Democrat candidate, Joe Biden, has won the US presidency over Donald Trump, major international and US-based TV networks reported on Saturday, a victory sealed after the Democrat claimed several key battleground states won by the Republican incumbent in 2016 thus becoming the 46th president of the United States, achieving a decades-long political ambition and denying Donald Trump a second term after a deeply divisive presidency defined by a once-in-a-century pandemic, economic turmoil and social unrest.
Biden polled a total of 290 electoral college votes or 50 percent against the incumbent, Donald Trump with 214 electoral college votes or 48 percent, after several days of painstaking vote-counting following record turnout across the country. The win in Pennsylvania, with 99% of the votes counted, took Biden’s electoral college vote to 284, surpassing the 270 needed to win the White House.
How Joe Biden got to 270 votes in the US Electoral College
Under the Electoral College system, which is defined in the US Constitution, 50 US states and the District of Columbia have apportioned electors based on their population.
A presidential candidate needs to win 270 electoral votes out of 538 to win the presidency, notwithstanding the popular vote.
Biden started with a baseline of 187 Electoral College votes from the District of Columbia and 14 solidly Democratic states, including two of the country’s largest: California, which is worth a whopping 55 Electoral College votes, and New York, which holds 29.
Biden easily picked up Colorado, Virginia and New Hampshire on election night, which added 26 votes to his column to bring him to 213.
As votes were tabulated and reported the next day, Biden then began beating Trump in key battleground states.
He secured Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, adding 36 votes to bring his total to 249.
He also won parts of Nebraska and Maine, which have a split Electoral College system, giving him an additional four electoral votes between them – bringing his total to 253.
Crucially, Biden won the state of Arizona, which had gone to Trump in 2016, bringing him 11 votes and putting him within striking distance of victory, at 264 total votes.
Biden’s margin in Arizona was tight and while the Associated Press and Fox News had called it for the former US vice president, other major media organisations held off as incoming mail ballots appeared to favour Trump.
That is when the process appeared to stall on Thursday, as the count of millions of mail ballots in all-important Pennsylvania and Georgia ground on with the presidency hanging in the balance and no clear winner.
The Republican leader started with only 122 votes from 19 solidly Republican states.
Texas had briefly appeared close, but Trump won its 38 electoral votes to bring his early count to 160.
However, Trump won some but not all of the battleground states he had won in the 2016 elections.
Ohio, Iowa, and Florida went to the president, adding 53 votes and getting him to 213 in the Electoral College.
He also won a congressional district in Maine, bringing him an additional vote – and bumping his total up to 214.
But Trump fell short in the all-important Midwest, losing Michigan and Wisconsin to Biden.
Then, on Saturday, Biden’s win in Pennsylvania put him over the top in the Electoral College with 284 votes. The AP soon after called a win for Biden in Nevada, putting him at 290.
Even then he would have still needed a long-shot win in Nevada and a reversal of the outcome in Arizona, two southwest states that went to Biden.
At 77, Biden is set to become America’s oldest president. His triumph came more than 48 hours after polls closed on election day, as officials in key states worked furiously to tally ballots amid an unprecedented surge in mail-in voting due to the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 230,000 people and infected millions.
Biden won by reclaiming key states that make up the so-called “blue wall” that Trump knocked down in 2016, and by expanding Democrats’ reach in places like Arizona, a reliably conservative state that has progressively slipped away from Republicans over the last four years. According to the Associated Press, Biden won Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona.
National polling showed Biden with a consistent lead as Americans grew increasingly frustrated with Trump’s erratic handling of the pandemic, particularly in the weeks after his own diagnosis and hospitalization from the virus.
Though Biden received nearly 75 million votes, the most for any presidential candidate in history, it remained uncertain whether the nation had delivered the sweeping denunciation of Trump and Trumpism that the former vice-president envisioned when he declared the election a “battle for the soul of the nation”.
As of Saturday, Trump had garnered more than 70 million votes, more than Barack Obama won in his historic 2008 victory, which remained the record until this year.
Predictions of a competitive race in Iowa, Ohio and Texas fell short as Trump proved unexpectedly resilient in battleground states. In the Senate, Republicans were increasingly confident in their ability to maintain control of the chamber, setting the stage for blistering political battles with a future Biden administration and dimming hopes of swift action on progressive priorities on the economy, climate and immigration.
The dynamic will test Biden’s enduring faith in bipartisanship, despite having witnessed the hardball tactics of his former Senate colleagues during the eight years he served as Barack Obama’s vice-president. This could also strain the fragile detente with progressives in his own party, who are demanding he meets Republican opposition with a similar take-no-prisoners approach.
Biden in part premised his campaign on an ability to appeal to a broad coalition of Democrats, including the blue-collar, white working-class voters who abandoned the party for Trump in 2016. Haunted by the Democrats’ losses in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin four years ago, Biden focused his attention on the region even as Democrats encouraged him to invest more heavily in once conservative states, where rapidly changing demographics and an erosion of support in the American suburbs left Republicans vulnerable.
With tens of thousands of votes left to be counted, contests remained too close to call in Georgia, where Biden held a narrow but steady lead, as well as in North Carolina and Alaska, where Trump was expected to prevail.
The election unfolded against a public health crisis that has left millions more out of work. While Biden made the pandemic a central theme of his campaign, framing the contest as a referendum on Trump’s management of the Covid crisis, Trump sought to downplay and dismiss it.
In the final days of the campaign, Trump held large rallies without regard to social distancing or mask-wearing, where he falsely claimed the United States was “rounding the corner” even as infections rose dramatically across the country.
Biden, by contrast, resisted public events for several months, in an effort to demonstrate that he would be a serious and sober leader in the face of national crisis.
The cautious approach was not without risk, and Democrats fretted over Biden’s decision to so often cede the stage to his opponent, who relished the spotlight. In the final weeks, Biden darted across the swing states, holding drive-in rallies and socially distanced events.
“The work ahead of us will be hard, but I promise you this: I will be a president for all Americans — whether you voted for me or not,” Biden said on Saturday. “I will keep the faith that you have placed in me.”
Biden’s victory was celebrated by millions of Americans across the country who had spent the last four years organizing and mobilizing against Trump as a repudiation of a president who shattered democratic norms and stoked racial and cultural grievance. Cheers, honking and dancing erupted in major cities, including the nation’s capital, where Biden will be sworn into office on 20 January.
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