WILMINGTON, Del. — Joseph R. Biden Jr. was elected president of the United States on Saturday, defeating President Trump after campaigning on a promise to restore civility and stability to American politics and to expand the government’s role in guiding the country through the surging coronavirus pandemic.
Mr. Biden, 77, who will become the 46th president and the oldest man ever sworn into the office, secured 273 votes from the Electoral College after Pennsylvania was called for him, though the race was far closer than many Democrats, Republicans and pollsters had expected.
The result also provided a history-making moment for President-elect Biden’s running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, who became the first woman, and first woman of color, on a winning presidential ticket.
With his third run for the White House — after unsuccessful bids in 1988 and 2008, and after spending eight years as President Barack Obama’s vice president — Mr. Biden finally attained a goal that he has dreamed of for decades, capping a career in national politics that began with a victory in a 1972 Senate race here in Delaware. He was swept into office this year with the support of a diverse coalition of younger voters, older voters, Black Americans and white college-educated voters, particularly women.
Mr. Biden’s triumph concluded an extraordinary election that was expected to set modern records for turnout, despite being held amid a pandemic that has upended life across the United States. More than 100 million Americans voted before Election Day as states sought to make voting safer, putting the nation on track for the largest turnout in a century once the final vote is tallied.
Mr. Biden also won the popular vote by nearly three percentage points, and, with more than 74 million votes, broke the vote record set by Mr. Obama in 2012. Mr. Trump received more than 70 million votes — far more than the 63 million he received in 2016 when he beat Hillary Clinton while losing the popular vote.
Voters overcame their fears of the coronavirus, long lines at the polls and the vexing challenges of a transformed election system to render a verdict on Mr. Trump’s chaotic and norm-breaking presidency. Mr. Trump was the first incumbent president to lose a bid for re-election since George H.W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton in 1992.
Still, the race was not the landslide many Democrats had hoped for: Mr. Biden lost a number of important battleground states where he had invested time and resources, most notably Florida, amid signs of challenges with a number of Latino constituencies.
The Trump campaign and Republican lawyers have already begun a wide-ranging legal assault to challenge Democratic votes and victories in key swing states, part of a long-telegraphed effort to call the validity of the election into question.
Mr. Trump, who baselessly declared victory early Wednesday, before votes were tallied in multiple states, had regularly questioned the legitimacy of the election as polls showed him trailing, and it was not immediately clear how he would respond to the news of Mr. Biden’s victory.
Much of Mr. Biden’s agenda in office may rest on his ability to work with Congress. Democrats have maintained their hold on the House but had a much narrower path to reclaiming control of the Senate.
Kamala Harris, a senator from California and former presidential candidate, made history when she was elected vice president of the United States.
Her victory represents a handful of firsts: She will be the first woman, the first Black woman, the first Indian-American woman and the first daughter of immigrants to be sworn in as vice president.
It also marks a milestone for a nation in upheaval, grappling with a long history of racial injustice. Over the course of her campaign, Ms. Harris has faced both racist and sexist attacks from conservatives — including President Trump — who have refused to pronounce her name correctly.
The daughter of a Jamaican father and Indian mother, Ms. Harris, 56, embodies the future of a country that is growing more racially diverse every year — even if the person whom voters picked for the top of the ticket is a 77-year-old white man. She brought to the race a more vigorous campaign style than that of the president-elect, Joseph R. Biden Jr., including a gift for capturing moments of raw political electricity on the debate stage and elsewhere.
A former San Francisco district attorney, Ms. Harris was elected as the first Black woman to serve as California’s attorney general. When she was elected a U.S. senator in 2016, she became only the second Black woman in the chamber’s history. Almost immediately, she made a name for herself in Washington with her withering prosecutorial style in Senate hearings.
Beginning her presidential candidacy with homages to Shirley Chisholm, Ms. Harris was seen as a potential front-runner for the Democratic nomination, but she left the race weeks before any votes were cast. Part of her challenge, especially with the party’s progressive wing, was the difficulty she had reconciling stances she had taken as California’s attorney general with the current mores of her party.
