America has chosen Democrat Joe Biden as its 46th president, CNN projects, turning at a time of national crisis to a man whose character was forged by aching personal tragedy and who is pledging to restore calm and truth in American government after Donald Trump's, exhausting and manic single term.
In a written statement after networks called the race, Biden, who is expected to address the American people later Saturday, said he was "honored and humbled" by the trust the American people have placed in him.
"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. "With the campaign over, it's time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation."
We are the United States of America. And there's nothing we can't do, if we do it together."
Biden, who turns 78 at the end of this month, will become the oldest president when he is inaugurated in January in the midst of the worst public health emergency in 100 years, the deepest economic slump since the 1930s and a national reckoning on racism and police brutality that is still unresolved.
Supporters poured into the streets across the country in a moment of catharsis to celebrate the President-elect's victory, that also means that California Sen. Kamala Harris, his running mate, will make history as the first woman, the first Black person and the first person of Southeast Asian descent to become vice president.
His election will end Trump's tumultuous hold on Washington and condemn the Republican, who has had a lifelong obsession with winning, to the ranks of chief executives who lost after a single term.
In a cinematic twist, it was Biden's boyhood state of Pennsylvania that put him over the 270 electoral vote threshold and delivered the White House. Trump had held a wide lead over Biden on the night of the election, but as election officials counted hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots, the race shifted dramatically in Biden's favor, infuriating Trump and his allies, who knew the President's path to the White House was over without the commonwealth.
Joe Biden stops in front of his childhood home on July 9, 2020 in Scranton, Pennsylvania.That the Keystone State was the last hurdle in Biden's path to the White House was a fitting end to a hard-fought race given that the former vice president has long cultivated his image as "middle-class Joe" from Scranton. In a visit that now seems almost prophetic, he had made a final trip to his childhood home in the city on Election Day after spending much of the campaign promising to prioritize the livelihoods of the many working-class voters whom Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in her 2016 bid.
On one of the living room walls in the house where he grew up, he wrote: "From this House to the White House with the Grace of God," signing his name and the date,"11.3.2020."
In the final days of the race, Biden's team redoubled their efforts to rebuild the Democrats' "blue wall" -- and that gambit paid off with Biden winning Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, according to CNN projections, while holding Minnesota, which the President made a priority in his reelection push.
As he watched his hopes of reelection being strangled with each tranche of votes in Pennsylvania, Trump lashed out on Twitter during the tense vote count, attempting to undermine democratic institutions with demands like "STOP THE COUNT."
The President falsely claimed the election was being stolen from him as many mail-in ballots, which were often counted after Election Day votes, landed in the column of his opponent.
Facing a deeply polarized country, Biden had tried to project comity and patience, and his desire to unite America.
"There will not be blue states and red states when we win. Just the United States of America," Biden said Wednesday afternoon. "We are not enemies. What brings us together as Americans is so much stronger than anything that can tear us apart."
Biden speaks to his supporters at a drive-in rally on Wednesday, November 4.The victory of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., who forged a 50-year career as senator and vice president from his Delaware homestead, is a full circle moment that comes more than 30 years after his first presidential campaign.
Biden's life of tragedy — he buried his first wife and his first daughter, and his adult son Beau, who died in 2015, survived two brain aneurysms and stayed in politics after two failed White House campaigns — shaped his image as a man of resilience and decency. Those qualities made him America's choice as a president who could shoulder the grief of a nation traumatized by the loss of more than 234,000 citizens to Covid-19, with millions unemployed in an environment of intense economic uncertainty.
Biden's victory means that Trump's rage-filled presidency — powered by his nationalism, toxic racial appeals, incessant lying and assault on democratic institutions — may come to be seen as a historical aberration rather than a new normal.
But Biden faces a huge task in uniting the country and addressing America's disillusionment with establishment figures like him, which led to the current President's political rise as an outsider who was elected on a wave of populism in 2016.
Biden is pledging to restore America's "soul," which he says was compromised by Trump's divisive approach, and to purge the President's "America First" foreign policy and rebuild Washington's traditional position of global leadership.
But Democrats dreaming of a "New Deal" style era of reform on health care, the economy, climate change, race and possibly even expanding the Supreme Court will see their ambitions tempered by their lack of gains in the balance of power in Congress and the need for the Biden administration to halt a pandemic that is getting worse. Health experts at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation project say the virus could claim nearly 400,000 Americans lives by the time Biden is sworn in. (CNN).