[ Joe Biden wins US election after four tumultuous years of Trump
presidency.] [[link removed]]

BIDEN WINS   [[link removed]]

 

Lauren Gambino
November 7, 2020
The Guardian
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_ Joe Biden wins US election after four tumultuous years of Trump
presidency. _

Thousands poured into downtown D.C. to celebrate Biden’s
presidential win. , Tyrone Turner / DCist/WAMU

 

Joe Biden wins US election after four tumultuous years of Trump
presidency

Joe Biden has been elected the 46th president of the United States,
achieving a decades-long political ambition and denying Donald Trump
[[link removed]] a second term after
a deeply divisive presidency defined by a once-in-a-century pandemic,
economic turmoil and social unrest.

Biden won the presidency by clinching Pennsylvania and its 20
electoral votes, after several days of painstaking vote-counting
following record turnout across the country. The win in Pennsylvania,
which the Associated Press called at 11.25am ET 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.

“In the face of unprecedented obstacles, a record number of
Americans voted, proving once again that democracy beats deep in the
heart of America,” Biden said in a statement after the result was
called on Saturday, exactly 48 years after he was first elected to the
US Senate.

“With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh
rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation. It’s time for
America to unite and to heal.”

The president-elect, joined by his running mate
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Kamala Harris, was expected to address the nation later on Saturday.

In electing Biden, the American people have replaced a real estate
developer and reality TV star who had no previous political experience
with a veteran of Washington who has spent more than 50 years in
public life, and who twice ran unsuccessfully for president. Trump is
the first incumbent to lose re-election since 1992, when Bill Clinton
defeated George HW Bush.

Despite a long-standing tradition of peacefully accepting the outcome
of US elections, Trump refused to concede and threatened unspecified
legal challenges regarding the vote counting process.

Biden’s victory, fueled by women and people of color who spent the
last four years resisting and mobilizing against Trump, was celebrated
as a repudiation of a president who shattered democratic norms and
stoked racial and cultural grievance. Cheers, honking and dancing
erupted in emotional displays of joy on the streets of major cities
across the country, including in the nation’s capital, where Biden
will be sworn into office on 20 January.

However, the nation’s deep divisions were laid bare as pro-Trump
protesters continued to claim that the election had been stolen from a
president who millions still view as a defender of “law and order”
at home and of “America first” abroad.

With turnout projected to reach its highest point in a century despite
the pandemic, 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 a historic milestone
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for Harris, 56, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants who
will become the first woman – and the first woman of color – to
serve as vice-president. Her presence on the Democratic ticket was a
rejoinder to Trump, who spent four years scapegoating migrants and
attacking women and communities of color.

The outcome threatened to send convulsions across the country, as
Trump and his campaign continued to make baseless claims of voter
fraud and vowed to challenge the results.

“Legal votes decide who is president, not the news media,” the
president said in a statement, which was sent while he played golf at
his golf course in Virginia.

Trump’s statement included a litany of unfounded assertions about
the vote-counting process, and attempted to undermine faith in the
integrity of the electoral system by advancing a conspiracy about
“legal” and “illegal” votes.

At 77, Biden 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.

Biden won by reclaiming key states that make up the so-called “blue
wall” that Trump knocked down in 2016, and by expanding Democrats’
reach in places like Arizona, a reliably conservative state that has
progressively slipped away from Republicans
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years. According to the Associated Press, Biden won Wisconsin,
Michigan and Arizona.

National polling showed Biden with a consistent lead as Americans grew
increasingly frustrated with Trump’s erratic handling of the
pandemic, particularly in the weeks after his own diagnosis and
hospitalization from the virus.

Though Biden received nearly 75m votes, the most for any presidential
candidate in history, it remained uncertain whether the nation had
delivered the sweeping denunciation of Trump and Trumpism that the
former vice-president envisioned when he declared the election a
“battle for the soul of the nation”.

As of Saturday, Trump had garnered more than 70m votes, more than
Barack Obama won in his historic 2008 victory, which remained the
record until this year.

Predictions of a competitive race in Iowa, Ohio and Texas fell short
as Trump proved unexpectedly resilient in battleground states. In the
Senate, Republicans were increasingly confident in their ability to
maintain control of the chamber, setting the stage for blistering
political battles with a future Biden administration and dimming hopes
of swift action on progressive priorities on the economy, climate and
immigration.

The dynamic will test Biden’s enduring faith in bipartisanship,
despite having witnessed the hardball tactics of his former Senate
colleagues during the eight years he served as Barack Obama’s
vice-president. This could also strain the fragile detente with
progressives in his own party, who are demanding he meet Republican
opposition with a similar take-no-prisoners approach.

A fresh start for America ...

... as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris win the US election. The American
people have disavowed four years of a thuggish presidency. They have
chosen decency over dysfunction, fact over fiction, truth over lies,
and empathy over cruelty. They have rejected the last four years of
ugliness, divisiveness, racism and sustained assaults on
constitutional democracy. And even as Trump plots legal challenges and
levies unfounded claims of fraud, it is clear America is moving on.

Now, the real work begins.

Removing Trump from the White House is one thing – fixing America is
another. Many of the systemic issues that afflict the country will
remain in place once he leaves Pennsylvania Avenue. Two eight-year
Democratic presidencies over the last 30 years have not significantly
impacted these issues. A stark racial wealth gap, school segregation,
corrosive inequality, a climate crisis and a democratic deficit at the
heart of America’s electoral college are but some of the issues that
confront the new president.

With the Trump administration drawing to a close, we welcome the
opportunity to refocus our journalism on the opportunities that lie
ahead for America: the opportunity to fix a broken healthcare system,
to restore the role of science in government, to repair global
alliances, and to address the corrosive racial bias in our schools,
criminal justice system and other institutions. We will report on the
massive economic transition needed to stem climate change and we will
continue to question the unchecked power of corporations and Big Tech.


But we can’t do this on our own. We need your support to carry on
this essential work. We rely to an ever greater extent on our readers,
both for the moral force to continue doing journalism at a time like
this and for the financial strength to facilitate that reporting.

We believe every one of us deserves equal access to fact-based news
and analysis. We’ve decided to keep Guardian journalism free for all
readers, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay.
This is made possible thanks to the support we receive from readers
across America in all 50 states. IF YOU CAN, SUPPORT THE GUARDIAN FROM
AS LITTLE AS $1 – AND IT ONLY TAKES A MINUTE. THANK YOU.

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