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In the early days of his campaign, Mr. Biden’s team envisioned setting up its own digital media empire. It posted videos to his official YouTube channel, conducted virtual forums and even set up a podcast hosted by Mr. Biden, “Here’s the Deal.”

those efforts were marred by technical glitches and lukewarm receptions, and they never came close to rivaling the reach of Mr. Trump’s social media machine.

So the campaign pivoted to a different strategy, which involved expanding Mr. Biden’s reach by working with social media influencers and “validators,

Perhaps the campaign’s most unlikely validator was Fox News. Headlines from the outlet that reflected well on Mr. Biden were relatively rare, but the campaign’s tests showed that they were more persuasive to on-the-fence voters than headlines from other outlets

the “Rebel Alliance,” a jokey nod to Mr. Parscale’s “Death Star,” and it eventually grew to include the proprietors of pages like Occupy Democrats, Call to Activism, The Other 98 Percent and Being Liberal.

2. Tune Out Twitter, and Focus on ‘Facebook Moms’

“The whole Biden campaign ethos was ‘Twitter isn’t real life,’” Mr. Flaherty said. “There are risks of running a campaign that is too hyper-aware of your own ideological corner.”

As it focused on Facebook, the Biden campaign paid extra attention to “Facebook moms” — women who spend a lot of time sharing cute and uplifting content

“Our goal was really to meet people where they were,”

3. Build a Facebook Brain Trust

“When people saw a Fox News headline endorsing Joe Biden, it made them stop scrolling and think.”

Ultimately, he said, the campaign’s entire digital strategy — the Malarkey Factory, the TikTok creators and Facebook moms, the Fortnite signs and small-batch creators — was about trying to reach a kinder, gentler version of the internet that it still believed existed.

“I had the freedom to go for the jugular,” said Rafael Rivero, a co-founder of Occupy Democrats and Ridin’ With Biden, another big pro-Biden Facebook page.

“It was sort of a big, distributed message test,” Mr. Flaherty said of the Rebel Alliance. “If it was popping through Occupy or any of our other partners, we knew there was heat there.”

These left-wing pages gave the campaign a bigger Facebook audience than it could have reached on its own. But they also allowed Mr. Biden to keep most of his messaging positive, while still tapping into the anger and outrage many Democratic voters felt.

4. Promote ‘Small-Batch Creators,’ Not Just Slick Commercials

the Biden campaign found that traditional political ads — professionally produced, slick-looking 30-second spots — were far less effective than impromptu, behind-the-scenes footage and ads that featured regular voters talking directly into their smartphones or webcams about why they were voting for Mr. Biden.

“The things that were realer, more grainy and cheaper to produce were more credible.”

In addition to hiring traditional Democratic ad firms, the campaign also teamed up with what it called “small-batch creators” — lesser-known producers and digital creators, some of whom had little experience making political ads

5. Fight Misinformation, but Pick Your Battles

The campaign formed an in-house effort to combat these rumors, known as the “Malarkey Factory.” But it picked its battles carefully, using data from voter testing to guide its responses.

“The Hunter Biden conversation was many times larger than the Hillary Clinton email conversation, but it really didn’t stick, because people think Joe Biden’s a good guy,”

the campaign’s focus on empathy had informed how it treated misinformation: not as a cynical Trump ploy that was swallowed by credulous dupes, but as something that required listening to voters to understand their concerns and worries before fighting back

On the messaging app Signal, the page owners formed a group text that became a kind of rapid-response brain trust for the campaign.

“We made a decision early that we were going to be authentically Joe Biden online, even when people were saying that was a trap.”

What perhaps Trump didn't realize was that he was playing right into Biden's hands. His efforts seem to prove an important point for Biden

Democrats got the message Trump was sending and nominated Biden.

Trump was impeached a second time after an insurrection that he incited last week over outrage of the 2020 election results.

During the transition period, Biden has been actively planning his presidency and not spending too much time publicly worrying about Trump's false claims of voter fraud.

Trump it seems, couldn't stand not to be the center of attention, which is unusual for an outgoing president.

Trump got about 70% of the news mentions.

The end result of all of this is that Biden goes into his administration this week with the vast majority of voters approving of Biden's handling of the transition.

Trump's political career seemed to be impermeable. That was until Trump ran into President-elect Joe Biden.

