That time is now. For Biden, character proved to be the clearest contrast with the incumbent president he dislodged with a decisive defeat. Now his success will be our country's success, and by leading with character he might help our nation rediscover the central importance of character, not only within the presidency, but within ourselves....

John Avlon is a CNN senior political analyst. The views expressed in this commentary belong to the author. View more opinions at CNN.(CNN)Election week in America has come to an end. The votes have been counted. And Joe Biden will be the next President of the United States.While Democrats did not get the landslide victory they were hoping for, make no mistake: Biden's win is huge and historic.


Why Donald Trump lostSo far, Biden has won over 74 million votes -- more than any other president in American history -- exceeding the previous record President Barack Obama set in 2008. Biden won with at least 50.5% of the popular vote, crossing the majority threshold that President Donald Trump failed to clear in 2016, when he received just 46.4% of the popular vote.On the road to 270 electoral votes, Biden flipped at least three states Democrats lost in 2016. He became only the 11th challenger to dislodge an incumbent president. He reclaimed the upper Midwest and is also leading in Arizona, Nevada and Georgia. According to exit polls, he won independent voters, union households and moderates by double-digit margins over Trump.It is an impressive mandate for the former Vice President, who became the oldest person to win the presidency, 32 years after his first run for the White House and 48 years after he was first elected to the US Senate as the face of generational change. This time, the mantle of generational change was embodied by his charismatic VP nominee, Sen. Kamala Harris, who will become the first woman -- and the first woman of color -- to serve as Vice President of the United States.Running against a conspiracy-theory-peddling President who failed to contain a raging pandemic that has already killed  more than 235,000 Americans, Biden was able to appeal to a country hungry for unity, empathy and competence. His closing argument offered a clear contrast to Trump, who has stoked partisan fires for the last four years: "I'm running as a proud Democrat, but I will govern as an American president. I'll work with Democrats and Republicans. I'll work as hard for those who don't support me as for those who do. That's the job of a president, a duty of care for everyone."


Donald Trump is a one-term president who can't admit he's a loserBut there has been grousing among Democrats, despite the big win at the top of the ticket. Many voters quickly fell into despair after Biden failed to win Florida on election night, and PoliticalWire's Taegan Goddard later pointed out, "Democrats let their expectations get way ahead of reality." While the results show Biden won with a broad coalition, the days-long count frustrated voters looking for a quick and clear repudiation of Trump.The divisive and broadly unpopular incumbent managed to rally his passionate base and gain more than 7 million more votes than he did in 2016. In Florida, Trump surged in Miami Dade County and won the support of many Cuban-Americans who may have been turned off by aggressive disinformation campaigns spreading conspiracy theories and tarring all Democrats as socialists. This led centrist House Democrats to rail against the political costs of their more progressive colleagues immediately after the election.And despite the President's race-baiting and culture war politics, exit polls show he won 18% of Black men and 36% of Latino men nationally. Overall, he  won the highest percentage of non-White voters among Republican presidential candidates since 1960, according to political strategist Adrian Gray.While a conservative, populist demagogue lost the election, he also demonstrated that Trumpism still has a constituency -- particularly among white men without college degrees. And conspiracy theories may be here to stay. As Mitt Romney's former chief strategist and Lincoln Project advisor Stuart Stevens put it, "The Republican party will now have more QAnon believers than African-Americans in the House of Representatives."


'The club' of former presidents will never be the sameBlack voters and suburban voters turned out big time for Biden. Democrats still have an uphill battle to face in the Senate, having only gained one seat so far (they picked up seats in Colorado and Arizona but lost one in Alabama), with two more seats up for grabs in Georgia's run-off elections in January. While Democrats will likely retain their hold on the House, their majority will be slimmer, having lost several seats to Republicans.For months, Donald Trump has been trying to undermine faith in the election and spreading baseless claims of voter fraud. Now that the President has lost, he is taking the desperate and predictable route of launching flimsy legal challenges, while his allies have spread unsubstantiated claims on social media. On Thursday night, Trump spewed lies about winning the election, falsely claiming that it was being "stolen" from him during a press conference at the White House before reiterating the sentiment in a rage-tweet at 3 am on Friday night. This is toxic nonsense and more evidence of Trump's impulse to put his self-interest over national interest. Ellen Weintraub, chair of the Federal Elections Commission,put it bluntly when she tweeted: "Enough, Mr. President. Enough. Spewing conspiracy theories regarding this election will not change the results...Your lies undermine our democracy and harm our country. Just stop."Trump won't stop. But he is powerless to unilaterally change the democratic outcome. The rage and fear we hear from Trump stems from his own confrontation with reality, and the fact that he is a loser who has been fired by the majority of the American people.


