Joe Biden a former two-term vice president under Barack Obama and 36-year Senate veteran will be the 46th president of the United States. His running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, will become the first woman, first African American, and first Indian American to serve as vice president.
The victory comes as a massive relief to Bidens supporters after an anxiety-ridden few days during which a record amount of mail-in ballots were tallied. It also serves as a promise though certainly not a guarantee that the high-octane drama of the Trump years might finally be coming to an end.
For Biden and Harris, the victory marks the end of the campaign but the beginning of an even more daunting challenge. Biden, who enters the White House as both the chief executive with the most experience in public service in US history and the oldest man to assume the presidency, will assume his duties amid a historic crisis, a pandemic that has already claimed more American lives than World War I, Korea, and Vietnam combined and has produced the highest unemployment rates since the Great Depression.
As the scale of the pandemic and its economic damage started becoming clear earlier this year, the Biden campaign signaled that the candidate wanted an FDR-sized administration. He touted a plan to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic by expanding testing, fostering better coordination between states, and organizing rapid development and deployment of a vaccine. He put forward a program to fight the economic crisis created by Covid-19, including funding for states and localities, cash and unemployment insurance for individuals and households, and grants and loans to small businesses like bars and restaurants.
All that seems fairly doable under unified Democratic control but much, much harder if McConnell keeps the Senate. In 2009, McConnell decided that a posture of absolute obstruction, meant to block any and all Obama legislation meant to rescue or reform the economy, was the best approach for Senate Republicans. At that time, his Republicans were in the minority, so total obstruction was harder. This time, he may have a Senate majority and he is likely to take that posture again.
Biden will also have to decide how to handle the legacy of his predecessor: whether to let bygones be bygones, as was the Obama-Biden attitude toward George W. Bush, or to seek to prosecute, or at least investigate wrongdoing from the Trump years under a new attorney general.
On the economy, Biden is proposing a bevy of plans that collectively amount to the most ambitious agenda for a Democratic candidate in decades. The plans are oriented in particular around rebuilding (green) manufacturing in the US, building on the safety net expansions made by Obama, and dramatically expanding access to child, disabled, and elder care services.
His economic recovery plan to address the Covid-19 downturn would pay health insurance costs for newly unemployed people, offer middle-class parents and caretakers $8,000 a year for child or long-term care support, spend $700 billion on manufacturing and R&D to expand jobs in those sectors, and make it easier to organize unions.