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CNN, NBC News and CBS News called the race in his favor, after projecting that he had won the decisive state of Pennsylvania.
FILE: Joe Biden. Image: AFP
WASHINGTON – Democrat Joe Biden won the White House, American media said Saturday, defeating Donald Trump and ending a presidency that convulsed American politics, shocked the world and left America more divided than at any other time in decades.
CNN, NBC News and CBS News rated the race in Biden’s favor just before 11:30 a.m. (1630 GMT) as an insurmountable lead in Pennsylvania brought the 77-year-old to the top in the state-by-state tally that the presidency decides.
After the network television announcement, Biden tweeted, promising to be “president of all Americans.”
“America, I am honored that you have chosen me to lead our great country,” Biden said in a statement.
“The work ahead of us will be tough, but I promise you this: I will be a president for all Americans, whether they vote for me or not. I will keep the faith they have placed in me.”
America, it is an honor that I have been chosen to lead our great country.
The work ahead will be hard, but I promise you this: I will be a president for all Americans, whether they vote for me or not.
I will keep the faith you have placed in me. pic.twitter.com/moA9qhmjn8
– Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) November 7, 2020
Trump was quick to respond to the ad by accusing Biden of falsely declaring himself the next president.
“We all know why Joe Biden is rushing to pose as the winner, and why his media allies are trying to help him: they don’t want the truth exposed,” Trump said in a statement.
“The simple fact is that this election is far from over.”
For Biden, who garnered more than 74 million votes, a record, the victory after a tense contest during a global coronavirus pandemic was the culminating achievement of his half century in American politics, including eight years as a deputy of the first black president of the United States, Barack. Obama
The result condemned the 74-year-old Trump, who made desperate attempts to claim fraud and stop the vote counting, to become the first president of a term since George HW Bush in the early 1990s.
The Republican, whose marathon press conferences, tweets and raucous campaign rallies have made him a perpetual and noisy presence at home and abroad for the past four years, had no immediate reaction.
But since the night after Tuesday’s election, when he claimed victory prematurely, Trump has been inhabiting a world increasingly disconnected from the reality of his impending downfall.
Early Saturday, he left the White House for the first time since Election Day to play golf and tweeted: “I WON
THIS CHOICE, BY A LOT! “
And in a remarkable White House address to the nation on Thursday, with Biden’s leadership on the biased results already rapidly consolidating, he claimed that “they are trying to steal the elections.”
Despite Trump’s protests, results from vote counting offices across the country kept coming in throughout the week, with no credible reports of wrongdoing.
And when the American television networks declared that Biden had taken an insurmountable advantage in Pennsylvania, that put the Democrat above the magic number of 270 electoral college votes. Trump had no turning back.
CENTRIST IN THE DIVIDED ERA
The largest voter turnout in history, some 160 million people, according to preliminary estimates, occurred across the United States, ultimately favoring Biden’s promise of calm to Trump’s roller coaster.
Biden, an old-school centrist, has taken on the energetic left wing of his party, while also choosing Kamala Harris, the first black woman in a major party presidential bid, as his running mate.
Although he is a career politician, a group widely ridiculed today, many see him as a sympathetic character, humanized for having endured the loss of his wife and daughter in a car accident in 1972, and then another son to cancer four decades. after.
Yet despite his fervent promises to restore America’s “soul,” Biden will inherit a troubled and angry country.
Americans are bitterly divided after an election campaign in which Trump deliberately fanned divisions on many of the country’s most sensitive issues, including race, immigration and gun ownership.
And despite critics painting Trump as an aberration, he still won the votes of around 70 million people, many of whom may not have liked Trump himself, but feel that the Democrats are out of touch with him. their traditional values.
That gulf of understanding between the two Americas is likely to continue to wreak havoc in Congress, threatening Biden’s ability to rule at a time of economic turmoil and an accelerating coronavirus crisis.
HUMILIATION
For Trump, the defeat and his departure from the White House in the January 20 transition will be primarily a story of personal humiliation.
He shocked the country and the world when he was victorious in 2016 as a political newcomer who defeated seasoned Democrat Hillary Clinton in her first chance at public office.
Then, for much of his administration, he seemed invulnerable to the normal laws of politics.
His show business style of running the government made him perhaps the most viewed (and controversial) individual on the planet.
It survived impeachment, broke diplomatic norms, and was so ubiquitous in the media that it settled on the conscience of ordinary Americans in a way never before experienced.
A former reality star and famous real estate developer, he came off as someone who always got his way.
The crowds at rallies loved to brag that “we’re going to win so much, you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning.”
And for the people who didn’t like him, his usual insult was “loser.”
Yet now he is a loser himself, as perhaps he already feared on election morning.
“Winning is easy,” he mused as the polls opened. “Losing is never easy. Not for me.”
PRO-BIDEN OR ANTI-TRUMP?
Biden secured his victory by recapturing the Midwestern states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, traditional Democratic territory that Trump had changed in 2016 with his powerful appeal to white working-class voters.
The Democrat also obtained slim majorities as the vote count drew to an end in Arizona and Nevada, while the count in Georgia was so close that the state declared it would conduct a recount.
But it was the capture of Pennsylvania that sealed the deal, meaning that even if Trump somehow won every other unannounced state, he wouldn’t rack up enough votes in the electoral college.
Biden built his campaign to drive breakthroughs at Trump’s working class base, while selling himself to the rest of the country as the responsible and stable leader needed to tackle the COVID-19 crisis.
Rejecting Trump’s erratic, often arrogant attitude to a virus that has killed more than 230,000 Americans, Biden vowed to follow scientific advice and make the tough decisions necessary to try to stop the pandemic.
He took a risk, politically speaking, by not holding the traditional type of mass demonstrations that Trump used to great effect, insisting that he wanted to lead by example by following the government’s guidelines on social distancing.
His campaign even refrained from knocking on doors, another basic and even essential tactic for rallying supporters that the Trump team adopted to great effect.
And in a climate of fierce political partisanship, where nearly every aspect of life is now viewed through Democratic or Republican lenses, Biden repeatedly pledged “to be a president for all Americans.”
However, in many ways, the elections focused less on Biden, who made his third presidential run, than on a referendum on Trump, a figure of hatred towards opponents and open adoration of his supporters.
Some Republicans asked Trump to expand his coalition with a more moderate tone aimed at independent voters. But the most polarizing of presidents took the opposite tack, focusing his energy on overloading his core base.
In the final weeks before the election, Trump addressed rally after rally with extreme speeches, often completely devoid of fact. He painted illegal immigrants as murderers and rapists, claimed that Biden was opposed to God, and said that Democrats would strip Americans of their personal firearms and allow mobs to destroy suburbs.
“We love you!” the crowd chanted back.
Faced with pre-election polls pointing to his next defeat, Trump seemed genuinely incapable of understanding what was happening.
“Running against the worst candidate in the history of presidential politics puts pressure on me,” Trump said.
“Can you imagine if I lose?”
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