The gloom hanging over Washington DC lifted minutes after America’s mainstream news organisations “called” the Election for Joe Biden. A role they have performed since Queen Victoria’s times. Trump’s unprecedented refusal to concede meant that painstaking vote-counting in many states had dragged on for so long after the polls closed on Tuesday night that it was now an unusually sunny Saturday afternoon. Neither the weather nor the weekend explained why tourist hotspots around the White House, which had been deserted until now, started to throng with cheering, dancing and singing local people of all ages and races.
There were spontaneous street parties in other Democratic voting metropolises across the US, including in San Francisco, New York City and Pennsylvania. The celebrations were sweetest for DC because the residents of the Nation’s Capital were cheering deliverance from four years of occupation by an alien ogre. The shops and restaurants which had been boarded up for fear of unrest should the President win a second term, immediately started to open for business. Unlike the MAGA capped Trump supporters outside some counting stations, no one was wearing a flak-jacket or carrying an assault rifle.
