Biden and Harris Win The White House

 Democrat Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump to become the 46th president of the United States on Saturday, positioning himself to lead a nation gripped by a historic pandemic and a confluence of economic and social turmoil.

His victory came after more than three days of uncertainty as election officials sorted through a surge of mail-in votes that delayed processing. Biden crossed the winning threshold of 270 Electoral College votes with a win in Pennsylvania.

Trump refused to concede, threatening further legal action on ballot counting.

Biden, 77, staked his candidacy less on any distinctive political ideology than on galvanizing a broad coalition of voters around the notion that Trump posed an existential threat to American democracy. The strategy proved effective, resulting in pivotal victories in Michigan and Wisconsin as well as Pennsylvania, onetime Democratic bastions that had flipped to Trump in 2016.

Biden’s victory was a repudiation of Trump’s divisive leadership and the president-elect now inherits a deeply polarized nation grappling with foundational questions of racial justice and economic fairness while in the grips of a virus that has killed more than 236,000 Americans and reshaped the norms of everyday life.

Biden, in a statement, declared it was time for the battered nation “to unite and to heal.”

“With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation,” he said. “There’s nothing we can’t do if we do it together.”

Biden was on track to win the national popular vote by more than 4 million, a margin that could grow as ballots continue to be counted.

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Written by Associated Press writers Will Weissert in Wilmington, Delaware and Jill Colvin and Lisa Mascaro in Washington contributed to this report. Read the full article here. 

President-elect Joe Biden will address the nation Saturday night for the first time since multiple major news outlets projected he would win the battleground state of Pennsylvania, giving him more than the 270 electoral votes needed to unseat Donald Trump and take the White House.  

The former vice president is expected to formally accept the presidency at 5 p.m. Pacific/8 p.m. Eastern from Wilmington, Delaware, his home state. With him will be his wife, Jill Biden, along with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, the first woman to be elected VP in the US, and her husband Douglas Emhoff. 

"I am honored and humbled by the trust the American people have placed in me and in Vice President-elect Harris," Biden said in a statement earlier Saturday after winning the presidency. "In the face of unprecedented obstacles, a record number of Americans voted. Proving once again, that democracy beats deep in the heart of America. 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. We are the United States of America. And there's nothing we can't do, if we do it together."

- President Elect Joe Biden