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You are here: Home / Breaking News / BIDEN BEATS TRUMP AND WILL BE 46TH PRESIDENT (UPDATE 1)

BIDEN BEATS TRUMP AND WILL BE 46TH PRESIDENT (UPDATE 1)

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Editor’s Note: This post will be updated all day with media, Twitter and blog reaction. Refresh TMV to see the latest. UPDATES will be placed under this story’s first few paragraphs and dated. Scroll down to see the latest update.

CNN has officially projected Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 Presidential election:

Joe Biden will become the 46th president of the United States, CNN projects, after a victory in the state where he was born put him over the 270 electoral votes needed to win.

With Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes, Biden now has a total of 273 electoral votes.

Before becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, Biden served as vice president under former President Barack Obama. He is also Delaware’s longest-serving senator.

Throughout his campaign, Biden has argued that the “soul of the nation” is at stake, and has promised that he would seek to heal a country fractured by Trump’s presidency.

And history was also made in two other areas. Kamala Harris has become the first woman to serve as Vice President of the United States, the first South Asian-American and the first African-American to serve in that post.

Kamala Harris will be the United States’ next vice president, CNN projects.

She will be the first woman to hold the office. She will also be the nation’s first Black and South Asian vice president.

Harris, who has represented California in the Senate since 2017, is the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, and she grew up attending a Black Baptist church and a Hindu temple.

She was the first Indian-American and second Black woman to serve as a senator.

UPDATE: 9:15 a.m. PST
New York Times:

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was elected the 46th president of the United States on Saturday, promising to restore political normalcy and a spirit of national unity to confront raging health and economic crises, and making Donald J. Trump a one-term president after four years of tumult in the White House.

Mr. Biden’s victory amounted to a repudiation of Mr. Trump by millions of voters exhausted with his divisive conduct and chaotic administration, and was delivered by an unlikely alliance of women, people of color, old and young voters and a sliver of disaffected Republicans. Mr. Trump is the first incumbent to lose re-election in more than a quarter-century.

The result also provided a history-making moment for Mr. Biden’s running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, who will become the first woman to serve as vice president.

He offered a mainstream Democratic agenda, yet it was less his policy platform than his biography to which many voters gravitated. Seeking the nation’s highest office a half-century after his first campaign, Mr. Biden — a candidate in the late autumn of his career — presented his life of setback and recovery to voters as a parable for a wounded country.

The race, which concluded after four tense days of vote-counting in a handful of battlegrounds, was a singular referendum on Mr. Trump in a way no president’s re-election has been in modern times. He coveted the attention, and voters who either adored him or loathed him were eager to render judgment on his tenure. Americans rarely turn incumbent presidents out of office, but from the beginning to the end of the race, Mr. Biden made the president’s character central to his campaign.

This unrelenting focus propelled Mr. Biden to victory in historically Democratic strongholds in the industrial Midwest, with Mr. Biden forging a coalition of suburbanites and big-city residents to claim at least three states his party lost in 2016.

Yet even as they turned Mr. Trump out of office, voters sent a more uncertain message about the left-of-center platform Mr. Biden ran on as Democrats lost seats in the House and made only modest gains in the Senate. The divided judgment — a rare example of ticket splitting in partisan times — demonstrated that, for many voters, their disdain for the president was as personal as it was political.

Even in defeat, though, Mr. Trump demonstrated his enduring appeal to many white voters and his intense popularity in rural areas, underscoring the deep national divisions that Mr. Biden has vowed to heal.

With his triumph, Mr. Biden, who turns 78 later this month, fulfilled his decades-long ambition in his third bid for the White House, becoming the oldest person elected president. A pillar of Washington who was first elected amid the Watergate scandal, and who prefers political consensus over combat, Mr. Biden will lead a nation and a Democratic Party that have become far more ideological since his arrival in the capital in 1973.

NBC News:

Joe Biden became president-elect Saturday after winning the pivotal state of Pennsylvania, NBC News projected.