Professor FLOTUS: How Jill Biden would redefine what it means to be first ladyDue to the slow drip of results over the last five days, Republicans and some Democrats may be tempted to make the case that Joe Biden will enter the Oval Office without an overwhelming mandate. But let's not forget: Biden won the White House with a bigger margin in the popular vote than John F. Kennedy in 1960 or Richard Nixon in 1968. And his victory is far more sweeping than Donald Trump's in 2016, when he lost the popular vote by 3 million votes before proceeding to govern with a complete disregard for uniting the nation.President Biden promises a very different approach than Trump. His experience primes him to make government work again, although it remains to be seen whether Senate Republicans will work with him in good faith. Either way, the divisions in this country run deep and will not be magically erased by the results of this election. A raging, recalcitrant incumbent who refuses to accept the reality of the democratic vote, will only make the task of bringing the country together even more difficult. But leadership matters. And unifying leadership is what we've been missing.Now Biden's time has come, with a political approach that is a cross section of former Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama. Like LBJ, he knows how to move legislation through Congress. He has campaigned as a champion of the working class and middle class for decades. And he believes in the power of personal diplomacy, often repeating his belief that while you can question someone's judgement, you shouldn't question their motives. He is in some ways a man who transcends the bitter politics of our era.During his campaign, Biden did not get distracted by Twitter mobs that so often distort our civic debates. He promises to be a steady leader in an unsteady time and harkens back to an era when bipartisan coalitions could be cobbled together to solve common problems with a combination of decency and raw political skill.He was a giant of the Senate who was seen by many as past his presidential prime when freshman senator Barack Obama asked him to join the ticket as an experienced hand with foreign policy expertise. A potential bid for the presidency in 2016 was derailed by the tragic death of his beloved son Beau, who died at the age of 46 from brain cancer. It devastated Biden, who has endured a life of loss, consoled and buoyed by faith. But he found renewed purpose in his oversight during the Obama administration of a national "cancer moonshot" initiative to find a cure.Biden had stepped away from politics until white nationalist violence broke out in Charlottesville in 2017, and Trump responded with his "both sides" equivocation. Biden decided to enter the 2020 race. It was poetic justice that his path to the presidency was cleared by flips in the home states of two of his friends—both Trump foes--who died of cancer in the past four years: Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Rep. John Lewis of Georgia. It was almost as if their spirits helped him over the finish line.
Biden has been preparing for this challenge his entire adult life. As the author Richard Ben Cramer wrote of Biden in his epic history of the 1988 election, What It Takes: "If there came a time when he should run for the White House, he'd know ... There would be time, in his life, to establish in everyone's mind, that he was of good character."That time is now. For Biden, character proved to be the clearest contrast with the incumbent president he dislodged with a decisive defeat. Now his success will be our country's success, and by leading with character he might help our nation rediscover the central importance of character, not only within the presidency, but within ourselves.

Προσθήκη λεζάντας

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump, who defied political gravity with his extraordinary rise from reality star and businessman to the presidency, has fallen back to earth.

In the end, his flurry of raucous rallies, an unprecedented turnout operation and sheer force of will could not overcome the reality of his enduring unpopularity and a raging pandemic that has killed more than 236,000 people in the U.S. and thrown millions out of work.

Yet Trump’s acerbic brand of politics — his Twitter taunts, his vindictive drive to punish enemies, his go-it-alone approach to the world — made its mark across the far reaches of the government and beyond. And his better-than-expected election performance against Democrat Joe Biden suggests his impact is likely to resonate for generations in politics, governing and policy, even in defeat.

It remains to be seen what Trump intends to do after his term ends on Jan. 20. Retreat to the golf course? Launch his own television network? Lay the groundwork to run again? And how fiercely will he try to contest his fate?

“I would absolutely expect the president to stay involved in politics. I would absolutely put him on the short list of people who are likely to run in 2024,” Trump’s former chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, said in an online interview with the Institute of International & European Affairs. “He doesn’t like losing.”

Trump retains the megaphone of his Twitter account, a far-reaching Fox News platform and the unflinching backing of his loyal base of supporters, who may never accept his defeat after he spent months insisting there was no way he could legitimately lose and even falsely claimed premature victory.

On Saturday, Trump declined to concede to President-elect Biden, instead promising unspecified legal challenges to try to overturn the outcome of the race.

Until a successor emerges to lead Republicans — likely not until the resolution of the 2024 Republican primary — Trump remains the de facto head of a party that he has reshaped in his image.