Biden proved to be Trump's kryptonite and helped himself tremendously by doing something very simple: allowing Trump to be Trump.

"you ain't black" if you were undecided on who to vote for in 2020.

Biden helped to write the 1994 crime bill, a law that has been widely panned -- particularly by members of the black community -- for its impact on levels of incarceration, among other reverberations.

Biden owes his status as the presumptive presidential nominee almost entirely to black voters -- particularly those in South Carolina. Biden's campaign was faltering badly -- he had finished 4th in Iowa, 5th in New Hampshire and 2nd in Nevada -- prior to the February 29 Palmetto State primary. According to exit polling, black voters made up a majority (56%) of the South Carolina primary electorate and went overwhelmingly (61%) for Biden. His victory in the state propelled him to a series of wins on Super Tuesday -- just three days later -- and, at that point, the nomination was his.

It will be a plus to have an African American woman. It will be a plus to have a Latino. It will be a plus to have a woman."

non-college educated voters who went with Trump, had Clinton been able to drive black turnout to the level it was during Obama's two victories, she almost certainly would have won.

Now, simply putting a person of color on the ticket doesn't mean that you win the votes of black people or ensure they turn out in large numbers. But politics at the presidential level is often about symbolism. And who Biden picks as his vice president will be his best chance to reveal how he views his party, the country and the world -- and what he prioritizes amongst the many, many issues facing the US at the moment.

And lucky for Biden, he has a number of African American women who would make excellent choices

Even before Biden's "you ain't black" gaffe and the uprising following George Floyd's murder, California Sen. Kamala Harris (age 55), who was both the first African American and Indian American elected to the Senate from California, was at the top of my VP rankings. Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (50 years old) and Florida Rep. Val Demings (63 years old) were in the Top 6. Now? It's hard to see three more people more likely to be the pick. (Stay tuned for my new rankings on Thursday!)

It also gave him the chance to set out the dire state of the nation he will lead in just five days and to establish a baseline from which to manage the expectations on which he will be judged.

The President-elect's initiative is packed with extended unemployment benefits, rental assistance, aid to small businesses and $1,400 more in stimulus payments, in addition to the $600 already appropriated. Biden wants billions of new spending to help schools open, $20 billion for a national vaccine plan and $50 billion for expanding coronavirus testing and plans to hire an army of 100,000 public health workers.

Biden proposes $1.9 trillion vaccination and economic rescue legislative package

Biden puts $2,000 stimulus payments back in play

Biden taps Lisa Monaco as homeland security adviser to inauguration amid rising threats

MAP: Full presidential election results

which has killed at least 387,000 Americans.

No new commander in chief since Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 has faced a tougher baptism of crises than Biden

The Trump administration had promised it would vaccinate some 20 million people by the end of 2020, but so far Operation Warp Speed has been able to get only about 10 million doses out to state and local governments

100 million shots over his first 100 days.

Because right-wing commentators aren’t the only ones who think Biden’s mind is basically gone—lots of voters think so too

Since mainstream media venues by and large epistemically rely on the views of the masses to supply journalists with their coverage frames, news operations end up treating popular concerns about Biden’s age as a kind of sacrosanct window into reality rather than as a hype cycle perpetually fed into the ambient collective consciousness by anti-Biden voices intending to sink his reelection chances.

By contrast, most of the news sources the right sees as hyperpartisan Biden spin machines actually strain at being fair-minded and objective, which disinclines them toward producing any sort of muscular pushback against the right’s relentless mischaracterizations.

Of course, a major reason why the public thinks this is because the entirety of the right-wing information superstructure is devoted, on a daily basis, to depicting Biden as severely cognitively compromised

even if we grant every single concern that Klein and others have voiced, it is indisputably true that Joe Biden remains an intellectual giant next to Donald Trump

'But -- Jill and I will sell the house and be in good shape.'"

pushed back vehemently on the thought of Biden and his wife selling their home in Wilmington, Delaware

Don't sell that house. Promise me you won't sell the house,

I'll give you the money. Whatever you need, I'll give you the money

we're focusing on the inspiration of Beau, rather than loss of Beau."

"It's personal," Biden said. "It's family."

A surge in border crossings by migrant children appeared to catch a White House focused on the pandemic off guard and offered Republicans an opening as they seek to slow his momentum -- and build their 2022 attack lines against Biden's narrow Democratic congressional majority.

