Former Vice President Joe Biden will be the 46th president of the United States.
That much was clear after major news outlets late Saturday morning declared Biden the winner of his home state of Pennsylvania, giving the Democrat more than the 270 Electoral College votes needed to prevail in his fraught campaign against President Donald Trump.
Biden’s victory touched off celebrations around the country, including in Houston, while leaving Republicans grappling with how to handle an unpredictable president not known for his graciousness in defeat.
“I shouted and everything!” said Jamilah Hoffman, 39, who helped organize a Texas Organizing Project rally held in Emancipation Park on Saturday. “It was really good to see, finally, that there were enough people who were against the direction that Trump is taking us.”
Hoffman wasn’t entirely sanguine, though, given Trump’s defiant response so far.
“It’s really important for people to make their dissent visible, because it’s not normal!” she said, “We’re not used to having a president who’s not going to leave, who has said he’s not going to accept the peaceful transfer of power.”
Rather than calling Biden to offer his congratulations, the president has sulked, raged, plainted and baselessly asserted that he is being cheated out of victory.
And on Saturday, Trump responded to the news of Biden’s victory by refusing to concede. Indeed, in a statement — issued from the golf course, apparently — Trump accused Biden of “rushing to falsely pose as the winner.”
“Beginning Monday, our campaign will start prosecuting our case in court to ensure election laws are fully upheld and the rightful winner is seated,” Trump said.
It was of a piece with his performance all week long:
“If you count the legal vote, I easily win,” Trump asserted Thursday at a prime-time news conference so rife with falsehoods that some networks cut away. “If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.”
He went on to indicate that he considered the votes cast by mail in those states not favoring him to be uniformly suspect, if not inherently legal.
“It makes people corrupt even if they aren’t by nature,” Trump bizarrely said of mail-in voting.
No one was expecting Trump to be gracious in the face of imminent defeat. But the president’s ongoing assault on the legitimacy of the 2020 election is dangerous, says Robert M. Stein, a political scientist at Rice University.
“He has undermined our confidence,” Stein said Friday. “If people don’t believe that their vote is being counted accurately, they no longer play the game; they no longer believe in the laws.”
Stein also described the president’s efforts to delegitimize the results of the election as “depressing.” He cited the ongoing efforts of men and women, working in less than glamorous conditions and for low pay, to administer our elections during a deadly pandemic.
“They were literally dying to get your vote counted,” Stein said.
Many Republicans, to their credit, have given Trump’s assertions the respect they deserve — which is to say none.
“Some hanky-panky always goes on, and there are already reports of poll watchers in Philadelphia not being allowed to do their jobs,” GOP strategist Karl Rove wrote on his blog. “But stealing hundreds of thousands of votes would require a conspiracy on the scale of a James Bond movie. That isn’t going to happen.”
Outgoing U.S. Rep. Will Hurd, who represents a district that stretches from San Antonio to El Paso, was even more pointed, in a tweet: “A sitting president undermining our political process & questioning the legality of the voices of countless Americans without evidence is not only dangerous & wrong, it undermines the very foundation this nation was built upon.”
Hurd, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Utah Sen. Matt Romney were among the Republican elected officials and party dignitaries to congratulate Biden on his victory Saturday.
Some other Republican leaders, throughout the week, have been quick to humor Trump’s claims. Hours after Biden was declared the victor, U.S. Reps. Kevin Brady and Brian Babin, both of Texas, were to address a “Defend the President” rally in Conroe.
And U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, appearing on Sean Hannity’s Fox show Friday, hinted at voting irregularities in “big Democratic cities” and seemed to back Trump’s claim that Democrats were trying to steal the election.
“I am more than a little frustrated that every time they close the doors and shut out the lights, they always find more Democratic votes,” said Cruz, implying that Biden’s advantage among voters who cast ballots by mail is some kind of conspiracy, rather than the inevitable result of Democrats encouraging voters to exercise this option.
Cruz knows better but no doubt wants to stay in the good graces of Trump supporters, given his own stated interest in running for president again.
However it’s irresponsible for GOP leaders to entertain baseless allegations of this nature.
And the Republicans certainly seem comfortable with the vote-counting in congressional races where they fended off aggressive, well-funded Democratic challenges. Republicans are in a strong position to retain control of the U.S. Senate, and they even picked up a few seats in the Democrat-controlled U.S. House.
And — perhaps most significantly for the future of the party — Trump and downballot Republicans made some gains among Latino and African American voters, as the GOP needs to do to compete successfully in future elections in this increasingly diverse country.
Although Trump lost the popular vote by more than 4 million votes, he could take solace in the fact that his party didn’t face the kind of drubbing that, say, Democrats took in 1980. But Trump has always been about Trump. Given that he so far hasn’t adhered to norms of behavior during the transition, it’s incumbent on Republican leaders to help the reality TV-star president recognize reality.
Those who do so may be pleasantly surprised to find that many Democratic voters who backed Biden share his desire for a president who works for all Americans — and are eager to turn the page on the turmoil of the Trump years in favor of more unity.
Ruth Randle, 67, a volunteer at the Texas Organizing Project rally Saturday, said she was expecting Trump and his supporters to “settle down” eventually.
“I pray for him,” Randle simply said.
erica.grieder@chron.com
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