Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. is set to become the 46th president of the United States on Saturday, promising to re-establish political normalcy and a spirit of national integrity to confront raging health and economic crises.
Biden’s victory came after more than three days of political drama as election officials sorted through a surge of mail-in votes that delayed the processing of some ballots. Biden surpassed 270 Electoral College votes with a win in Pennsylvania, as per the reports from AP.
Biden, who would turn 78 this month staked his candidacy less on any distinctive political ideology than on focussing on a broad coalition of voters around the notion that Trump posed an existential threat to American democracy. The strategy was successful, which helped in pivotal victories in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, onetime Democratic strongholds that had flipped to Trump in 2016.
The result also provided a history-making moment for Biden’s running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, who will become the first woman in history to serve as vice president of US
As Biden moved closer to victory, President Donald Trump and his political deputies spent the day continuing to hover baseless conspiracy theories about the legitimacy of the election, and Republicans in several states threatened or took legal action aimed at decelerating or halting the counting of ballots. But there were also mounting indications that Trump would not have the full support of his party if he persisted in a scorched-earth effort to impede the electoral process.
Earlier on Friday, Biden surpassed Trump in the vote count in both states of Pennsylvania and Georgia.
Apart from Pennsylvania and Georgia, as well as in Arizona and Nevada, Biden was behind Trump by a sufficiently wide margin to completely exclude any possibility — however remote — that the count could still turn against him. On Friday evening, Biden was ahead in Pennsylvania and Georgia by less than 1 percentage vote count, and by not much more than that in the two Western states.
