Hail to the New Chief: Race Finally Called As Biden Defeats Trump to Become 46th President of the U.S.

Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., an ordinary Joe from Scranton, Pa., is now officially president-elect of the United States. And Kamala Devi Harris, an Asian and Black woman from California, is the first female vice-president-elect of the United States.

Just before noon Saturday, four days after election day ended in the U.S., Pennsylvania tabulated the state’s last vote that was needed to put Biden over the top.

Biden tweeted that he was honoured he had been chosen “to lead our great country”  and reiterated that he would serve all Americans – not just those who voted for him.

 

 

The final count was 3,345,724 votes of 49.6 per cent of the for Joe Biden,  and 3,311,310 votes or 49.1 per cent for Donald Trump. That meant Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral college votes, added to the 253 votes already won by Biden, raised him over the 270 vote threshold that delivers the presidency. Shortly after Nevada was called for Biden with most of the outstanding states breaking his way.

The news, at last, that Biden has beaten Trump in a hotly contested, close election is bringing both signs of relief and flashes of rage across the country.

Becoming the 46^th president may have been a long hard slog, but the next two months until the inauguration on Jan. 20 will be no walk in the park. There’s still the matter of Trump’s recalcitrance, recounts, lawsuits and protests. It’s a dangerous time.

Trump, who is the first incumbent President to lose since George H.W. Bush in 1992, is still showing no signs of accepting defeat, his Tweets becoming more delusional than usual.

 

President-elect Joe Biden and vice president-elect Kamala Harris  will address the nation tonight at 8 p.m.

 

 

November 6, 2020 – 11:00 a.m.

As a Biden Victory Nears, Trump and His Volatile Supporters Aren’t Accepting Results Quietly

The aftermath, it appears, could be even more messy than the election.

While a Joe Biden victory now seems assured, there’s no indication that President Donald Trump, or millions of his fired-up supporters, are willing to accept defeat.

On Friday morning, Joe Biden moved definitively into the lead in Pennsylvania, which at one point seemed to be swinging in Donald Trump’s favour. Final results are expected later today.

Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes would put Biden well over the top, even without Arizona, Nevada and Georgia. Those states are still very tight but it’s expected that Biden will take them too when the last votes are counted.

Unfortunately, the relief that tens of millions of Americans — and Canadians and much of the rest of the world — will feel when the increasingly volatile Trump  is ousted will be tainted with grim apprehension.

Trump has already warned that he will not go quietly, if at all. He has said that he has no plans to concede. On Thursday, he addressed the nation in a speech that was condemned by many observers, raging without evidence about baseless conspiracy theories involving “tremendous corruption and fraud going on” in the states that he’s losing or lost.

Confidants say he is angry and depressed. He is also dangerous, suggesting that civil disobedience and even violence might be necessary to fight against what he and many of his supporters see as a stolen election.

Even if American institutions are able to contain him and his followers, it’s now been suggested that Trump and his cabal will set up a shadow presidency, fomenting unrest and unruliness through Biden’s presidency.

The danger right now is not just Trump. The danger is an America so torn in two that it will no longer be able to function.

There are tens of millions of people who believe Trump when he says the election has been stolen and that he’s been cheated out of the presidency, despite offering no concrete proof. They’re angry and ready to go to any lengths to protect their champion.

One telling example: former Trump advisor and staunch supporter Steve Bannon yesterday blamed the defeat on Dr. Anthony Fauci  and FBI Director Christopher Wray, saying: “I’d put their heads on pikes, right. I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats, you either get with the programme or you’re gone.”

For his efforts, Bannon was banned permanently from Twitter.

While we wait to celebrate a Biden / Harris victory and the election of the first Asian and African-American woman to the vice-presidency, we can’t stop holding our breath, waiting to see what happens next.

 

 

November 5, 2020 – 10:30 a.m.

Biden on the Verge of Being Declared President as Late Ballots Continue to Stack Up Against Trump

Joe Biden is on the verge of becoming the next president of the United States.

With ballot results finally coming in across the land, it’s likely that the state that will put them over the top to make history is Nevada, with its six electoral college votes.

When he is inaugurated as the 46th President, Biden, 77, will become the oldest president to ever hold the highest office in the U.S.

