Joe Biden has won the 2020 presidential election, the Associated Press projected Saturday, sending President Trump to a bitter defeat four years after he shocked the world by winning the White House with a victory over Hillary Clinton.
Biden crossed the 270-vote threshold in the Electoral College on Saturday after the AP called Pennsylvania for him. He was also able to capture Wisconsin, Michigan, and Arizona states that Trump carried in 2016.
Other states remain too close to call, and the Trump campaign has filed multiple lawsuits to contest the legitimacy of certain ballots. The fate of those challenges was obscured Thursday after Biden was projected to have won the Electoral College.
Biden now holds the record for the most number of votes cast for any presidential candidate in history — more than 73 million — shattering the previous mark (69,500,000) set by Barack Obama in 2008. He leads Trump by nearly 4 million votes nationwide.
The former vice president, who turns 78 this month, won his bid for the White House on his third attempt, becoming the oldest person ever elected president in the U.S. His running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., is the first Black woman and first Asian American elected vice president in U.S. history.
Trump, however, has signaled that he is not likely to concede defeat quickly. In a Wednesday tweet, the president declared without evidence that he had won in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina.
“We have claimed, for Electoral Vote purposes, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (which won’t allow legal observers) the State of Georgia, and the State of North Carolina, each one of which has a BIG Trump lead,” Trump wrote in tweets that were quickly flagged on Twitter as containing disputed or misleading election information. “Additionally, we hereby claim the State of Michigan if, in fact, there was a large number of secretly dumped ballots as has been widely reported!”
Hours earlier, the Trump campaign announced it would seek a recount in Wisconsin, another state the AP said Biden had won.
On Thursday, as it became clear that his early lead in states like Pennsylvania and Georgia was eroding as more ballots were tabulated, Trump posted a dramatic tweet that read, “STOP THE COUNT!”
Then in a White House speech without precedent in American history, Trump flailed at the media, pollsters, election officials, mail-in voting, judges, and Democrat-led U.S. cities Thursday evening, as his rival Joe Biden continued to inch toward a win in the 2020 election.
“If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” Trump said, though no state allows the counting of illegally cast votes. “If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.”
Trump
The president portrayed the counting of legally cast mail-in ballots as improper — an assault on American democracy by the president himself.
“Our numbers started miraculously getting whittled away, in secret,” Trump said, again without evidence. “This is a case where they’re trying to steal an election. They’re trying to rig an election. And we can’t let that happen.”
Biden’s election was as much about rallying support among Democrats, independents and even some Republicans with a message of unity as it was a repudiation of Trump, whose approval rating, according to Gallup, never hit 50 percent.
In poll after poll leading up to Election Day, large majorities of voters disapproved of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 234,000 Americans and infected more than 9.5 million in the U.S., including him.
Throughout the pandemic, Trump was accused of downplaying the virus, mocking Biden for wearing a mask. He claimed that the United States is “rounding the corner” on the pandemic at a time when cases and deaths from COVID-19 continue to rise.
As the race for the White House pushed into October and November, the country set a string of new daily records for coronavirus cases and saw a dramatic spike in states that Trump needed to win to secure his reelection.
Originally Published by Yahoo News
