Joe Biden won the White House race against Donald Trump, US media reported on Saturday, a victory that marks a historic turning point for America and the world after a four-year split under the Republican president.
After four days of suspense, the Democratic candidate and former vice-president of Barack Obama was given the winner with at least 273 voters, thanks to a success in the key state of Pennsylvania, according to major American media, including CNN and the New York Times. He will become the 46th President of the United States.
For the first time in their history, the country will have a vice president, Kamala Harris, 56, who will also be the first black person to hold the office.
Donald Trump has not admitted defeat at this point, and it is unclear whether he will continue to challenge the results on the grounds of fraud, unsubstantiated at this point, when his own side already seemed resigned to four years of Biden’s presidency.
He is the first US president to be deprived of a second term since Republican George H. W. Bush in 1992.
Whatever Donald Trump says, the date of the handover is written into the Constitution: January 20 at noon. By then, states will certify their results, and the 538 electorate voters will meet in December to formally nominate their president.
“The US authorities are perfectly capable of expelling the intruders from the White House,” said Joe Biden spokesman Andrew Bates this week.
Joe Biden, who served as Barack Obama’s staunch vice president from 2009 to 2017, had bet that a moderate campaign focused on workers would give Democrats back the keys to the White House, and the gamble has clearly paid off.
He took back from Donald Trump three industrial states that had escaped Hillary Clinton four years ago: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, “the heart of this nation,” he said Friday evening.
And he was ahead of Mr. Trump in Georgia, Nevada and Arizona on Saturday, according to partial results.
The count has been prolonged since Tuesday in these states because of the exceptional volume of ballots sent by mail, a method that had been encouraged by the health context. In Pennsylvania, those ballots were 80% in favor of Joe Biden, which allowed him to erase the Republican’s initial advance.
Overall, despite the pandemic, turnout has reached an all-time high in the modern era: around 66% of voters cast their ballots, according to the US Elections Project.
Joe Biden got more than 74 million votes, compared to 70 million for Donald Trump, in total in the country.
This “popular vote” has no value in the American electoral system, but it does, according to Democrats, strengthen the political legitimacy of the next president.
“President-elect Biden has a strong mandate,” Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi said on Friday.
But his power would be greatly constrained if the upper house of Congress, the Senate, remained Republican-controlled. The suspense will last until January 5, the date of the second round of a senatorial in Georgia.
