New York Times
By Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was elected the 46^th president of the United States on Saturday, promising to restore political normalcy and a spirit of national unity to confront raging health and economic crises, and making Donald Trump a one-term president after four years of tumult in the White House.

Biden’s victory amounted to a repudiation of Trump by millions of voters exhausted with his divisive conduct and chaotic administration, and was delivered by an unlikely alliance of women, people of color, old and young voters and a sliver of disaffected Republicans. Trump is the first incumbent to lose reelection in more than a quarter-century.

The result also provided a history-making moment for Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris of California, who will become the first woman to serve as vice president.

With his triumph, Biden, who turns 78 later this month, fulfilled his decades-long ambition in his third bid for the White House, becoming the oldest person elected president. A pillar of Washington who was first elected amid the Watergate scandal, and who prefers political consensus over combat, Biden will lead a nation and a Democratic Party that have become far more ideological since his arrival in the capital in 1973.

He offered a mainstream Democratic agenda, yet it was less his policy platform than his biography to which many voters gravitated. Seeking the nation’s highest office a half-century after his first campaign, Biden — a candidate in the late autumn of his career — presented his life of setback and recovery to voters as a parable for a wounded country.

Appearing Saturday night in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden called on the country to reunite after what he described as a toxic political interlude. “Let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end here and now,” he said.

Without addressing Trump, the president-elect spoke directly to the president’s supporters and said he recognized their disappointment. “I’ve lost a couple of times myself,” he recalled of his past failures to win the presidency, before adding: “Now let’s give each other a chance.”

In a statement earlier in the day, Trump insisted “this election is far from over” and vowed that his campaign would “start prosecuting our case in court” but offered no details.

The race, which concluded after four tense days of vote-counting in a handful of battlegrounds, was a singular referendum on Trump in a way no president’s reelection has been in modern times. Voters who either adored him or loathed him were eager to render judgment on his tenure. From the beginning to the end of the race, Biden made the president’s character central to his campaign.

This unrelenting focus propelled Biden to victory in historically Democratic strongholds in the industrial Midwest, with Biden forging a coalition of suburbanites and big-city residents to claim at least three states his party lost in 2016. With ballots still being counted in several states, Biden was leading Trump in the popular vote by more than 4 million votes.

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