And with its customary sense of timing, North Korea is testing the new commander-in-chief with missile launches that are ratcheting up tensions in a showdown that no president in the last 70 years has managed to solve.

The President has maintained approval ratings above 50% in his early months in office because he arrived with a mandate to tackle the pandemic head on and executed his agenda with a steady approach that was the antithesis of the erratic

Unlike the coronavirus crisis that has killed more than half-a-million Americans, the issues that are now at the top of the nightly newscasts have defied bipartisan consensus for decades -- and will provide a severe test of the President's calls for national unity and cooperation between Democrats and Republicans.

Two years ago, Democrats excoriated Trump administration officials for its handling of the crisis at the border. Now the problem is squarely within Biden's domain and government resources are once again strained to the brink as more than 600 unaccompanied children cross the Mexico border each day.

"We're not seeing any action. Our experience has taught us that now is the time to act. We need Congress to get on board. We need a recognition of the fact that there's a crisis on the Southwest border," Roy Villareal, who served as chief patrol agent in the Tucson sector from 2018 to 2020, told CNN's Priscilla Alvarez.

"This is just the first step in a process of providing greater access to the media," Psaki said during a news briefing.

"It's a huge problem. I'm not going to pretend that it's not. It's a huge problem," Harris said in remarks that appeared to be somewhat of a do-over of the administration's initial downplaying of the situation.

"I asked her, the VP today, because she's the most qualified person to do it, to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle, and the countries that can help, need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border," Biden said on Wednesday.

reassure the country of the safety of the vaccines.

Delaware

get the entire Covid operation up and running,

US Capitol, which was stormed and breached by supporters of President Donald Trump

impeach President Donald Trump

incitement of insurrection

"That's my hope and expectation,

refusing to take masks

irresponsible,

listen to public health experts

to stop the spread of the virus.

50 million Americans in his first 100 days.

n 374,500 Americans have died

cases are rapidly climbing across the country.

encouraged Americans to receive one as soon as it becomes available to them.

requires two doses administered several weeks apart in order to reach nearly 95% efficacy.

9 million people have received a first dose

adults, ages 75 and older, and "frontline essential workers,"

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris received the first dose

Jill Biden and Doug Emhoff, Harris' husband, have also both received the first doses

100 million Covid-19 vaccine shots

Mike Pence was administered the first dose

President was likely to get his shot once it was recommended by his medical team.

Trump's treatment for Covid-19 included the monoclonal antibody cocktail made by Regeneron.

"The European relationship has changed and will now be shrouded in skepticism,"

Trump's outward aggression affected all aspects of European life, be it trade, defense or even the emotional shared ideas and cultural ties.

All those things suddenly seem debased and of less value."

"When they did take big stances on things like China or Iran, they chose not to involve anyone, leaving Europeans scrambling for a response,"

But he might have to accept that America's role in these relationships has changed."

This has led to lots of countries having to think more seriously about their future with a less assertive US,"

"In some respects, it was a good thing Trump forced us to think more about diplomatic initiatives, NATO and withdrawal of US troops,"

A view many European officials share is that no matter how friendly Biden is, Trump happened once -- and could happen again.

In 2024, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Mike Pompeo, or any other of his allies could conceivably pick up the torch and win an election.

"We cannot afford to be naive. If you look at the number of votes that Trump got, he wields an influence on American voters.

This anti-global, 'America First' undercurrent in American politics is still very much alive and we have to hedge our bets,"

For the US, it's unclear whether being downgraded as a diplomatic force is something that its citizens, who've lived through four introspective years of "America First," will even care about.

Regardless, the Trump era has left Europeans with little choice but to wait and see how much of a priority Biden places on reclaiming America's place on the world stage.

with most polls indicating that it’s anyone’s guess who will carry Florida

held rallies in nearby Tampa on Thursday that underlined the polar-opposite realities each candidate now inhabits:

a conservative who said he had blocked Fox News on social media for being “too mainstream,”

“felt that it would be a good learning experience, so she could learn about some history and politics firsthand.”

Does he have a locker-room mentality?

“Yeah, sure, but I’m not hiring him to be nice.”

once overshadowed by Clearwater’s beach-retirement hub — has been transformed by recent years that have brought a mix of gentrification and progressive politics.

get-out-the-vote rally in honor of Representative John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat and voting rights champion who died over the summer

One in five Black Floridians is thought to have a felony conviction and could be unable to vote because of it.

