We were told this election would take time to interpret and it has.

The red and blue mirages did come true.

But after an undulating election night, the dust has started to settle a little and at the time of writing, Joe Biden appears to have the political momentum needed to win.

As more mail-in votes have been counted, the Democrats closed and surpassed some vital Trump leads.

The so-called Blue Wall that crumbled in 2016 is now slipping out of Trump's hands. Pennsylvania, with the most Electoral College votes in that industrial Midwest, is still within his reach, but it's a heck of a tight race.

He needs it to stay alive and his pride will find it deeply bruising to lose. As a sign of how dear it is to him, he's already claimed victory without waiting for the actual count.

But why wait, when you've got lawsuits. Mr. Trump appears to think he can win this race through the courts.

His team have launched three lawsuits in Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia, pushing either for recounts or to halt vote counting - suggesting to the Democratic Governors in this Great Lakes region that their system is fraudulent or inadequate is one thing.

But suggesting to the Ruby Red governors in Georgia and Arizona that they're not doing it right will be harder to spin.

There's a lot of unique aspects to this unprecedented race.

It's taught us a couple of key things - the polling industry is probably dead, and lawyers are about to enjoy a gold rush.

But there's also a good deal of nuance we should acknowledge too. Donald Trump, against the odds, expanded his vote share by more than three million people.

Millions of Americans watched what he did over the past four years and signed up for four more. That is surely all the proof we need that his presidency is not some historical aberration. What he represents is here to stay in whatever form that may manifest.

We've also learned that America cares about its political future - a huge turnout was proof of that.

Just pause for a minute to consider that Joe Biden has secured more votes than any Democratic candidate in US political history. He, like Trump defied some expectations... except when it comes to a landslide of course.

But after staring down the barrel of what at one stage started to look very 2016, he clawed it back with some healthy margins in key places (far more than Donald Trump did last cycle).

He appears at this stage to have achieved in some cities like Detroit, the kind of enthusiasm among African-American voters that Obama did in 2012 and Hillary Clinton so critically failed to.

If he flips Arizona and Georgia, two Republican strongholds, history will judge it as a decisive victory - the product of a new America and the new demographics in those diverse states.

It may be just beyond him, but this year, something has started to shift. The country, though, still feels bitterly locked in its own division.

Even if Biden were to win, he'd likely lose the Senate. Without it, we can probably expect four years of ugly gridlock.