“Even in defeat, Donald Trump has exceeded expectations and helped other Republicans do the same,” said GOP consultant Michael Steel, who has worked on Capitol Hill and for campaigns. “He will remain a powerful force within the party.”

Still, Trump’s loss is likely to spark a reckoning over how much of Trumpism the party should embrace going forward, especially given that Republicans could retain control of the Senate and won additional seats in the House.

Had Biden won in a blowout, that would have put “wind at the back of a lot of Republicans who said character counts and the Republican Party should never put its faith into someone who pushed boundaries liked Donald Trump,” said former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, who served under former President George W. Bush.

But because it was closer, he predicted the party would likely “continue to be wracked with a split between insiders and outsiders, between the establishment and the Trump supporters who fault the establishment. And the soon-to-be former president’s role will be a huge question mark because if he decides to stay active, despite the close loss, he remains powerful and effective, especially for Republicans.”

In the meantime, it remains unclear whether Trump will accept the results of the election or continue to contest them as he spends the next three months as a lame duck president.

Those who know him well say there is little chance he will go quietly into the night.

“When Donald Trump loses there will never be a peaceful transition to power,” said Trump’s longtime lawyer and fixer-turned-critic Michael Cohen. He predicted Trump would do everything in his power to claim the election was “stolen from him” by Democrats or other forces, just as Trump tried to sow discord as the votes were being counted.

Cohen said Trump was also likely aware that after losing the presidency he might “be served with a plethora of lawsuits, both federal and state.” Trump is already facing lawsuits that accuse him of sexual assault and defamation, and his Trump Organization’s finances are being investigated by New York’s attorney general.

Barbara Res, a longtime Trump associate who recently wrote a book about her experience working with him, speculated the president might leave the country before Biden’s inauguration and perhaps pursue his own media empire.

“He could put on whatever he wants. He could say whatever he wants. It’s almost like having Twitter explode into everything else,” she said.

As for the future for Republicans, Steel said the party would likely look to leaders who combine elements of Trump’s populist agenda with policies that appeal to a broader swath of the electorate.

“The challenge will be identifying the popular, durable, and practical parts of his agenda and marrying them to policies and arguments that appeal to the broader electorate that the party will need to win at the national level in the future,” he said.

Under Trump, the Republican Party fully embraced the populist wave set in motion by the Tea Party rebels in earlier years, shifting its focus from free trade and trickle-down economics to trade wars and an isolationist foreign policy.

His rise broke open a new path to the presidency, driven more by force of personality than policy, that echoed even as he lost the Electoral College vote. His nativist message and stoking of “culture wars” proved the power of the politics of division and hastened a generational political realignment.

While he deepened his reach with white rural and working-class voters with his economic and racial grievance-stoking, he also turned off college-educated voters in the cities and suburbs with his sometimes crass rhetoric and endless tweets.

Still, many Republicans believed he would have won reelection had it not been for the coronavirus pandemic and a widespread belief among voters that he mishandled it.

Some top GOP leaders believe that while so-called “Never Trumpers” may celebrate the president’s defeat, it is unlikely Republicans will be able to repudiate him completely, given how his stances on trade, immigration and foreign policy have resonated with voters and how close he came to clinching a second win.

It remains unclear, too, whether those who have flocked to the party because of Trump will remain engaged once he is no longer on the ticket.

The race for the 2024 Republican nomination has already quietly begun behind the scenes. A wide range of candidates are testing the waters, from moderates like Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, to firebrands like Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and former Trump officials like ex-South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., has become a particular favorite with the president’s loyal supporters on the campaign trail, meaning the Trump name could endure.

Fleischer said the party would likely be looking for someone with the blunt outspoken voice of an outsider who would at the same time refrain from going “so far that your tweets push people away that want to be for you.”

Many of Trump’s supporters see his influence continuing.

“We started something that is going to go on for generations,” said Chris Haluck, 56, looking out over a crowd of thousands at a recent Trump rally in Pennsylvania that she’d attended with her 17-year-old daughter.

Indeed, as Trump has traveled the country, his campaign has inspired a new generation of supporters who have been organizing their own events outside the campaign infrastructure.

They include “Loud Majority Long Island,” which has been drawing thousands to car parades in New York, a state that is overwhelmingly Democratic.

Matt Vereline, who joined fellow group members at a recent Trump rally, said that even if Trump loses, the group intends to continue its efforts, with a focus on local politicians, including New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

“We want to oust Cuomo, of course,” he said. “And we want to oust de Blasio. We’re going to try to organize.”