US Election Results: 5 Reasons Biden Won

After nearly 50 years in public office and a lifetime of political aspirations, Joe Biden won the White House, BBC reports. 

It wasn't the campaign everyone had expected. It took place in the midst of a once-in-a-century pandemic and unparalleled civil unrest. He ran against an unorthodox, precedent-defiant incumbent. But in his third attempt at the presidency, Biden and his team found a way to conquer the political challenges and claim a win that, although narrow in the electoral college, is expected to exceed Trump's national total by millions of votes.

These are the five reasons the son of a car salesman from Delaware finally won the presidency.

1. Covid, Covid, Covid

Perhaps the biggest reason Biden won the presidency was something entirely out of his control.

The coronavirus pandemic, which took more than 230,000 lives, also transformed American life and politics in 2020. And in the final days of the general election campaign, Donald Trump himself seemed to understand this.

"With the fake news, everything is Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid," the president said at a rally last week in Wisconsin, where cases have spiked in recent days.

The media's emphasis on Covid, however, was a reflection rather than a driver of public anxiety about the pandemic-which resulted in an unfavorable poll on the President's handling of the crisis. The Pew Research poll last month indicated that Biden had a 17 percentage point advantage over Trump when it came to confidence in their handling of the Covid outbreak.

Trump's chosen campaign promise of growth and development was knocked off by the pandemic and the resulting economic recession. It also highlighted the questions that many Americans had about his administration, the occasional lack of attention, the propensity to doubt research, the haphazard management of large and small policies, and the prioritization of partisan politics.

The pandemic was a lead weight on Trump's approval ratings, which, according to Gallup, dipped to 38% at one point in the summer - one that the Biden campaign exploited.

2. Low-key campaign

During his political career, Biden developed a well-earned reputation for talking to himself in trouble. His penchant for gaffes ruined his first presidential bid in 1987, helping to ensure that he never had much of a chance when he ran again in 2007.

In his third attempt at the Oval Office, Biden still had his share of verbal upheavals, but they were so infrequent that they never became more than a short-term issue.

Part of the reason for this, of course, is that the President himself was an unrelenting source of news cycles. Another factor was that major headlines – the coronavirus pandemic, demonstrations after George Floyd's death, and economic disruption – dominated national attention.

But at least some credit should be given to a deliberate strategy of the Biden campaign to restrict the visibility of their candidate, keep pace with the campaign, and reduce the chances that exhaustion or lack of care might cause problems.

Perhaps in a regular election, where most Americans weren't concerned about restricting their own exposure to a virus, this tactic would have been reversed. Perhaps then Trump's derisive "hidin' Biden" jabs would have taken their toll.

The campaign sought to stay out of the way and let Trump be the one whose mouth betrayed him - and, in the end, it paid off.

3. Anyone but Trump

The week before the election day, Biden's campaign launched its final TV ads with a message that was strikingly similar to the one he gave in his campaign kick-off last year, and his nomination acceptance speech in August.

The election was a "battle for the soul of America", he said, and a chance for the national to put what he characterised as the divisiveness and chaos of the past four years behind it.

Beneath that slogan, however, was a simple calculation. Biden bet his political fortunes on the contention that Trump was too polarising and too inflammatory, and what the American people wanted was calmer steadier leadership.

"I'm just exhausted by Trump's attitude as a person," says Thierry Adams, a native of France who after 18 years living in Florida cast his first vote in a presidential election in Miami last week.

Democrats succeeded in making this election a referendum on Trump, not a binary choice between the two candidates.

Biden's winning message was simply that he was "not Trump". A common refrain from Democrats was that a Biden victory meant Americas could go for weeks without thinking about politics. It was meant as a joke, but it contained a kernel of truth.

4. Stay in the centre

During the campaign to be a Democratic nominee, Biden's competition came from his left, with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who ran well-funded and coordinated campaigns that produced rock-concert crowds.

Despite this pressure from his liberal side, Biden was stuck with a conservative policy, refusing to back universal government-run healthcare, free college education, or a wealth tax. This allowed him to maximise his appeal to moderates and disaffected Republicans during the general election campaign.

This strategy was reflected in Biden's choice of Kamala Harris as his running mate when he could have opted for someone with stronger support from the party's left wing.

The one place where Biden moved closer to Sanders and Warren was on the environment and climate-change - perhaps calculating that the benefits of appealing to younger voters for whom the issue is a priority was worth the risk of alienating voters in energy-dependent swing-state industries. It was the exception, however, that proved the rule.

"It's no secret that we've been critical of Vice-President's Biden's plans and commitments in the past," said Varshini Prakash, co-founder of the environmental activist group the Sunrise Movement in July. "He's responded to many of those criticisms: dramatically increasing the scale and urgency of investments, filling in details on how he'd achieve environmental justice and create good union jobs, and promising immediate action."

5. More money, fewer problems

Earlier this year, Biden's campaign coffers were running on empty. He entered the general election campaign at a decided disadvantage to Trump, who had spent virtually his entire presidency amassing a campaign war chest that approached a billion dollars.

From April onwards, however, the Biden campaign turned itself into a fundraising juggernaut, and ended up in a much stronger financial position than its rival, partially due to the profligacy of Trump's campaign. At the beginning of October, the Biden campaign had $144 m more cash in hand than the Trump operation, enabling it to bury Republicans in a torrent of television ads in almost every crucial battleground state.

Money isn't everything, of course. Four years ago, the Clinton campaign had a sizeable monetary lead over Trump's shoestring operation.

But in 2020, when in-person campaigning was limited by coronavirus, and Americans across the country spent considerably more time-consuming media in their homes, Biden's cash advantage allowed him to reach out to voters and drive his message out to the very end. It helped him to broaden the electoral map, bringing money into what once seemed to be long-running states like Texas, Georgia, Ohio, and Iowa. Most of those bets didn't pay off, but he put Trump on the defence, flipping what was once reliably conservative Arizona and staying highly competitive in Georgia.

Money gives a campaign option and initiative - and Biden put his advantage to good use.