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WASHINGTON: Joe Biden won the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania, the Associated Press (AP) projected on Saturday (Nov. 7), securing him the 270 Electoral College votes needed to run the White House.
If all the results are confirmed, the Democratic candidate will be the next president of the United States.
AP, Edinson Research, CNN, NBC News and CBS News have called the race in their favor.
Biden, 77, is the oldest candidate ever elected to the White House. His running mate Kamala Harris is the first black woman to become vice president.
Biden spent eight years as Barack Obama’s vice president. His victory comes in his third career for the highest office in the nation.
Harris, who is also the first person of South Asian descent elected to the vice presidency, will become the highest-ranking woman in government, four years after Trump defeated Hilary Clinton.
Live updates on the US elections
Before Pennsylvania, which has 20 electoral votes, neither candidate had accumulated the votes necessary to win the White House four days after Election Day. But Biden’s victories in Michigan and Wisconsin dropped him at 264, meaning he was a battlefield state from becoming president-elect.
Trump, with 214 electoral votes, faced a much bigger hurdle. To get to 270, he needed to claim the four remaining battlefields: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, and Nevada.
There is some uncertainty surrounding Arizona, which has 11 electoral votes.
AP and Fox News have called Arizona for Biden. Some other media outlets, including CNN and NBC News, have refrained from calling Arizona, placing Biden at 253 electoral votes.
Trump made clear on Friday that he will continue to press his unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.
“From the beginning we have said that all legal ballots should be counted and all illegal ballots should not be counted, yet we have encountered resistance to this basic principle from Democrats at all times,” he said in a statement released by his campaign. .
“We will continue this process in all aspects of the law to ensure that the American people have confidence in our government. I will never stop fighting for you and our nation.”
The Trump campaign is pursuing a series of lawsuits in battlefield states that legal experts described as unlikely to alter the outcome of the election.
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The close election has underscored the nation’s deep political divisions, and Biden will likely face a difficult task ruling in deeply polarized Washington.
Republicans could retain control of the United States Senate pending the outcome of several indecisive Senate elections, and they would likely block much of their legislative agenda, including expanding healthcare and fighting climate change.
Biden will also have to deal with a pandemic that has killed more than 235,000 people in the United States and left millions more out of work, even as the country still faces the aftermath of months of race relations riots and police brutality.