The former vice president amassed 273 Electoral College votes after winning Pennsylvania’s 20 electors, according to NBC News, surpassing the 270 needed to win the White House and defeat President Donald Trump.

Biden’s victory capped one of the longest and most tumultuous campaigns in modern history, in which he maintained an aggressive focus on Trump’s widely criticized handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. A majority of voters said rising coronavirus cases were a significant factor in their vote, according to early results from the NBC News Exit Poll of early and Election Day voters.

Biden regularly criticized Trump as unfit for office and positioned his campaign as a “battle for the soul of America.” He promised from the outset of his run to heal and unite the country if he won, and made central to his closing message a pledge to represent both those who voted for him as well as those who didn’t when he got to the White House.

As president, Biden will immediately be confronted with a bitterly divided nation in the throes of a pandemic that has already killed 236,000 Americans. Trump has exacerbated the split by minimizing the effects of the pandemic, and has not even said whether he would recognize the outcome of the election.

He will also have to corral a fractious Democratic Party with unresolved tensions between its progressive and centrist wings.

Biden, who turns 78 on Nov. 20 and will be the oldest incoming president in U.S. history, first ran for the nation’s highest office more than 30 years ago. A longtime moderate, he has stressed bipartisanship for decades, and his long Senate career was typified by his willingness to work across the aisle with Republican colleagues.

Heading into Saturday, Biden led Trump 253 to 214 in the projected Electoral College vote tally tracked by NBC News. Biden had higher vote totals in four key states — Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania. But all four remained rated by NBC News Decision

Los Angeles Times:

It is rare for sitting presidents to lose at the polls. Incumbents seeking a second term have won 17 of 24 times since 1860, a better than 70% success rate. The last president to lose his reelection bid was George H.W. Bush in 1992.

But Trump faced powerful countervailing forces: a once-in-a-century pandemic, the resulting economic collapse, and a wrenching debate over the country’s painful history of racial discrimination.

Alone among modern presidents, Trump’s approval rating never surpassed 50% in a reliable opinion survey — his provocative behavior, racist comments and trampling of presidential norms ensured that. But he also never tried to broaden his support, focusing on his base among conservative, mostly white, rural and exurban voters — many of them thrilled by his outrageous antics — while largely ignoring, or antagonizing, others.

His cavalier handling of the coronavirus — which has killed more than 235,000 Americans and sent millions more to the hospital — proved his undoing in the way the Vietnam War ended the career of President Johnson, the Iranian hostage crisis damaged President Carter, and a limp economy hurt Bush. All either lost or gave up their reelection hopes in great part because they appeared to be overmatched by events.

Even so, Biden’s victory was hard-won and came only after a days-long and divisive counting of the votes, brought on by the exigencies of the pandemic, which led many voters to cast ballots by mail. Also contributing were the machinations of Trump and his supporters, who blocked measures in several key states that would have allowed those mail ballots to be processed more quickly.

Drudge Report headline: “YOU’RE FIRED!”
The Daily Beast:

Joe Biden was declared the 46th president of the United States on Saturday morning, winning the bitter campaign he has described as “a battle for the soul of the nation” after four tense days of counting—and making incumbent Donald Trump a one-term president.

The election of Biden, a former two-term vice president and an icon of the Senate for nearly four decades, is a restoration of Democratic power in the White House after four years in the political wilderness. By defeating the president, Biden has realized the hopes of supporters who believed he was the best candidate to win back the disenchanted white suburban and working-class voters who had sent Trump to the White House four years ago, and to build a winning coalition that embraced the Democratic Party’s racial and generational diversity.

But with control of the U.S. Senate on the verge of slipping from the party’s grasp, and with hopes of an electoral landslide having evaporated early on Election Night, Biden’s victory is far from the stunning national repudiation of Trumpism—and of the bigotry, cruelty, cronyism, and incompetence that came to define it—that many Democrats had hoped for.

…At the time the race was called, Trump was doing what he spent so much of his presidency doing: golfing at his eponymous club in northern Virginia.

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