As the vice-presidential nominee, Ms. Harris has endeavored to make plain that she supports Mr. Biden’s positions — even if some differ from those she backed during the primary.
And although she struggled to attract the very Black voters and women she had hoped would connect with her personal story during her primary bid, she made a concerted effort as Mr. Biden’s running mate to reach out to people of color, some of whom have said they felt represented in national politics for the first time.
WILMINGTON, Del. — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. will address the nation at 8 p.m. Eastern on Saturday, his campaign said, after days of anticipation and anxiety among his supporters about the outcome of the election.
Mr. Biden was expected to speak from a flag-bedecked outdoor stage near the Chase Center on the Riverfront, an event facility in Wilmington. He will be joined by his wife, Jill, as well as the vice president-elect, Senator Kamala Harris, and her husband, Douglas Emhoff.
In a written statement on Saturday, Mr. Biden called for the nation to come together, a sentiment he is likely to express in his remarks on Saturday night as well. “It’s time for America to unite,” he said. “And to heal.”
On Saturday, Mr. Biden spoke with former President Barack Obama, who congratulated him, as well as with the top Democrats in Congress, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer. At one point, Mr. Schumer held up his flip phone so Mr. Biden could hear people cheering for him in Brooklyn.
Meanwhile, Mr. Biden’s advisers and allies were giving serious thought to the transition period, for which they have already been planning for months.
“He will show respect to the 68 or so million Americans who voted for his opponent by how he conducts himself in the transition, by how he speaks to the country as president-elect if that’s what happens and in his inauguration,” Senator Chris Coons of Delaware said on Friday. “He will promptly begin reaching out to leaders of both parties to help figure out what’s possible and what’s the right path forward.”
And a number of officials who expected to be involved in the transition said they thought Mr. Biden’s team would devote particular focus to grappling with health care challenges, including how they will deal with the coronavirus crisis.
“There’s no question that Covid has been a massively important part of everything that’s gone on with health care over the last several months,” said former Gov. Jack Markell of Delaware, who also said he intends to be involved in the health care transition. “The huge focus on Covid would continue.”
But in Wilmington on Saturday, the news of the victory was still sinking in. Mr. Biden’s campaign manager, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, said she had been on a run and her mother had called to inform her that CNN had called the race for her candidate. Asked how she felt, she said, “Ecstatic — a great day for this county,” according to a pool report.
“It’s wonderful,” Valerie Biden Owens, Mr. Biden’s sister, told a small group of reporters at the Westin hotel in Wilmington a few minutes before CNN called the race. “It’s a wonderful thing for us, but it’s a better thing for America.”
Mr. Biden’s younger brother James Biden was also on hand at the Westin, where a coterie of Biden aides have been camped out in recent days, and he said he had spoken with the president-elect.
“We’re just overjoyed — overjoyed and grateful,” he said. “He’s doing well.”
As President Trump signaled his intention to continue fighting the results of an election that he lost, some of his supporters — many of them carrying guns — amassed at state capitol buildings around the country.
In some cities, tensions continued to escalate throughout the day Saturday. In Harrisburg, Pa., police started out watching the scene from afar, but intervened during the afternoon to keep supporters of Mr. Trump and President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. separated. Some Trump supporters were carrying what appeared to be assault rifles.
In Salem, Ore., members of the far-right Proud Boys, a group notorious for engaging in violence, gathered at a rally where people embraced the president’s baseless claims of election fraud. One person wearing a Proud Boys shirt pepper-sprayed someone, and video showed another person in the crowd shoving a photographer. Police intervened.
In Lansing, Mich., right-wing advocates chanted, “Whose streets? Our streets!” and repeated Mr. Trump’s false contention that he won the election. Video showed a fight break out, with people knocked to the ground near a line of portable toilets. Many people were carrying weapons.
