From tragic loss to the White House: Can Joe Biden unite America?

The first thing Joe Biden did on Election Day was visit his son’s grave.

After a mass at Brandywine Roman Catholic Church in Greenville, Delaware with his wife Jill and granddaughters at his side, the man who would be declared the 46th president-elect of the US stood beside Beau Biden’s gravestone, in a cemetery where his first wife Neilia and daughter Noami are also buried

Joseph Robinette "Beau" Biden III died following a brain cancer diagnosis in 2015. Joe Biden’s first wife Neilia and daughter Naomi died in a car crash in 1972, weeks before a then 30-year-old Democratic candidate was sworn into his first term in the US Senate.

Officials held a swearing-in ceremony with his surviving sons Beau and Robert Hunter Biden beside their hospital beds.

Read more: Joe Biden wins the 2020 US election - follow live updates 

Joe Biden – a Pennsylvania-born six-term senator and a vice president under the nation’s twice-elected first Black president – received more votes than any candidate has ever received in a presidential race, preventing Republican Donald Trump from a second term, and promising a period of healing amid several campaign-defining crises.

He has relied on his empathy and faith, shaped by his devastating losses and public mourning, to frame his politics through a lens of compassion and healing, from his emotional appeals to voters to his critical support for groundbreaking healthcare legislation.

His 2020 campaign pledged to heal the “soul” of the nation, and his election tests whether a man defined so strongly by great personal loss can repair a nation that has lost so much.

He sought to define his campaign as a moral referendum, with a trail of intimate events and meetings with supporters in sharp contrast to the president’s grievance-filled rallies with sports arena soundtracks. His campaign distilled his half-century career into a personal one – Biden often spoke directly to Americans who know the feeling of reaching across an empty bed following the death of a loved one, because he did the same.

Read more: Everything you need to know about Jill Biden

The president-elect inherits a public health crisis that has killed more than 233,000 Americans and shows no signs of slowing, mass unemployment and millions of Americans in the grip of the pandemic’s economic fallout, and widespread injustice inflamed by a demagogue who has resisted efforts to repair the damage.

He also inherits Trump’s 70 million voters, the most-ever for a losing candidate, as Democrats must reckon with a presidency that sought to crush its opponents and his millions of voters who supported his agenda.

But Biden’s victory – a moderate Democrat overcoming a right-wing populist who found stronger Republican support in 2020 than he did in 2016 – is by no means a mandate, with a fractured Congress, a growing progressive movement and an emboldened, festering Trumpism that will return in 2024, without any certainty that Biden, and his vision, will return.

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1942 as the oldest child in a family with four siblings. His father fell on hard times following the region’s economic decline in the 1950s, and the family moved to Delaware, where Biden flourished in school sports and student government with a firm C average in his graduating class.

He married Neilia Hunter on 27 August 1966 while he was still enrolled in law school at Syracuse University – he called his time there “a dangerous combination of arrogant and sloppy” and ultimately graduated 76th in a class of 85.

The couple had three children – Beau, Hunter and Naomi, born on 8 November 1971. She had the nickname “Amy”.

After clerking at a Wilmington law firm, he began his 50-year career in public office as a councillor in New Castle County before launching a campaign to the US Senate in 1972. Neilia became his closest adviser and the “brains” behind his campaign, The News Journal reported at the time.

The family campaigned across the state, mounting a lucrative grassroots effort attacking his Republican incumbent as old and out of touch, a shock to the status quo highlighting the generational divide between the elder conservative statesman’s base and a much younger electorate following the Vietnam War and civil rights movement. It also was the first year 18 year olds were eligible to vote.

Biden, the 30-year-old underdog, won the race in November 1972.

The following month, Neilia asked her husband, “What’s going to happen, Joey? Things are too good,” The News Journal reported.

One week before Christmas, the senator-elect was in Washington DC interviewing staff members for his new office when he received the news about the deaths of his wife and daughter.

After that phone call, “my whole world was altered forever”, he later said in a speech to Yale University graduates.

In his 2017 book Promise Me, Dad, he wrote that “the pain ... seemed unbearable in the beginning, and it took me a long time to heal, but I did survive the punishing ordeal. I made it through, with a lot of support, and reconstructed my life and my family.”

He said in his Yale speech: “I can remember my mother – a sweet lady – looking at me, after we left the hospital, and saying, ‘Joey, out of everything terrible that happens to you, something good will come if you look hard enough for it.’”

With an intense, heartbreaking focus on his family, he began commuting daily from Washington to Delaware to remain with his young sons. It earned him the nickname “Amtrak Joe”.

“And I began to commute thinking I was only going to stay a little while – four hours a day, every day – from Washington to Wilmington, which I’ve done for over 37 years,” he said in his Yale speech. “I did it because I wanted to be able to kiss them goodnight and kiss them in the morning the next day. ... But looking back on it, the truth be told, the real reason I went home every night was that I needed my children more than they needed me.”

Five years after the car accident that killed his wife and daughter, Mr Biden married Jill Jacobs, then a student at the University of Delaware. They met on a blind date.

The couple married on 17 June 1977 at the United Nations Chapel in New York City. Beau and Hunter attended both the ceremony and the honeymoon.

Hunter named his daughter Naomi in honour of his later sister.

In his 30-year career in the US Senate, Biden held seats in the foreign relations and judiciary committees, where he campaigned for the passage of the Violence Against Women Act and the so-called crime bills, parts of which he would later admit were a “mistake,” with harsher sentencing guidelines contributing to a plague of mass incarceration that disproportionately impacted Black Americans.

In 1988, he made the first of three bids for the White House. He tried again in 2008.