“I’m not encouraging anyone to break the law, but today is a day for some ‘good trouble,’” she added, using one of Mr. Lewis’s signature phrases from his civil rights struggles

Mr. Overcast sighed. He said that living in the same county as the Church of Scientology’s headquarters had taught him how to tolerate almost any point of view, even that of the neighbor, who he suspected had stolen the Trump sign from his lawn.Mr. Overcast said his home security system had filmed the culprit making off with it. But rather than confront the neighbor, Mr. Overcast just bought another sign.“But with this one I tied 90 pounds of fishing line on it and tied it to a tree in my yard,” he said.

Billy Overcast — “spelled like the weather,” said Mr. Overcast, pointing up, however, to a typically clear day with one hand, a “Trump 2020” flag in the other.

Clearwater

The Confederate flag also bothered him, he told his fellow Jeep enthusiasts, as did the systemic racism

decorated with red, white and blue balloons; an American flag; a Black Lives Matter flag; another flag with an L.G.B.T. rainbow he found on Amazon; and lots of Biden-Harris campaign paraphernalia.

St. Petersburg and conservative Clearwater, the vacation hub and base of the Church of Scientology.

in the swing state that crowned past presidents by small margins, much in this country is riding o

n the all-important question of who flies what flag on which Jeep.

Pinellas County, about three-quarters of which is white, includes a good number of older retirees and suburban women

favor Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee.

256,000 are registered as Democrats

252,000 as Republicans.

a swing county in a swing state

Donald J. Trump narrowly triumphed here by roughly 6,000 votes, out of about half a million cast

But postelection observers said her appeals to middle-class voters in Pinellas County didn’t resonate as well as Mr. Obama’s had.

Biden’s proposal to establish a national pre-K and child care system would be a huge step forward for children and for working parents alike.

You drop a kid off at a high-quality prekindergarten program in the morning and pick the child up on the way home from work.

When my wife and I lived in Japan in the late 1990s, we sent our kids to one of these nurseries, and they were a dream.

But the United States never developed such a system, because for half a century as other countries were investing in children, the United States was stiffing them.

Today one of our saddest statistics is this: American children ages 1 to 19 are 57 percent more likely to die than children in other rich countries.

Some of those kids die because the United States doesn’t provide universal health care to children — only to senior citizens, who vote and thus are a priority.

National pre-K and affordable day care don’t have to be a dream.

But still more important for America’s future, in my view, will be the elements focused on children.

Making his child allowances permanent.

Expanding home visitation programs that help at-risk moms and dads from pregnancy through early childhood

Working toward universal access to high-quality pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds.

Ensuring high-quality affordable day care for parents

One model the White House is studying is the excellent day care system offered by the U.S. military,

For some of my middle-aged friends wrestling with homelessness, mental health crises and decades of addiction, with more of a criminal record than an educational record, it may not be possible to turn lives around. For their kids and grandkids, we have to try.

please, President Biden, push on. This is about America’s future. This is your chance to preside over a Rooseveltian revolution that sprinkles opportunity and averts tragedies for decades to come.

he question isn’t whether we can afford to invest in children and break cycles of poverty, educational failure and substance abuse. It’s whether we can afford not to.

Sunday's "indoguration," co-hosted by Pumpkin Pet Insurance, touts Jill Martin of NBC's Today show along with "notable rescue dogs and their parents." Proceeds support the Delaware Humane Association.

Though Major is digging up new ground as the first shelter pup in the White House,

President Trump is the first president in more than a century not to have a dog. William McKinley had only cats and birds, including a parrot named Washington Post.

Biden even targeted dog lovers with a campaign message shortly before Election Day.

"If you need pet food because you're struggling, or you need low cost vaccinations to keep your pet healthy, all the things people need, they should see their shelter as a resource."

"Democrats wanted to do much more in the last bill and promised to do more, if given the opportunity, to increase direct payments to a total of $2,000,"

Undocumented immigrants who don't have Social Security numbers are ineligible for the payments

their spouses and children are now eligible as long as they have Social Security numbers.

