Joe Biden spent eight years in the White House as Barack Obama’s vice president. His victory comes in the third race for the highest office in the country.
Democratic Joe Biden wins over the White House, defeat Mr Donald Trump, end a US-political presidency that shocked the world and divided the US as it had never had in decades, the Associated Press reports.
KEY POINTS
- Democratic Joe Biden wins over the White House, defeat Mr Donald Trump.
- Biden is the oldest man to win the presidency – having failed twice in his long political career.
- Harris will make history as the first black woman to enter the White House in one of two top jobs.
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The Associated Press, CNN, NBC News and the CBS News, who had taken 77 years in top position in the state by state count which decides presidency, called a run in Biden’s favours just before 11.30 a.m. (1630 GMT), as an insurmountable lead in Pennsylvania.
There was no immediate reaction to Trump’s announcement, but as Biden’s lead increased in the vote count after Tuesday’s election, the Republican leader falsely claimed that he had won.
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Earlier on Saturday, on his way to his golf course in Virginia, he tweeted this again and again: “I won this election, a lot!”
This outcome now condemns Trump, 74 years old, to becoming the first one-time President since the beginning of the 1990s in George H. W. Bush reign.
Biden, who received more than 74 million votes, hid with his partner, Kamala Harris, in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware.
Late on Friday, he delivered a speech urging Americans to “come together as a nation and heal.”
The Secret Service has already begun to intensify its security bubble around those who have been elected president, who will open on January 20.
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A centurion who promised to bring peace to Washington after four turbulent years under Trump, Biden is the oldest man to win the presidency – having failed twice in his long political career before being elected vice president to 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 one of two top jobs. At 56, she is seen as a leading contender after Biden and is seeking to become America’s first female president.
The US election and the COVID crisis
Overall voting on Tuesday broke records after a deep polarization campaign complicated by the Covid-19 epidemic that left 160 million people in the United States.
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Biden won his victory by recapturing what Trump, the traditional democratic region of central and western Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, had overturned in 2016 with his powerful appeal to white, working-class voters.
With Pennsylvania in the bag, Biden has now amassed 273 of the 538 poll college votes, clearing 270 bars, making it unlikely Trump will win a second term even if he wins a second unannounced state.
Biden was in the heat of the heat in Arizona, Nevada and Georgia, a southern state that did not vote for the Democratic presidential candidate after Bill Clinton in 1992.
The race results in Congress indicate that Biden will face a split legislature, with his Democrats having a majority in the House and Republicans sticking to the Senate – and that is likely to change.
The controversy in Congress over the delayed economic stimulus package for Americans affected by the fall of the coronavirus crisis will immediately complicate Biden’s ruling ability in Washington.
