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- Democrat Joe Biden won the White House by defeating Donald Trump and ending his presidency.
- Biden received the votes of more than 74 million people.
- Biden secured his victory by recapturing Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Democrat Joe Biden won the White House, US media said on Saturday, defeating Donald Trump and ending a presidency that convulsed American politics, shocked the world and left America more divided than at any time in decades.
CNN, NBC News and CBS News rated the race in Biden’s favor just before 11:30 a.m., as an insurmountable lead in Pennsylvania drove the 77-year-old above the state-by-state tally deciding the presidency.
Trump did not have an immediate reaction to the announcement, but as Biden’s lead grew during the vote count since Tuesday’s election, the Republican president lashed out with unsubstantiated fraud allegations and falsely claimed he had won.
Early Saturday, while on his way to his golf course in Virginia, he repeated this, tweeting: “I WON THIS ELECTION, BY FAR!”
However, the result now dooms the 74-year-old Trump to become the first one-term president since George HW Bush in the early 1990s.
Biden, who got the votes of a record more than 74 million people, was huddled with his running mate Kamala Harris, in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware.
On Friday night he delivered a speech urging Americans to “unite as a nation and heal.”
The Secret Service has already begun to intensify its protective bubble around the president-elect, who will be inaugurated on January 20.
A centrist who promises to bring calm to Washington after four turbulent years under Trump, Biden is the oldest man to win the presidency, a position he unsuccessfully sought twice during his long political career, before being elected vice president under Barack Obama. in 2008.
Harris, a senator and former California attorney general, will make history as the first black woman to enter the White House in either of the two top positions. At 56, she is considered one of the top candidates to succeed Biden and try to become the first female president of the United States.
Overall turnout Tuesday broke records with about 160 million people across the United States after a deeply polarizing campaign complicated by the resurgence of the Covid-19 pandemic.
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.
With Pennsylvania in the bag, Biden has amassed 273 of the Electoral College’s 538 votes, topping the 270 bar, making it impossible for Trump to get a second term even if he wins the remaining undeclared states.
Biden was also ahead in Arizona, Nevada and near a tie in Georgia, a southern state that has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Bill Clinton in 1992 and is now heading for a recount.
The results of the congressional races indicate that Biden will face a divided legislature, with his Democrats holding a majority in the House and Republicans clinging to control of the Senate, though that could still change.
The split in Washington will likely immediately complicate Biden’s ability to govern, beginning with disputes in Congress over a delayed economic stimulus package for Americans hit hard by the fallout from the coronavirus crisis.
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