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s motorcade was just pulling into his private golf club in suburban Virginia Saturday morning as news organizations ended days of waiting, declaring him the loser in his bid for re-election against former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Aides called Mr. Trump to let him know that their predictions over the past several days had come true: Every major media outlet had called the race for Mr. Biden. The president was not surprised, they said, but it did not change his plans to march ahead with legal challenges that several of his own advisers warned him were long shots at best.
The president’s decision to go to his club Saturday morning meant that he was not at home as thousands of people gathered to celebrate Mr. Biden’s victory close to the White House, cheering the president’s ouster and waving signs that said “TRUMP IS OVER” and “YOU’RE FIRED.”
Aides said Mr. Trump has no plans to immediately concede defeat as his campaign vowed to continue waging the legal battle across the country in a last-ditch effort to somehow reverse the stream of ballots that delivered the White House to Mr. Biden. In a statement, Mr. Trump said Mr. Biden is trying to “falsely pose” as the winner.
“The simple fact is this election is far from over,” the president said, less than two hours after tweeting the false claim that “I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!,” which drew a warning from Twitter that it was premature. “Beginning Monday, our campaign will start prosecuting our case in court to ensure election laws are fully upheld and the rightful winner is seated.”
Mr. Trump’s advisers said they do not believe he will attempt to deny Mr. Biden from taking his place in the White House in January. But they described him as in complete denial that he has been fired from the presidency and said he is refusing to abandon his accusations that Democrats stole victory from him.
The president’s tone — in his statement he accused Democrats of wanting “ballots counted even if they are fraudulent, manufactured, or cast by ineligible or deceased voters” — was a sharp contrast to Mr. Biden, who called for unity in a nationwide address Friday night as it was becoming clear that he was closing in on victory.
Even some of Mr. Trump’s longest advisers, like former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, said publicly that he needed to have actual evidence to make the claims he was making.
With the race called for Mr. Biden, the machinery of a formal transition of power — including millions of dollars in federal funding for Mr. Biden’s team — is set to begin roaring to life in Washington, even as aides said the president tentatively planned to escape to Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Florida, late next week, for at least a few days.
Mr. Trump left the golf course on Saturday afternoon and returned to the White House where crowds of Biden supporters had gathered outside.
On Saturday, White House advisers began confronting the reality that Mr. Trump will be a lame-duck president inside the White House — or at one of his privately-held properties — for the next two-and-a-half months, lashing out at his perceived enemies on Twitter and asserting the power of his office even as the coronavirus pandemic continues to rage across the country.
Earlier Saturday morning, before the race was called for Mr. Biden, Twitter flagged all of President Trump’s early-morning tweets, calling them disputed and potentially misleading after he made baseless claims about election irregularities.
Mr. Trump had focused his ire on Pennsylvania, the state that would later seal his fate as a one-term president. Mr. Trump was trailing Mr. Biden by about 28,000 votes in that state when he tweeted.
Within an hour, Twitter had put a warning label on all four of the president’s tweets, indicating that the content of his claims “might be misleading about an election or other civic process.”
Twitter has grown increasingly aggressive about flagging Mr. Trump’s false statements even as the president, in the days since Election Day, has spread false stories about “illegal ballots” and has demanded that local officials in several states stop counting ballots prematurely.
In a phone interview with The New York Times, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York called President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory a first step, but stopped short in expressing confidence that the incoming Democratic administration would have a good working relationship with the party’s left wing.
“We probably paused this precipitous descent,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said, referring to the removal of President Trump. “And the question is, if and how we will build ourselves back up.”
The measured optimism was a sign of the looming fights for Democrats, who experienced a mixed set of results on Election Day. Mr. Biden defeated Mr. Trump by a convincing margin in the Electoral College, but results in several states were more narrow than anticipated. Democrats also lost seats in the House of Representatives and failed to win key Senate races.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez rejected the idea, espoused by some in her Democratic caucus, that progressive proposals such as “Medicare for all” should be blamed for Democratic losses. She said she thought things like lack of canvassing and digital organizing hurt the party more.
