Despite Donald Trump’s middle-of-the-night attempt at totalitarianism by demanding an end to the counting of ballots, dawn arrived over a nation continuing the work of vote-tallying regardless.

However, while both Trump and his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, maintained paths to the ultimate number of 270 electoral votes, it quickly became very clear on Election Night that Democrats would not be enjoying the landslide election which some opinion polling appeared to say was in their grasp.

Indeed, by the time most news anchors signed off the air in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, the only real estate which traded hands on the election map was Biden’s pick-up of a single electoral vote in a congressional district in the area around Omaha, Neb.

“Nothing has changed from 2016 in terms of what we have seen. Trump has won states Trump previously won and Biden won states [Hillary] Clinton previously won,” said MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. “And any effort to encroach on one another’s territory has thus far been rebuffed or at least delayed.”

An array of opinion polling and other indicators seemed to be pointing, before Election Day, to a great day for Democrats in which Biden would run away with the presidential election while Democrats would capture majorities on both sides of Congress for the first time in a decade.

While, by Wednesday morning, several Senate seats were still to be decided–there, too, Democratic dreams seem not to be meeting reality as they have picked up just one net seat by Wednesday (counting the expected loss of Sen Doug Jones in Alabama.)

“But it’s just not going to be as some Democrats were hoping for — they thought it was going to be an early landslide, which was really always a pipe dream,” said CNN host Jake Tapper.

Many were left wondering how and why such parity could remain after four years of Trump, which includes a novel coronavirus pandemic which has left nearly 250,000 Americans dead just in recent months.

“It may be a lot early to start to play out narratives. But Rahm Emanuel, this is looking a little bit right now like a replay of 2016,” ABC host and former Clinton administration official George Stephanopoulos said on-air Tuesday night.

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