While Donald Trump was on the golf course, Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral college votes were declared for former Vice President Joseph R. Biden and his running mate Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) putting the Democratic team over the 270 threshold. Mr. Biden will become the 46th President of the United States and Ms. Harris will be the first woman and person of color to be Vice President.
Joe Biden won the presidency by clinching Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral votes, after days of painstaking vote counting following record turnout across the country. The win in Pennsylvania, which the Associated Press called at 11:25am EST on Saturday with 99% of the votes counted, took Biden’s electoral college vote to 284, surpassing the 270 needed to win the White House.
The American people have replaced a real estate developer and reality TV star who had no political experience with a veteran of Washington who has spent more than 50 years in public life and twice ran unsuccessfully for president. Trump is now the first incumbent to lose re-election since 1992, when Bill Clinton defeated George H W Bush.
In a statement, Trump refused to concede to Biden and said his campaign would pursue unspecified legal challenges regarding the results.
With turnout projected to reach its highest point in a century, a fearful and anxious nation elected a candidate who promised to govern not as a Democrat but as an “American president” and vowed to be a unifying force after four years of upheaval.
The result also marked the historic rise of Kamala Harris, who will be the first woman and the first woman of color to serve as vice-president in American history.
The outcome threatened to send convulsions across the country, as Trump’s campaign made baseless claims of voter fraud and vowed to challenge the results.
Biden, 77, is set to become America’s oldest president. His triumph came more than 48 hours after polls closed on election day, as officials in key states worked furiously to tally ballots amid an unprecedented surge in mail-in voting due to the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 230,000 people and infected millions.
A father and husband who buried his first wife and his infant daughter in 1972 after they were killed in a car crash, and decades later buried his adult son after he died from brain cancer in 2015, Biden sought to empathize with Americans who lost loved ones to the coronavirus.
On a personal note, we here at Stars Hollow and Docudharma are mourning the loss of our dear son, brother, friend and confidant ek hornbeck but this win for America eases his loss just a little.