Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

Unfortunately, Trump's brand of conspiracy theory populism resonates with a significant number of American voters more so than any other political ideology. Trump was so popular that his base increased over the last four years. So popular with that base that an actual messianic cult formed around him. Trump himself just wasn't charismatic, competent or forward thinking enough to capitalize on it at scale the way populist dictators in other countries have. But that still leaves the danger of a competent successor to Trump in the future.

What we need to watch for is whether or not the Republican Party interprets this as a repudiation of Trumpism, or merely of Trump himself.

Politics is usually against the HN guidelines.

Also there's a new thread from the NY Times that has more votes and isn't flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25016070

> The media was way too cautious in making the call here,

It's my understanding that it had zero to do with caution and all to do with the fact that the election was not decided.

If there are still votes that were not counted and the slim margin between both candidates is smaller than the number of unaccounted votes then the election results are yet to be determined. Thus it would make zero sense to claim that one candidate was the winner when the votes that are yet to be counted are enough to sway the results.

I don't understand why this is flagged. It's highly relevant to tech (particularly given trump's moves on Chinese tech firms and his treatment of social media) and from a legitimate source.

All: before reading further, make sure you're up on the site guidelines and don't post political or ideological flames to this thread. If you're hot under the collar, please cool down and wait for your curiosity to come back before commenting (and maybe even reading) further. This is a good test case to see if HN can stick to its intended spirit: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: There are now multiple pages of comments in this thread. If you want to see the later pages, click 'More' at the bottom of the earlier pages. Or get there like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25015967&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25015967&p=3

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25015967&p=4

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25015967&p=5

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25015967&p=6

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25015967&p=7

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25015967&p=8

---

As many have pointed out, a dozen or so submissions on this topic were flagged by users. That's actually the immune system working as intended, but another component of the system is that moderators rescue the very most historic stories so HN can have a single big thread about them. We did that 4 years ago, also for Brexit, etc.

Since this was the first submission on the topic, it seems fairest to be the one to restore. (It's still on our todo list to have some form of karma sharing for situations like this, to make it be less of a race and/or lottery.)

I changed the URL from https://www.cnn.com/ since that is not the most useful link and the AP seems as close as one can get to a neutral source.