain lost to Obama, went out there and really stoked the beginning of the Trump base, the Tea Party, to say, you know, that the establishment is keeping us down. is keeping us down. You know, she didn't ever say it was an unfair result, but she really whipped up the angrier part of that base. And it became a real problem for President Obama and at first for the Republican Party, which was trying to not get led by the passion of this crowd. And that, it lost that fight. The Republican establishment lost that fight. And that anger and that activism changed the party and made it Trump's party. So we're in that moment. And the thing that Trump has is this passionate group. And he's got a television network, the number one rated network in the country, Fox News, that has tried on its news side to toe the line and be responsible this year. But at night, you are hearing it all week that this is an unfair

election, that this was stolen. Now, sometimes the argument is really kind of absurdist, I mean, or really would seem politically ridiculous that, you know, Laura Ingraham on Friday night said, we have to do something about this mass voting. I mean, it's an argument against voting, but it is there. And I don't see that going away. I see it only getting stronger. And President Trump will play a big part in that. I do think, Michael, it's probably worth just reflecting on the fact that there are a lot of voters who voted for Trump either for the first time in their lives as voters in 2016, and he activated a bunch of new voters this time as well.

Joe Biden landed the most votes in history. Donald Trump is the second biggest vote-getter in history. And there are a lot of people out there who, you know, while the president's language about stealing an election is wildly irresponsible, there are a lot of people who that's going to resonate with and who are in pain because the person who they wanted to see win did not. And the fact that the president is telling them that they should be in so much pain because he was wronged creates a bit of a volatile situation that we really haven't seen before.

And then what that looks like heading into 2021 when there isn't a President Trump is a very open question. And we know he's going to have some amplification of that message, that false message that this election was stolen. But the question is, how enduring is that power for him? How loud is his bullhorn? And I think that part of this rests again with the broader political system and the way that the public debate is handled. I think the Democrats learned a lesson in the Obama years when they treated this group that is now the Trump base as fringe and the media as fringe around them and that, you know, these are, we don't have to really deal with that. I mean, there are, these are,

this is a powerful group of voters in American politics with grievances and real issues. And so maybe you'll see a Biden presidency try to address some of the root causes of the anger. And I think you've already heard Biden try to speak to that, right? That it was a mantra in the closing days of the election that he's a Democrat, but he'll be an American president and that he'll govern for the people who voted against him, too. driven grievances that led them to support President Trump rather than the sort of underlying cultural and racial dynamics where Biden is just, I think, irreconcilably opposed to where

much of the Trump base is. But, you know, on issues like trade and wage stagnation, can he do things for people who supported President Trump that might give them pause about believing that he's just, you know, not just their political opponent, but their just bitter cultural enemy. And I think it's a very, very tall order. Right. We've been spending so much time talking about the Biden campaign and the kind of campaign that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ran and that Americans ultimately voted for by a margin of millions of votes. Alex, tell us about the promise of that campaign that's now about to turn into a presidency. I think it was really a remarkably consistent campaign from start to finish in terms of

the values and theory of governing that Biden put in front of the country. And I think that if people have been listening to him over the last couple of days in his sort of incremental, you know, things are looking good for us, election updates, non declarations of victory, I think he has continued to return to that message. On Friday night, he came out in Delaware and he had hoped that the race would be called by then. It wasn't. But he said he had a mandate for action. He said he had a mandate for action on several crises, including the coronavirus, the economy, climate, race relations. And I think that that's a pretty fair read on what the country just elected him to do, that he is being given the most important job at a moment where there are a couple of really urgent challenges in front of the country.

And a president's job is to address the country's urgent challenges. I think Biden's realistic about the limits of what an electoral mandate really gives to a president and just how ideological the country is and what kind of a rate of change the country might be prepared for. There has been something to me a little bit dissonant in the conversation over the last week as you have had a sort of disappointed Democrats or gleeful Republicans sort of looking at the results in the presidential race and the congressional level and saying, well, now Joe Biden is not going to be able to appoint a whole lot of very left-wing people to his cabinet and pursue a very left-wing policy agenda. That was never what a President Biden was going to do. He was always, if elected, very clear that

