Joe Biden set to be 46th US president, promises to restore political normalcy as Trump's chaotic presidency nears end

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr was elected the 46th 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 J 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 colour, old and young voters, and a sliver of disaffected Republicans. Trump is the first incumbent to lose re-election in more than a quarter-century.

The result also provided a history-making moment for Biden’s running mate, Senator 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.

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. He coveted the attention, and voters who either adored him or loathed him were eager to render judgment on his tenure. Americans rarely turn incumbent presidents out of office, but 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.

While Biden stopped short of claiming victory as the week unfolded, he appeared several times in his home state, Delaware, to express confidence that he could win, while urging patience as the nation awaited the results. Even as he sought to claim something of an electoral mandate, noting that he had earned more in the popular vote than any other candidate in history, Biden struck a tone of reconciliation.

It would soon be time, he said, “to unite, to heal, to come together as a nation.”

Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns c.2020 The New York Times Company