Early Wednesday morning, soon after I realized I was going to have to wait at least a day to know the winner of the presidential race.

Here is the election night speech I was watching.

I'm here to tell you tonight, we believe we're on track to win this election.

We knew because of the unprecedented early vote and a mail-in vote

that's going to take a while.

We're going to have to be patient until the hard work of tallying votes is finished.

And it ain't over till every vote is counted.

Every ballot is counted.

Joe Biden was speaking from his home state of Delaware.

He was outside, surrounded by cars honking their horns,

at a rally designed for this pandemic we're in the middle of.

I mean, it was brief.

He just kind of wanted to instill confidence, and he sounded confident.

It was him saying, you know, I believe we're going to win.

We will win Pennsylvania.

Jim Newell was watching all this, too.

He's Slate's senior politics writer, our go-to election night guy.

He seemed chipper. He did. I think he was

probably a little chilly, you know, he didn't seem to have a jacket, so he didn't want to speak for too

long. An hour or two later, President Trump gave a very different speech from the east room of the

White House without a mask in sight.

He didn't tell his followers to wait.

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