he was going to pursue a presidency about national reconciliation and trying to bring the country together and pursue policies that can achieve a broad consensus. Now, we've talked about a lot of the reasons why that's going to be very, very challenging and why simply positioning yourself as a moderate figure bringing the country together is on its own a sort of dubious political proposition in the age of Trump and in the aftermath of an election like this. But if you think back to his announcement remarks back in April of 2019, and you listen to the remarks that he has made this week,

there is a remarkably consistent through line throughout them. Right. And in fact, this divided government that you seem to be hinting at, the fact that it wasn't a election that gave Joe Biden a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress may actually just create exactly the kind of government that a Joe Biden in his heart would want to pursue. There's no question that Joe Biden would rather have, you know, the situation that Barack Obama had coming in, 59 seats in the Senate and a huge majority in the House. It's just easier to govern that way.

But Joe Biden did just spend a year and a half telling the country that he was going to be able to work with Republicans to get things done for them. And that is essentially the job that the country has now given to him. Mm-hmm. Jim, we should acknowledge the history-making nature of this ticket. You have covered, I'm going to say, six or so presidential campaigns. You have appreciated how male and white

those tickets have all been. Yeah, it's an amazing moment in history that got lost and gets lost in some of this chaos of this process this year. First woman vice president, first Black vice president, with Indian heritage as well. And she's no normal vice president. She automatically has a much higher stature

than other vice presidents. Her running mate now, her president, is in his late 70s. So there's gonna be more weight on her shoulders to be ready to take over just reality here. And I think that there was a moment that captured the history-making aspect of this entire campaign on CNN when Van Jones, African-American commentator on CNN, was basically near tears over this. It was a kind of release of emotion that did capture what a lot of people in this country are feeling today, especially people of color. And Alex, just describe for us the nature of the coalition of Americans that elected

this historic ticket of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. I think it's the groups that we have been talking about, Michael, for the last few years during Donald Trump's presidency. It is a coalition of women. It is a coalition of educated white voters, particularly in the suburbs. It is a coalition of young people and people of color. And it is a coalition of somewhat more seniors and slightly more rural white folks

than Hillary Clinton managed to get four years ago. I don't want to overstate Joe Biden's gains in more conservative parts of the country because President Trump did very, very well at holding on to his base and maintaining the intensity of that support. But Joe Biden is a practitioner of what you would call defensive politics. He believes in trying to make yourself unobjectionable to the other side at the same time as you're trying to excite the people who are inclined to support you to begin with. And there are signs in states like Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Georgia, that he managed to do a better job of that than your standard issue Democratic candidate,

because the reason why a state like Georgia, and I just want to hold on to that one for just one second, because it's so illustrative of everything that came together in Biden's coalition. The reason why he has this tiny lead in Georgia is because he inspired strong enthusiasm among black voters, Asian American voters, and Hispanic voters in and around the city of Atlanta. He swung the suburbs of Atlanta, including a good chunk of white voters in the suburbs of Atlanta, strongly in his direction relative to 2016. And then in the more rural parts of the state. He lost by less than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. And then Stacey Abrams did when she ran for governor in 2018. And all of that adds up to right now a lead of about 4,000 some votes.

That's what the Biden coalition looks like in these states that he has managed to flip from red to blue. And politically speaking, especially in a state like Georgia, that is a pretty meaningful accomplishment. It's an extraordinary accomplishment in a state like Georgia, assuming that that holds, that the race stays where it is. And up north, it is a very meaningful accomplishment, though a somewhat less complicated accomplishment, because those are historically Democratic states, that this is something that Biden believed firmly from the start, believed all along, was that the fastest way for him to reclaim the presidency for Democrats was to reclaim the industrial Midwest and Pennsylvania. When he was choosing a vice president, there were concerns about one of the candidates who might prove to be unpopular in the state of Florida. And Biden told one of his associates, you know, yeah, we probably shouldn't

do that. But even if I lose Florida, I'm winning this election in the Midwest. And that's exactly what happened. That's quite fitting for this race to have been decided in Pennsylvania. I think you cannot overstate the sort of sentimental value of that to Biden, who, as everybody and their mother knows, spent a good part of his childhood in Scranton, and who for much of his political career was referred to as the third senator from Pennsylvania. I was joking to a Pennsylvania political operative a couple of days ago, just asking,

are they moving so slowly because they want to be 270? Like, do they have the votes and they're just holding them back because Philly wants to be the one that delivers it? And they said, no, that's not happening. But of course that is how the sequence turned out. So what are you all looking to right now? What are the big questions?

