The Economist: “Mr Biden finds himself in landslide territory without having had to do very much to get there. Mr Trump’s flailing has made a Democratic Senate majority possible. That opens up the chances of a highly productive presidency which once seemed inconceivable. Before covid-19 and widespread social unrest, Mr Biden’s candidacy was about restoration—the idea that he could return America and the world to the prelapsarian days of 2016. It transpires that he could have the opportunity to do something big instead.”

“Mr Trump is already painting this as a threat. He wants to scare voters with warnings that his opponent is a doddering fool who will be taken hostage by dangerous radicals seeking to defund the police and confiscate everybody’s guns. Some Democrats have the opposite fear, of an old patriarch stuck in his centrist ways. And indeed when Mr Biden was first elected to Washington, Elvis Presley was playing in Hawaii and Leonid Brezhnev was general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. He has survived by adjusting his views on race, sex, religion and other cultural signifiers as the Democratic Party has shifted. How, hot-headed Democrats say, can a man who has followed rather than led be trusted to fix America’s ills?”

“In fact, both points of view could turn out to be wrong. The dominant theory, on the right and the left, is that change in America is made by the extremes. On the right that has meant Goldwater-ism, the Tea Party and Mr Trump. On the left it has meant the anti-Vietnam movement, social-justice campaigns and Bernie Sanders. There is something to this idea: without these forces dragging him, Mr Biden might not have moved.”