“I think that was the big thing that we learned was that high-turnout elections are not automatically Dem wins,” she said. “But also when we target turnout for us in a very targeted way, then that is absolutely beneficial. I believe we’ve learned we can’t run away from progressive policy. I don’t think it was decisive one way or another.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was herself re-elected in New York despite the fact that Republicans had poured millions of dollars into challenging her in the primary and the general election. She said her own experience fending off G.O.P. attacks informs her thinking.
“There’s going to be very effective Republican messaging every single cycle,” she said. “And if you keep trying to play whack-a-mole with this message or that message, you know, you’re never going to be getting ahead.”
LONDON — For a world that held its breath as American voters went to the polls last Tuesday to elect a president, the triumph of Joseph R. Biden Jr. over President Trump elicited many emotions, but above all, a profound sigh of relief.
As news of Mr. Biden’s victory on Saturday reverberated from Latin America, and Europe and the Middle East to Asia, foreign leaders showered him with congratulations. Diplomats and commentators expressed gratitude, satisfaction and even quiet jubilation that a new president would bring a much-needed return to normalcy — something that vanished abruptly the day that Mr. Trump took office.
“Our two countries are close friends, partners and allies,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada said in a Twitter message to Mr. Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. “I’m really looking forward to working together and building on that with you both.”
The German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, said: “We look forward to cooperating with the next U.S. administration. We want to invest in our cooperation, for a trans-Atlantic restart, a New Deal.”
For many world leaders, the importance of this election was as much about removing Mr. Trump as elevating Mr. Biden.
The former vice president, now president-elect, is a familiar fixture on the global stage, a centrist Democrat who is likely to restore the traditional habits and methods of American power abroad. Mr. Trump, who held no public office before the presidency, has been a great disrupter, leaving alliances in tatters and casting into doubt the liberal international order that the United States helped build after World War II.
“I feel optimistic, for the first time in quite a long time,” said Simon Fraser, a former diplomat for Britain. “I’m not expecting a radical change in American foreign policy, but I do expect a change in body language and tone, and a shift away from unilateralism to collaboration with allies.”
For American allies on the European continent, the relief was even more palpable. Mr. Trump has enthusiastically advocated Brexit because he saw it as a way to undermine the European Union. He levied tariffs on European goods, pulled out of the Paris climate accord and hectored France and Germany about their dues to NATO.
Even European leaders who labored to cultivate Mr. Trump, like President Emmanuel Macron of France, eventually gave up. Diplomats said these leaders hoped to reset the trans-Atlantic relationship with Mr. Biden, who analysts in Washington said would make a priority of repairing frayed ties with Europe.
“You will be able to have a coherent conversation with a normal guy,” said Gérard Araud, a former French ambassador to Washington, who sat in on often discursive exchanges between Mr. Trump and Mr. Macron.
Mr. Araud said the ascension of Mr. Biden — a “nice guy, a smiling guy,” as he put it — would have emotional resonance for many Europeans, particularly older ones, who struggled to reconcile Mr. Trump’s unyielding “America First” vision with the generous, if imperfect, country they knew in the postwar period.
“They need to love America,” Mr. Araud said. “There is a sentimental relationship with America, which the Americans always underestimate.”
President Trump’s staunchest supporters greeted the news of his re-election defeat with a mix of anger, disappointment, resignation and skepticism on Saturday, as some held out hope that their favored candidate could still prevail in the days to come.
Across the country, Mr. Trump’s backers gathered as multiple media organizations, including The New York Times, called the election for Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee — spelling the end of a presidency that divided the population.
The gatherings, on the whole, were far more subdued than the scenes unfolding on the streets of big, Democratic-leaning cities such as New York where cheers, honking and general joyousness broke out Saturday afternoon.
In Houston, Larry Thompson, 75, said he did not believe the race calls made by news organizations, echoing a commonly held view among Trump backers gathered to protest the results.
