Vice President-elect Kamala Harris holds hands with President-elect Joe Biden as the election victory is claimed. Photo: AP

I’m buzzed.

And it’s not from my second celebratory beer since watching President-elect Joe Biden and Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris give their victory speeches.

It’s from relief and euphoria. Italians felt it after Benito Mussolini fell in 1943; Filipinos felt it after toppling Ferdinand Marcos in 1986; and Iraqis felt it in 2003 after Saddam Hussein’s overthrow.

Make no mistake: In America, we’ve ousted a fascist dictator. The White House occupant may not have directly killed anyone, but his COVID-19 pandemic negligence has contributed to more than 200,000 American deaths.

Over his brutal four-year reign, he murdered the collective spirit of the 75 million – and counting – voters who have risen up to depose him.

America’s own fascist dictator demonized Mexican-Americans and attempted to build a wall to keep out potential undocumented immigrants from their ancestral home. He violated the sovereignty of the indigenous Lakota Sioux people, staging a campaign rally on their lands, without their permission.

He consistently demeaned and sexually objectified female journalists and politicians. He mocked people with physical challenges. His xenophobia led to the detention of more than 500 brown, undocumented children in concentration camps – separated from their parents.

He labelled developing countries “shitholes.” His anti-Chinese rhetoric over COVID-19 exposed some Asian-Americans to racially-motivated verbal and physical attacks.

After pushing the bogus “birther” conspiracy theory to delegitimize President Barack Obama, the dictator credited himself for improving black employment rates Obama’s economic policies had created.

So for the last five days here in San Francisco, I’ve been glued to my TV, laptop, and phone watching the unfolding uprising.

I cast my ballot in person for Joe Biden on the morning of the first day early voting opened in California – and I berated myself for my lateness, arriving 40 minutes after the polls opened.

On election night, many Americans, and indeed Australians, panicked after Biden initially lost states like Florida and Ohio and appeared to be losing Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. I remained calm and confident.

In our living room, I counselled my wife to be optimistic. On the phone, I texted a dear friend from work, telling her not to fear a 2016 repeat. On Twitter, I urged all Australia to chill, using a three-word mantra: It’s still early.

US presidential elections are marathons, not sprints. Early on in key states the voices of and votes cast by those the dictator and his administration marginalized – urban black, brown, white progressive, LGBTQ+ and dissident Republican women and men – had neither been heard, nor counted.

When they were, just as I foresaw, they swept Biden into insurmountable leads in cities like Milwaukee, Detroit, and Philadelphia, helping him win Wisconsin, Michigan and ultimately, his birth state, Pennsylvania, which propelled him over the 270 electoral vote threshold, clinching his victory.

Months after “Black Lives Matter” became part of the world’s lexicon, on election night, another emerged: Black Votes Matter.

Since 1965, after then-President Lyndon B Johnson passed the Voting Rights Act, guaranteeing all Americans the franchise, the Republican Party has insidiously tried to limit black Congressional representation.

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It has done that through illegally redrawing districts and trying to suppress our voting power through disinformation campaigns, enacting Draconian voter ID laws, reducing the number of early voting days, and limiting numbers of polling places.

These moves are all under the guise of what the party calls “widespread voter fraud,” which many election experts say doesn’t exist.

Black votes mattered most in Georgia, which hasn’t elected a Democratic presidential candidate since 1992. As of writing, Biden had a 10,000-vote lead. When he wins, it will be poetic justice.

In 2018, Stacey Abrams, a Democratic black Georgia legislator, lost Georgia’s gubernatorial election by 54,000 votes, to Brian Kemp, a white Republican Georgia secretary of state.

Before the election, in a manoeuvre the daily newspaper, the “Atlanta Journal and Constitution” called “the largest mass disenfranchisement in US history,” Kemp used strict voter ID laws to purge more than 500,000 people – without their knowledge – from Georgia’s voter rolls.

But Abrams has settled the score. Through her non-profit organizations, Fair Fight, and the New Georgia Project, she helped register or re-register 800,000 voters.

Further, on election night, voters in Clayton County, the district of recently deceased Congressman John Lewis – who was severely beaten by police in the 1965 Selma, Alabama voting rights march immortalized as “Bloody Sunday” – vaulted Biden ahead.

Brown votes also mattered.

According to “Business Insider”, some 200,000 Arab-American voters in the Detroit area supported Biden by a 70 per cent margin, helping him capture Michigan, a state Democrats lost in 2016 by just under 11,000 votes.

In Arizona, which a Democratic presidential candidate hasn’t won since 1996, Indigenous, Mexican, and Central American heritage (Latinx) voters have helped give Biden an 18,000-vote advantage.

The “Navajo Times” reported an overwhelming 97 per cent of 74,000 Navajo voters went for Biden, while CNN says Latinx voters turned out in record numbers and, at a two-to-one ratio, chose Biden.

Now, as I’m finishing that second beer, I’m reflecting.

Three years ago, I vigorously protested with a few thousand others at Los Angeles International Airport, after the White House instituted a “travel ban” on people from predominantly Muslim countries.

Two months from now, after Biden is sworn in, his expected executive order will repeal that.

With President Biden, I’ll be less worried about racists, emboldened by the dictator’s xenophobia, publicly accosting my English-fluent, Filipino-American in-laws for opting to use their freedom of speech to converse in their native Zambal or Ilocano, or Tagalog, another common denominator tongue.

Maybe under Biden and Harris – the first female, black and South Asian heritage vice-president – America will make real inroads in reforming police departments, whose debilitating implicit racial bias and brutality reigned long before George Floyd’s murder.

Maybe those of us committed to creating a more equitable, just, and inclusive America, won’t be branded as “socialists.”

Dawn is breaking in America. We’ve taken down a tyrannical autocrat with a barrage of ballots, not bullets.

And I’m still buzzed — on hope.