That year, Barack Obama – a junior Democratic senator from Illinois – became the nation’s first Black presidential candidate to win the party’s nomination, tapping Senate stalwart Biden as his running mate, relying on his record of critically needed Senate experience and bipartisan efforts, firm blue-collar support and foreign policy experience.

With president Obama, then-vice president Biden shared credit for the passage of the Affordable Care Act and stimulus relief in the wake of the financial crisis, bolstered support for marriage equality, and demonstrated a camaraderie with the president that has been romanticised and idealised among Democrats in the years that followed.

The 2016 presidential campaign revived the demagoguery and racism that tinted president Obama’s terms, with old foe Donald Trump – who promoted baseless “birther” conspiracies during Obama’s campaigns – defeating Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, demolishing a “blue wall” in the midwest, and shredding expectations for Republican dominance after eight years under Obama.

Biden later said he decided to enter the 2020 race after watching footage from 2017’s Unite the Right rally, where a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd and killed one woman and injured 19 others during neo-Nazi and white nationalist marches in Charlottesville, Virginia.

That spectre of violence has loomed over the 2020 race, up to the tabulation of election results, following mass demonstrations against police brutality and a far-right movement emboldened by the president to suppress them.

Months before he would emerge as the front-runner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Biden was one among a dense field of candidates, seeing poor results in Iowa and New Hampshire during the first of the party primaries.

His early campaign was marred by a series of uncharacteristically awkward, often-condescending interactions with voters, allegations of inappropriate behaviour, and injurious debate performances, including a sharp line of attack from the woman who would eventually become his vice presidential pick.

He drew victories in several states on Super Tuesday, paving the way to his party’s nomination, as the campaigns came to a crawl amid the coronavirus emergency that has upended American life for months. In April, Bernie Sanders, his chief rival in the primary campaign and the face of a growing progressive movement that mobilised millions of young Americans beginning in 2016, suspended his race and backed his opponent.

But the moderate Democrat made no grand overtures to a burgeoning progressive left. With Senator Sanders, the campaign established a coalition of establishment liberals and progressive party leaders to draft an agenda that contained a bulwark of his policy goals heading into the White House – expanding the Affordable Care Act, relying on a framework for the Green New Deal resolution for a massive infrastructure project, and expanding economic relief for struggling Americans, including raising the federal minimum wage and universal pre-Kindergarten and college debt relief.

Biden has also demanded significant police reforms and so-called “community” policing in the wake of the killings of Black Americans by law enforcement that sparked renewed global demonstrations.

As thousands of Americans have died from Covid-19-related illness, and millions of others were infected, the pandemic became the campaign’s urgent focus, criticising the president’s delayed response and attempts to downplay its severity, and offering a stark contrast to the president’s denial that instead spoke to the realities many Americans were facing.

His opponents cast him as an elderly, out-of-touch Trojan Horse to socialism, emblematic of Democratic corruption that the president has sought to disrupt, promoting allegations that his son Hunter Biden – who was central to the president’s impeachment – was embroiled in efforts abroad to enrich his father while in office.

Read more: How Joe Biden’s family tragedy shaped his Washington career

But progressives criticised the Democratic Party’s shift to attract moderate Republicans rather than galvanise a coalition of progressive support, pointing to a chasm between a kind of bipartisan pragmatism and the needs of a majority of Americans that support policies that Biden has rejected.

The 2020 Democratic National Committee gave outsized platforms to current and former Republicans compared to one of the party’s chief voices, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, while other members from the growing progressive caucus in the House of Representatives did not participate in the event.

Senator Sanders, meanwhile, held more than a dozen virtual campaign events and rallies to support the candidate while warning against the dangers of both a second Trump term and his efforts to undermine the results of the election.

Biden tapped California senator and former Democratic candidate Kamala Harris – the first Black woman to receive the vice presidential nomination – as his running mate, hoping to return to the Obama-Biden dynamic and its “hopeful” agenda that the party has sought to revive.

His victory, an attempted repudiation of Trump and a rejection of the Republican Party’s far-right embrace, saw with it the failure of Democrats to flip any House seats and the defeat of several Democratic House incumbents.

The party will maintain a slim majority in the House – while Republicans have gained at least two far-right candidates who have expressed support for the cult-like QAnon conspiracy.

His administration will continue to face a GOP-dominated, Mitch McConnell-led stonewall in the Senate.

He is also the nation’s oldest president-elect – he’ll turn 78 years old on 20 November.

In recent months, Biden campaigned as a voice for calm in a tumultuous present and preached a vision of unity, condemning both rising police and authoritarian violence and riots that sprang from unrest, and framing his measured perspective against a president who provoked and encouraged threats against his political opponents.

He repeatedly said during the campaign that although he ran as a Democrat, he will “govern as an American” and will “work as hard for those who didn’t vote for me as those who did.”

The president-elect repeated those remarks from Wilmington on 4 November, as officials continued to count results in critical swing states.

In closing remarks, he called for the nation “to put the harsh rhetoric of the campaign behind us, to lower the temperature, to see each other again, to listen to one another, to hear each other again, with respect and care for one another."

"To unite, to heal, to come together as a nation," he said. “I know this won’t be easy. I’m not naive  – neither of us are. … But I also know this as well: To make progress, we have got to stop treating our opponents as enemies. We are not enemies. What brings us together as Americans is much stronger than anything that could tear us apart.”

On Friday, hours before he would be declared president-elect, Biden appealed to a national unity in remarks from Wilmington, Delaware, not far from where his career began, at the heart of his movement.

“My responsibility as president will be to represent the whole nation,” he said. “And I want you to know that I will work as hard for those who voted against me as for those who voted for me. That’s the job. That’s the job. It’s called a duty of care, for all Americans.”