Still, he acknowledged that “if it’s a legitimate vote, I’m going to have faith in my country.”
“I want my guy to win,” he said, “but if he loses fair and squarely, I’m in.”
Outside of Miami, where voters helped tip Florida into Mr. Trump’s column, about two-dozen people, mostly Cuban-Americans backing Mr. Trump, gathered outside La Carreta restaurant to demonstrate against President-elect Biden’s victory. Drivers honked their horns, waving Make America Great Again hats out their windows. Some people waving Biden flags and driving in the opposite direction shouted, “go home!”
Maura Sheesley, 60, who was wearing a Trump mask and hat, and carrying a flag in each hand, vowed to fight to the end. Although there have been no credible claims of voter fraud, Ms. Sheesley said she believed fraud had been committed in connection with mailed ballots.
“He won’t stop, and those that support him won’t stop either,” she said of Mr. Trump.
But Jodi Lavoie-Carnes, 48, a dental hygienist who lives in Dover, N.H., and supported Mr. Trump, was more circumspect.
She said she was shocked and disturbed by the boisterous celebrations of Biden supporters, who had gathered in her town, waving profane anti-Trump signs. The tone was so negative that she wondered what lies ahead for the country.
“I’m like, are you serious?” she said, adding that it was Mr. Biden’s responsibility to keep the tone of celebrations civil. “The language doesn’t need to be there. My children need to drive by that.”
Like other Trump supporters, Ms. Lavoie-Carnes said she had reservations about the vote counting in some states and supported recounts.
But she also said she would accept the result of the recounts, whatever they might be.
“If it’s true that he did pull legitimate, true votes that are not fraudulent, he is my president for the next four years, and I will accept it,” she said of Mr. Biden. “I’m not going to go out there and holler and scream. I’m going to go on with my life.”
From Los Angeles to the White House to the steps of Trump Tower in New York, celebrations broke out across the United States on Saturday after the news, at last, that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had won the presidential election.
The champaign bottles and tears were as much for Mr. Biden, a 77-year-old former vice president and career politician, as they were for the ouster of President Trump, whose divisive rhetoric has contributed to the deep polarization gripping the country. Not since the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer have bigger crowds, in the era of a global pandemic, come together — masked, sure, but making not even the slightest attempt to social distance. Such a moment seemed to call for anything but that.
“This feels so good to see everybody so happy,” said Demoz Desta, 29, who emerged from the grocery store to find sudden commotion on the streets of Chicago. “It feels good to know that I’m not the only one. And we haven’t had a chance to be happy together for so long.”
In the weeks leading up to the election, an anxious nation has braced for protests and unrest once the race was decided. Yet in heavily Democratic big cities at least, a palpable sense of joy overwhelmed any suggestion of the violence that some had come to expect at the conclusion of a bitter campaign.
Shortly after 1:30 p.m., a large group, many who were people of color, broke out into song in front of the White House, chanting along to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.”
Agi Joseph, 43, who is from The Gambia in West Africa, said that Mr. Trump’s tenure, during which he has called Haiti and several African nations “shithole countries,” had made her felt forgotten and disliked, but on Saturday she felt seen. “This is why I came to the U.S.A.,” Ms. Joseph said. “United we stand — we have been divided so long, it’s time for that to stop.”
The revelry was at times, more solitary, too, but exuberant nonetheless.
In suburban Milwaukee, Michael Jeske stepped into his yard and blasted a conch shell. Bjorn Hansen received a text from Europe in Kent County, Mich., and pumped his fist. Derrick McConnell of Detroit jumped up and shouted, “Thank you, Jesus!”
“I’m giddy,” Mr. Jeske’s wife, Karren, said through tears, sharing that she had quit a job to volunteer full time for Democratic groups seeking to turn out Wisconsin voters. “The nightmare is over.”
President Trump might be vowing to battle ahead in his bid to turn the tide of the presidential election despite unanimous, major media organization calls naming former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. the winner.
