Joe Biden is projected to become the next president of the United States after an election that was historic, messy, chaotic and uncertain.
With him in the White House will be senator Kamala Harris as vice president – the first woman, and the first African American and Asian American person, ever to hold the position.
The decisive call came in Pennsylvania, which gave Biden the necessary electoral votes to clinch the presidency.
Biden could further pad his Electoral College victory in Arizona and Nevada where he leads. Biden also overtook Trump in Georgia on Friday but votes in the state will be recounted due to the small number of ballots separating each candidate. North Carolina does not yet have a projected winner but Trump is expected to win the state.
“One of the things I’m especially proud of is how well we’ve done all across America,” Biden said in a speech on Friday night as his vote total continued to climb over Trump’s.
“We are going to be the first Democrat to win Arizona in 24 years. We are going to be the first Democrat to win Georgia in 28 years.
And we re-built the Blue Wall in the middle of the country that crumbled just four years ago. Pennsylvania. Michigan. Wisconsin. The heartland of this nation.”
Biden had already flipped two other states that Trump won in 2016: Michigan and Wisconsin, reclaiming Democrats’ Rust Belt “blue wall.” The former vice president also decisively won the most total votes, besting Trump by about four million.
For months, Trump had been laying the groundwork to reject the election results if they didn’t go his way.
He not only tried to undermine mail-in voting but claimed that if the winner wasn’t declared on election night, the results would be suspect – even though some state rules allow mail-in ballots to be received after election day.
And sure enough, Trump did exactly as he said he would.
“Frankly, we did win this election,” Trump said – baselessly – in the early hours of Wednesday morning. In reality, millions of ballots had yet to be counted, a number of key swing states were still in limbo and no news organisation had yet projected a winner.
He also tweeted that Democrats were trying to “STEAL the Election” and wrote: “Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!” No votes were cast after the polls closed so this was little more than a truism.
On Thursday, he held a news conference in which he – again, baselessly – claimed that there was vote fraud, without providing any evidence.
Federal Election Commission commissioner Ellen Weintraub confirmed on Saturday that there is no evidence of any wrongdoing.
