2020 US presidential election: Joe Biden, 77, to become longest-serving president-elect in US history
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. defeated Donald Trump to become the 46th U.S. President, toppling the outgoing president with a promise to unify and repair a nation reeling from a worsening pandemic, a failing economy and deep political divisions.
Biden’s victory came after the Associated Press, CNN, and NBC showed him he was winning Pennsylvania and winning more than the 270 constituency votes needed to run for president. Trump sought to undermine the outcome, baselessly accusing Democrats of trying to steal the election and claim victory before the race is called.
Biden’s vice president, California senator Kamala Harris, 56, becomes the first black and Native American woman to serve as vice president, a glimpse of a generation change to come in the party.
Biden, 77, would become the longest-serving president-elect in U.S. history and the first to oust a sitting commander-in-chief after a term since Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush in 1992.
Biden won 284 electoral college votes, according to the PA, which previously called Arizona for Democrat. Several other networks have yet to call Arizona, leaving Biden with 273 Electoral College votes in their tally, many still to claim the presidency.
But the new president’s goal of uniting the country will be made more difficult by unfounded allegations of Trump fraud and the control of the US Senate in the air, pending two rounds in Georgia in January.
If Republicans hold the Senate, Biden’s program of tax hikes on the rich and corporate and climate-friendly energy policies could be stalled in Congress. Democrats have maintained control of the House of Representatives.
Biden reclaimed the battlefield of the states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – the so-called Blue Wall that handed the presidency to Trump in 2016. Backed by a historic turnout, Biden garnered 4 million votes more than Trump nationwide on Saturday morning, winning at least 74 million votes against Trump’s 70 million.
Trump disputes the results
Trump has sought to cast doubt on the result, claiming widespread voting irregularities without evidence and filing lawsuits to challenge the vote count in some key states where he was late.
“I won this election a lot!” Trump tweeted on Saturday morning. He was at the Trump National Golf Club Washington, D.C, in Sterling, Va., When the networks started the race for Biden.
So far, none of Trump’s lawsuits have gained ground or demonstrated that the election results can be overturned.
Biden mustered enough support to sweep aside one of the most unconventional and polarizing presidents in US history, a man who cultivated fierce loyalty among his followers – they had taken to chanting: “We love you!” during his electoral rallies – while likening his political rivals and the media to enemies of the state.
Given how close Biden’s margins are, Trump might have won a second term had it not been for his widely criticized response to the coronavirus pandemic and economic fallout. The president has regularly reflected at rallies on how he won the election before the virus hit the United States earlier this year.
Trump has consistently downplayed the threat of the virus and discouraged even the simplest public health measures to stem its spread, making mask wearing a political problem. For voters, seeing Trump, his wife and youngest son infected with Covid-19 in early October punctuated his failure to protect the nation as a whole.
Biden vowed that tackling the epidemic in the United States would be his top priority, along with fixing a struggling economy. He has proposed a $ 3.5 trillion plan that relies heavily on deficit spending to create jobs, though a plan of this size would likely meet resistance in a Republican-led Senate. More than 9.7 million Americans have fallen ill and more than 236,000 have died since February.
The president-elect has said he can erase some of Trump’s most controversial decisions on his own, without congressional approval. He plans to join the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization and reverse Trump’s cancellations on environmental regulations. He says he will also end immigration bans from several Muslim-majority countries and restore the rights of asylum seekers.
Voters responded to Biden’s relative humility and his conventional approach to the campaign, which reflected his 47 years in public life. Biden surrounded himself with many of the same advisers from his previous campaigns, and his administration would likely include at least a few veterans of Barack Obama’s White House, where Biden was vice president.
On the air, Americans witnessed a one-sided contest: In August and September, Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee topped Trump’s team by more than $ 289 million, fueling a massive publicity effort.
Biden faces GOP Senate
Faced with a likely Republican majority in the Senate, Biden would need to build on long-standing relationships with top Republicans in Congress so he can pass major legislation or secure his preferred cabinet. That might prove difficult in a Washington that bears little resemblance to what it was when Biden entered politics in 1972.
The presidency marks an unexpected milestone in Biden’s five-decade political career. The two previous presidential offers of the former senator from Delaware in 1988 and 2008 collapsed during the primaries. After serving as Obama’s vice president, he missed a chance to run again in 2016 following the death of his son Beau Biden and as Democrats rallied around Hillary Clinton.
Biden entered the Democratic primary in April 2019 as a frontrunner. He delivered a message of unity, often claiming he had come forward because of Trump’s response to the 2017 white supremacist rally and counter-demonstration in Charlottesville, Va., When the president said that there were “very good people on both sides”.
Until Biden’s victory was secured, Democrats feared he would fail – much like Clinton in 2016. Public polls once again appeared to overestimate Biden’s strength in tightly contested states, as Biden was forced to achieve narrow victories in battlefields like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Party members expressed concern over Biden’s light travel schedule during the campaign’s home stretch. Some aides feared Biden’s operation had not excited enough black and Latino voters to get them to the polls.
Harris will be the key advisor
Biden’s choice of Harris seemed designed to counter criticism that he was a returning candidate in a forward-looking party. A California senator and former state attorney general, Harris has drawn younger and minority voters to the countryside. Biden promised her she would have the same access to the Oval Office he had as vice president, and be the last to offer advice after a meeting.
Harris challenged Biden in the primaries after gaining national fame by questioning Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Attorney General William Barr during their confirmation hearings. If Biden, who will be 82 in 2024, decides not to run for a second term, she is almost certain to run again.
Ultimately, it was the coronavirus that undermined Trump’s chance for a second term. Even after recovering from his battle with the virus, Trump attacked leading infectious disease experts, such as Anthony Fauci, a member of his own coronavirus task force. Polls have consistently shown voters misjudging Trump’s response to the pandemic.
As Trump organized a series of rallies filled with unmasked supporters, Biden urged Americans to heed warnings from scientists and medical experts to maintain social distancing and wear masks in public.
After canceling all campaign events in person as the coronavirus swept across the United States in March, Biden then resumed his travels after Labor Day and made a point of wearing a mask in public. His events were modest and socially remote, and he staged drive-through rallies of hundreds of people honking their support.
Biden made the race a referendum on Trump, and the president attempted to caricature Biden as a corrupt, past-his-principal politician who was too weak to hold back his party’s far left. The President coined a ridiculous nickname for Biden – “Sleepy Joe” – just like his nickname “Crooked Hillary” in 2016.
Trump was better able to define Clinton, whose campaign was overshadowed by controversy over her handling of emails when she was Secretary of State. A late October letter from then-FBI Director James Comey may have solidified Trump’s victory.
But attempts by Trump’s associates to denigrate Biden as corrupt have failed. A week before the election, 55% of voters polled in a CNN poll said they viewed the former vice president favorably.
Yet many of the same challenges that sank Trump’s presidency – namely a resurgent pandemic that slows America’s economic recovery – could overwhelm the rest of Biden’s agenda.
He will face a cascading series of crises, even beyond the pandemic: racial unrest, accelerating climate change and a possible Supreme Court ruling that could wipe out Obamacare, a policy he has promised to build on. .
Biden will likely have to keep fighting with Trump, who shows no signs of quietly leaving the White House.
(This story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
