President-elect Joe Biden just did something incredibly difficult: He defeated an incumbent president for the first time in 28 years, and only the fifth time in 100. Beyond overcoming the traditional advantages held by an incumbent, Biden had to maneuver through the archaic Electoral College, which denied the clear winner of the popular vote an easy victory. He also had to surmount a stunning series of decisions by conservative courts and Republican legislatures that made it harder both to vote and to count the vote. And finally, there was Donald Trump s unprecedented and perhaps illegal use of federal government resources to aid his reelection bid.

If Biden had racked up only a slightly slimmer lead in key states, these obstacles might have cost the Democrat the election, even if hed maintained a large lead in the popular vote. Now that he has defeated this increasingly broken system, he will face many urgent calls to reform it.

Bidens biggest obstacle was the same one that tripped up Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Al Gore in 2000: the Electoral College. The only reason his election was called a nail-biter by the press was because he needed to win a select group of states with competitive electorates. The reality, in the popular vote, is that the election was not remotely close.

Biden was winning the national popular vote by more than 4.1 million votes, or 2.8%, as of Saturday morning. Both margins exceed Clintons 2016 popular vote leads and are expected to grow substantially as millions of votes are left to be counted in the Democratic strongholds of California and New York. When the counting ends, Biden will have won the second-largest victory by popular vote margin since the disputed 2000 election and grabbed the largest vote share for a challenger defeating an incumbent since Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

Summiting the Electoral College was made even harder for Biden by legal obstacles put in place by state governments and federal courts.

Voters had to overcome the usual suppression strategies pioneered by Republican state legislatures in recent years, including obtaining the proper identification and finding out if they had been improperly purged from the voter rolls, as hundreds of thousands were in Georgia. They also had to cope with legislatures and courts refusing to expand or loosen absentee voting rules during the coronavirus pandemic.

Throughout the summer and fall, the U.S. Supreme Court used its shadow docket to strike down lower court decisions loosening state absentee voting rules due to the pandemic by tightly embracing a precedent that federal courts cant change election laws close to an election. The court knocked down rulings that would have allowed everyone in Texas to vote by mail, loosened Alabamas absentee ballot voter identification and witness requirements, eliminated South Carolinas absentee witness requirement, and extended the ballot receipt deadline in Wisconsin.

The Courts decision will disenfranchise large numbers of responsible voters in the midst of hazardous pandemic conditions, Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent from the conservative majoritys ruling overturning the extension of the ballot receipt deadline in Wisconsin.

The high courts conservative majority also continued to advance its normal anti-voting rights agenda when it upheld a law passed by the Florida legislature requiring felons whove served their time to also pay fines to get back on the voting rolls. The Republican state government enacted the law in response to a popularly passed ballot initiative granting ex-felons the right to vote again. Critics of the law called it a modern-day poll tax .