After surviving the punishing Democratic primaries and remaining strong during the long and often vicious campaign waged by Donald Trump, Biden today took to social media, saying he was “confident we will emerge victorious.”

His running mate, Kamala Harris, who will make history as the first Asian and African-American woman on the ticket of a major party, is also about to become the first ever woman vice-president.

This stunning turnaround comes less than 24 hours after initial results looked like Trump would somehow manage to hold on to the White House.

But even as this tumultuous contest continues to stumble to its inevitably chaotic conclusion, it seems assured that Nevada will put Biden-Harris over the top to make history is the battleground state of Nevada and its seven electoral college votes.

Biden consolidated his lead Wednesday afternoon with a win in Michigan that brought his total number of electoral votes to 253. At the same time, he was also leading in Arizona and Nevada with their combined 17 votes, pretty much sealing the deal and leaving Trump with almost no chance of catching up.

By late afternoon of Nov. 4, Arizona also fell into Biden’s column, leaving only Nevada to be called. State officials there said it could be Thursday Nov. 5 around 10 a.m. before the winner was officially declared.

But even as the Democrats prepared to declare victory, Trump was already making good on his intention to contest the result.

At one point, he even said he’d won the election and that the Democrats were trying to steal it. His campaign has initiated lawsuits in Michigan and Pennsylvania.

In the aftermath of the election, Trump is expected to continue his assault on the results with legal challenges, charges of voter fraud and other irregularities and will likely appeal his case to the Supreme Court.

November 4, 2020 – 1:30 p.m.

Biden Poised to Win Wisconsin, Nevada and Michigan As Desperate Trump Team Begins Filing Lawsuits

In the latest astonishing development of this dizzying back-and-forth U.S. election, Joe Biden has now been projected to win both Wisconsin and Michigan, together accounting for a bountiful haul of 26 electoral college votes.

Donald Trump won the state in 2016 and was counting on it heavily this time around in hopes of securing his re-election bid.

If Biden does go on to win Wisconsin, as well as Nevada and Michigan (where he is projected to win), his path to victory becomes far clearer. He’ll reach the 270 magic number of electoral college votes needed to win the presidency. If that happens, it won’t matter if Trump wins Pennsylvania, where results may not be known until Friday.

True to form, Trump is not taking any of this news gracefully. As almost everyone predicted, he has no plans of leaving the White House quietly and is now resorted to accusing the Democrats of engaging in voter fraud.

His tirades are not only stirring up the chaos surrounding this election but aren’t backed up by anything other than his word.

The Trump campaign team has already filed a suit in Michigan seeking to halt counting of the ballots. And that’s likely just the beginning of his legal manoeuvring that he hopes will keep the winner of this election in doubt for as long as possible.

Meanwhile, in Maine, Susan Collins has held on to her Senate seat. The Republican senator sometimes strayed from the Republican line to present a more moderate approach but she angered progressive Down Easters by voting for Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court. Democrats thought they had a good chance of picking up her Senate seat.

November 4, 2020 – 10 a.m.

How Could It Be This Close? Surprisingly Tight Race Still Undecided as U.S. Election Chaos Continues

How could it be so close?

That’s the question a shocked world is asking this morning as we awake to the awful news that president hopefuls Donald Trump and Joe Biden are gridlocked in a race still to be decided by battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Wisconsin and Maine’s Second Congressional District.

Everybody’s doing the arithmetic, measuring margins, counting on the lagging tabulation of mailed and absentee ballots. Most of the remaining votes are expected go Biden’s way, based on the presumption that more Democrats than Republicans tend to vote that way.

We may not know the answer for days. As it stands, Biden has 227 confirmed electoral votes and would need 43 more to win. Trump has 213 confirmed electoral votes and would need 57 more to win.

 

 

Amid all the chaos and uncertainty, early this morning Biden urged Americans to exercise caution and patience, attributes that are definitely not in their DNA.

Michigan may have results today and could boost Biden on his pathway to the presidency with 16 electoral votes. He’s leading, too, in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Wisconsin.

But it could be late today or even tomorrow before Biden breaks through to the 270 electoral vote gateway to the White House.

