By all accounts, Joe Biden has done it.
With a new round of votes having been counted overnight in Georgia and Pennsylvania — and with the outstanding ballots remaining in the latter state expected to heavily tilt Democratic — we feel comfortable enough to now announce:
Joe Biden will be the next President of the United States.
We aren’t the only ones, either.
Business Insider has printed BIDEN WINS on its home page, projecting him to now possess 273 electoral votes after his victory in Pennsylvania.
For all his bluster, and threats of lawsuits, and claims of non-existent cheating, Donald J. Trump looks like he will be a one-term president.
Vox, meanwhile, has done the same, as you can see via the graphic down below, as well as via this passage from its lead story:
Joe Biden — a former two-term vice president under Barack Obama and 36-year Senate veteran — will be the 46th president of the United States.
His running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, will become the first woman, first African American, and first Indian American to serve as vice president.
The election was not decided on November 3 because three of the states Biden ended up winning – Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – had to wait a few more days to count all their mail-in ballots.
Others, including Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina, have yet to be called.
Trump leads in North Carolina and is making up ground in Arizona, though he trails narrowly. Biden has taken a very slim lead in Georgia and remains ahead in Nevada.
But it’s all academic. With his Pennsylvania victory, Biden has the 273 electoral votes needed to win.
Both Biden and Trump addressed the nation many hours after the polls closed on Tuesday, each delivering a very different kind of message.
“Keep the faith guys, we’re going to win this,” the Democratic nominee told viewers from Wilmington, Delaware.
“We knew this was going to go long – but who knew we were going to go into tomorrow morning, maybe even longer?” he added.
“We need to be patient and it ain’t over until every vote is counted, every ballot is counted. It’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who’s won the election.”
“That’s the decision of the American people.”
President Trump, conversely, made baseless accusations about voter fraud and showed a total lack of comprehension for how elections work.
We’re not even gonna print his dangerous and misleading quotes on the topic here.
We’ll just say that mail-in ballots and absentee ballots are counted every single year, often well into Election Night and beyond.
There were just more of them than ever before this year because, in case Trump hasn’t noticed, we’re in the middle of a global pandemic.
Biden won over three million more votes than Trump across the nation as of Friday, a lead that’s likely to grow as states finalize their results in the coming days and weeks.
He earned the most raw votes in American Presidential history.
If Biden’s current leads also hold in Nevada, Georgia and Arizona, he will finish this election with 306 electoral votes, the same as Donald Trump earned in 2016 when he defeated Hillary Clinton.
With Biden’s victory, Trump also becomes the 12th president to lose reelection – and just the fourth to do so since the end of World War II and the first since George H.W. Bush in 1992.
Kamala Harris, meanwhile, becomes the first African-American woman to be voted Vice President, as well as the first person of Indian descent to hold this position.
For the record, though, Trump is not about to leave office quietly.
“The election is not over,” claims the President.
Consider the rest of the statement just released by his lead attorney;
Indeed, things will continue to be ugly and maybe even a little confusing over the next few days.
But let’s be patient. And let’s just look forward instead to January 20, 2021.
On that date, Joe Biden will be sworn in as President.