It’s safe to say that few could’ve predicted the results of last week’s elections, which are still in the process of being fully resolved. The one thing we can say for sure at this point is that Joe Biden has succeeded in beating Donald Trump for the presidency, and that the result for the rest of his party has been a historic collapse.

As the calendar ticked over to November 3, conditions seemed ripe for a historic drubbing of the sitting president and his party, suggested by months of polling. Donald Trump was already a uniquely polarizing and unpopular president before coronavirus struck the United States, and once the virus did begin to surge through the country, he soon proved catastrophically inept and even disinterested in handling it, leading to the deaths of 238,000 Americans and counting, and a series of lurching lockdowns and reopenings around the country that have thrown ordinary people’s lives into chaos.

This was on top of an economic crisis, the worst since the Great Depression, that saw massive unemployment and business closures, followed by a dramatic but erratic recovery. When a president and his party preside over an economic downturn in an election year, they are usually punished by voters. (An exception was Harry Truman’s infamously close win in 1948.)