 

 

Meanwhile, as expected, Trump made an appearance around 2 a.m. Wednesday morning to pronounce himself the winner and to demand that no more votes be counted because election day was over. “Frankly, we did win this election,” he declared.

Immediately following this dangerous and completely unverified claim to victory, both sides criticized the President for trying to interfere in the democratic process.

“The president’s statement tonight about trying to shut down the counting of duly cast ballots was outrageous, unprecedented and incorrect,” said Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign manager, in a statement.

“The counting will not stop. It will continue until every duly cast vote is counted. Because that is what our laws — the laws that protect every Americans’ constitutional right to vote — require,” she continued.

And so the nail-biting continues and now we’re holding our breath too, to see what happens next.

Will a Trump defeat unleash the unrest of his followers? And if he refuses to concede defeat and instead contests the results all the way to the conservative Supreme Court and wins a ruling in his favour, which would be likely, will the Democratic majority in the U.S. take to the streets?

And if Biden wins fair and square and Trump accepts defeat, how will the new president govern with what looks again to be a Republican Senate majority led by smug adversary Mitch McConnell, who was easily re-elected.

Millions of votes remain to be counted, dozens of questions and scenarios linger.

But here’s the big question this morning: How could you do this, America?

 

November 3 , 2020 – 11:30 pm

No Clear Winner Emerges in Tight U.S. Election; Key States Still Counting Ballots

It wasn’t a Joe Biden blowout. It wasn’t a Donald Trump landslide.

It was, in fact, an unexpectedly and tightly contested election that had a lot of watchers north of the border postponing bedtime to see who would lead America for the next four years.

And still, many went to bed as thousands of ballots remained uncounted, and no winners were declared in key states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. It was unclear how long it would take to count all the ballots but it was expected to go deep into the night, perhaps longer

For many, the most surprising, even shocking, development of the night was that Trump, one of the most disliked presidents in history, not only managed to hang on to the base that supported him in 2016 but slightly expanded it.

Biden, who made a speech before the night was out calling on Americans to be patient as the votes were being counted while assuring his supporters that he is confident in a victory, won big in New York and California. In many states, the cities and suburbs went heavily Democrat while rural counties stuck with Trump. An early lead for Biden in Arizona gave hope that this might narrow Trump’s path to victory.

Following Biden’s speech, Trump tweeted baseless accusations about Democrats attempting to steal the election.

Early on, however, the the results filtered in as expected. Trump won the southern and midwestern Republican strongholds: Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Kansas, Idaho, Wyoming, North Dakota, and South Dakota as well as West Virginia.

At the same time, Biden performed well in the northern and eastern Democratic strongholds and west coast states: New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, Delaware, Illinois, California, Colorado, Oregon, New Mexico and Washington state.

Florida began as the early big prize Tuesday night. Winning the 29 electoral votes of the Sunshine State would mean Biden needed only one more swing state to win. For Trump, losing Florida would mean he had no clear path to keeping the White House.

It was a nail-biter in Florida all evening, flipping back and forth county by county, with no winner declared even when well over 90 per cent of the vote was in. But as the night wore on and Trump finally pulled off a win in his home state of Florida, the focus continued on other tight key states including North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Texas.

Ohio was another race analysts were watching closely because no Republican has won the presidency in modern times without winning it as well. While Biden led early in Ohio, it slowly evaporated and the night closed with the Republicans in the lead.

So while no president was declared on Election Night, one clear winner that has emerged is the American people. They voted in record numbers. Even before election day, 100 million Americans had cast ballots by mail or advance polls. And Election Day was mostly calm, without incident, with none of the predicted violence or intimidation.

After all the ugliness and hostility of the never-ending campaign — and of the last four years — the country managed to pull off a calm, normal election. What will happen in the days and weeks to come when all the results are in and the winners are declared and the losers concede (or contest)? And then, in the years ahead? That remains to be seen.

RELATED:

Mourning in America? Canadians Are Closely Watching a U.S. Election that Could Turn Very Ugly

Swing State Dispatch: Navigating Pennsylvania’s Political Divide For One Last Voter Push

What the Experts Say About the Aging Brain and Its Role in the 2020 American Presidential Election