What are the major untold stories? Maggie, let me start with you. Three things, Michael. One is, it's hard for me to describe the number of texts I have gotten from people close to the president who are not sad about this, who are relieved that this is the result, who did not want to live through another four years of a Trump presidency. And in their words, and literally almost to a fault, it has to end. So that tells you something, number one. Number two, I think that a big question is obviously how the president handles the next 70 some odd days. Does he go off to Mar-a-Lago and, you know, sort of ride out the storm there?

It's going to be very interesting. He's golfing as we're speaking. It's going to be really interesting. Yes. It will be really interesting when he returns to the White House where there are huge crowds of Biden supporters celebrating and cheering and playing music. It'll be very audible for him. So that's going to be interesting. And I doubt that that ends today. And then the main question that I have, Michael, is not what he can accomplish on policy for the remaining several days. Policy has never been his big motivator, as we know.

What I'm looking for is, does he start issuing a bunch of pardons to various people and possibly sentence commutations as well? But really pardons is what I'm watching for because we have seen other presidents do that in their final days. This is a president who has really made pretty liberal use of his pardon power to help allies and associates. And I have no reason to believe that that ends because he lost an election. Right. And we've never had a president with so many allies and associates who have been so frequently imprisoned or indicted. Or investigated, yes. Jim, big questions, stories to be told? I guess for me, there are two main ones

with a third mini one. And I think that the main one is voting in this country. And what we saw was a huge turnout. That should be a good thing for democracy. But we saw a counter movement that ran against voting with this notion that voter fraud is prevalent and a corrosive force at the heart of democracy. And these court cases will maybe have a bearing on whether that continues to be an argument going forward to the extent that this voter fraud charge is false and beyond exaggerated in the small instances where they find some.

I hope it will be repudiated. I fear it won't be. But that brings me to the mini issue there, I fear it won't be. But that brings me to the mini issue there. And that is that will the president somehow make more out of these cases than we're ready for? You know, is this going to rear up one last time before this is over where he gets some traction with some case and it degrades the perception of voting in this country further? The more broadly I'm looking at the kind of Trump media movement. People speculate about a future Trump TV network. I've heard that speculation for years. I've yet to see the rubber meet the road on that. But what becomes of this Trumpism and its melding to this sort of media conservative infrastructure? So I just I really am eager to see that play out and we're just going to have to be patient and cover it. And Alex, the final word to you, what are you watching for and what

is the story you want to see figured out in the next few weeks? Well, the first thing is control of the Senate, because that will say so much about what Biden's governing agenda might be. There are two Senate races still to be resolved in the state of Georgia. And they will also be a test of the political coalition that Biden just put together that we were just talking about. That one of the things that happens election to election is that I think we as a country and we as an industry, the media, tend to look at the votes that a new president put together and say, this is now the baseline for how American politics works. This is the way our country works now.

And anybody who is going to succeed in the future is going to have to succeed using this as a template. And we know often four or eight years after that, that turns out not to be the case. We're going to get a test in those runoff elections in Georgia of whether the Biden coalition is a coherent, stable political coalition or whether it's really just an anti-Trump coalition that came together for one night only on Tuesday in November of 2020. And then people will return to their earlier corners. I think that to the extent that Biden can show the country and his party and his political opposition that those groups that we just talked about, that he put together to give him this victory, that they are with him and with him for the duration, that would be a pretty powerful statement going into what is going to be a very difficult presidency. Any final thoughts from any of you? Michael, I guess just one final thought on Biden himself. We have never had in our lifetimes, or I think in American history, somebody who has so clearly spent as long wanting to be president and trying to become president before actually becoming president as Joe Biden. His first presidential campaign ended 32 years ago. He was first elected to the Senate in 1972.

This isn't just a reflection of his longevity and political endurance, but just his resilience and his ambition. And now he has achieved that ambition. And so this is a guy who's had a long time to think about what he would want to do if he were the president. And I think he's gonna try to start showing us pretty fast

and filling out that picture with those thoughts that have been in his head for a really long time. Alex, Maggie, Jim, thank you all very much. Thank you for making time for us on a historic day. And we will talk to you soon. Thank you, Michael. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Joe Biden is scheduled to deliver a victory speech,

his first as president-elect, tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern. That's it for now. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.