Reflecting a pervasive pessimism, nearly two-thirds of voters said they believed the country was heading in the wrong direction, according to an Associated Press canvass of those who had cast ballots

More than four in 10 voters said it was the most important problem facing the country, far more than any other issue. 

The overwhelming majority of Trump supporters called the economy excellent or good while an equal share of Biden supporters said it was doing poorly.

Views of the virus also cleaved to politics: Roughly four in five Trump supporters called it at least somewhat under control, while as many Biden voters said it was “not at all under control.”

Those who reported that the pandemic had taken a personal toll tended to back Mr. Biden.

It was these voters at the center whom Mr. Biden had most aggressively targeted, using a message of unity and American tradition to offer voters a respite from the bombast of the current president, and to push back against the Trump campaign’s portrayal of the Democrat as a tool of the left.

For the first time, not one but two probability-based, scientifically sound voter surveys were conducted amid the election.

The overall trends in the results were consistent between the two organizations’ surveys,

Among white voters, there were stark divides along lines of gender as well as education. While Mr. Trump appeared on pace to come close to repeating his blowout win in 2016 among white voters without college degrees, Mr. Biden held a lead among white voters with a college education.

The former vice president said that he, as president, would recommend governors temporarily lock down their states for a period of time to stop the spread of coronavirus, aligning himself closer to the billionaire Microsoft founder's suggestion that the country needs a lengthy shutdown, not the President's hope that the country reopen in mid-April.

"It's a false choice to make, saying that you either open the economy or everything goes to hell," Biden said. "You cannot make this economy grow until you deal with the virus."

The former vice president described his days at home in Delaware, where he is observing the same "stay-at-home" orders that now apply to millions of Americans. For Biden that means calls with family and the occasional visit from a couple grandkids who live nearby and walk over to say hello.

"I've lost a couple children, I've lost a wife and it is incredibly difficult to go through and it's harder to go through when you haven't had an opportunity to be with the person while they're dying," Biden said. After noting that he was able to be with his mother, father and son as they died, he said he was not able to do the same with his first wife.

The package passed in December provided $82 billion for education, a far cry from what the future Biden administration is now proposing.

“Educators are encouraged not only by President-elect Biden’s leadership, but also in knowing that there is finally a true partner in the White House who will listen, value the ideas, and act in the best interest of students, educators, and families.”

over 30% of school districts were now fully online, a number that has grown since the beginning of the school year

Overall, the plan also focuses on offering child care assistance for families and providers, and on lifting children out of poverty. It is only the first part of Biden’s recovery plan, called the American Rescue Plan. Next month, he plans to unveil the second part of his plan, Build Back Better Recovery Plan, he said.

Vice President Mike Pence is set to attend the inauguration.

Biden dismissed Trump’s decision not to attend the inauguration, telling reporters last week it was "one of the few things he and I ever agreed on."

Trump and Pence's relationship has soured in recent days after the vice president defied the president by fulfilling his constitutional role in counting the electoral votes that showed Biden won.

Trump will be the first president to skip the inauguration of his successor since 1869, when impeached President Andrew Johnson avoided the ceremony for Ulysses S. Grant.

#BidenCrimeFamily, and the typo, is a crash course in how to rally supporters around a conspiracy theory — while neutering the attempts of social media companies to stop it. Mr. Trump has used this same tactic to sow doubt about mail-in ballots and the integrity of the election.

On Wednesday afternoon, with the presidential race unresolved, a protester in Nevada interrupted an election official’s news conference by yelling, “The Biden crime family is stealing the election!”

#BidenCrimeFamily is part of a yearlong, effective disinformation campaign against Joe Biden. In the final days of the presidential race, the hashtag was used on Twitter and Facebook, as well as the darker parts of the web, including 4chan and Parler. It was repeated in the right-wing media ecosystem, like Steve Bannon’s podcast and The Gateway Pundit.

In the last month, on Facebook alone, it reached at least 277,000 people, according to CrowdTangle — and that’s only on non-private pages

Stage 2: Seeding on Social MediaIn any manipulation campaign, the second stage involves campaign operators strategically spreading the hashtag across the media ecosystem.

Stage 1: OriginsFor more than a year, right-wing media and partisans have pushed “Biden crime family” as a viral slogan. Media manipulation campaigns are usually conjured in small, hidden spaces by a few operators with an agenda. But in this case, it was influential media and political personalities who got the ball rolling.