But his legal campaign, already failing to gain traction in the courts, now has a new challenge in his other main arena, the political realm.
As passionate as Mr. Trump’s core of supporters may be, and as large as his popular vote was, it was millions smaller than that of Mr. Biden, whose vote share has already shattered records even as it continues to grow with the counting.
On Saturday, the Trump campaign released a statement from the president saying, “The simple fact is this election is far from over.” On Monday, the president said, “Our campaign will start prosecuting our case in court to ensure election laws are fully upheld and the rightful winner is seated.”
The only modern historical antecedent to the moment is the 2000 recount, when Al Gore sought to stave off a winning result for George W. Bush in Florida that would decide the presidency.
Mr. Trump is now, effectively, in the role of Mr. Gore, only with fewer advantages than Mr. Gore had in his ultimately losing fight. Mr. Gore won the popular vote; Mr. Trump lost it decisively.
Mr. Gore faced a deficit in the hundreds of votes in Florida; Mr. Trump faces deficits in the thousands — in some cases, tens of thousands — in every state he is contesting.
The most devastating argument Mr. Bush had against Mr. Gore was that Mr. Gore was contesting a losing result — a fact his supporters hammered home with a merciless campaign to paint Mr. Gore as a “sore loser,’’ going so far as to print signs, stickers and T-shirts proclaiming the Democratic ticket of Mr. Gore and Senator Joseph Lieberman as “Sore-Loserman.”
Mr. Gore, at least, had one thing to rest his hopes on. After calling the Florida race for him and then Mr. Bush, the television networks and The Associated Press pulled Florida back into the undecided column and left it there as the fight played out in the courts, where Mr. Gore won several important rulings.
Mr. Trump had yet to score any substantive court wins before Saturday (a Supreme Court decision on Friday night in his favor simply reiterated pre-existing guidance from the Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar), as the network calls trickled in.
There is, of course, one important difference. Mr. Trump has a powerful media ecosystem at his back, one that amplifies his statements and claims, no matter how false, to millions. And Fox News, a fledgling network in 2000, is now the highest-rated news network in the nation, and its nighttime hosts are more solidly behind him than they have been behind any president in the network’s history.
On Fox on Saturday afternoon a member of Mr. Trump’s advisory legal team, Harmeet Dhillon, said the campaign would make several new legal filings on Monday. Some but not all, she said, would include new allegations of fraud, but she declined to go into specifics.
Minutes after the 2020 presidential race was called for Joseph R. Biden Jr., and Kamala Harris, prominent Democrats supportive of the former Vice President and his running mate cheered their victory as the first step toward a brighter American future.
Democrats who ran against Mr. Biden in the 2020 primary including former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend Ind., the climate activist Tom Steyer and Senators Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts all offered their congratulations.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the most well-known figures on the progressive left, also offered kind words, as did world leaders such as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada.
And former President Barack Obama sent out his own statement praising Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris in which he said his former vice president would “do the job” of president with “the best interests of every American at heart.”
“I encourage every American to give him a chance and lend him your support,” Mr. Obama said.
Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, whose endorsement as the state’s Democratic primary approached was a key turning point in the race and a huge boost to Mr. Biden said his win “marks a new chapter for our country.”
“As we face unprecedented challenges, Americans have chosen you to lead us out of the chaos and to build a stronger community,” he wrote on Twitter. “Today, I am hopeful for a brighter future.”
Congratulations to the 46th President, Joe Biden.
Your victory marks a new chapter for our country.
As we face unprecedented challenges, Americans have chosen you to lead us out of the chaos and to build a stronger community.
Today, I am hopeful for a brighter future. pic.twitter.com/HV7gefLKRz
— James E. Clyburn (@WhipClyburn) November 7, 2020
Maya Harris, Ms. Harris’s sister, immediately invoked the memory of their mother, Shyamala, who the vice-president elect often discussed during the campaign when telling her back story and sharing her values. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the actress who for years played a female vice president in the HBO comedy “Veep,” made sure to note: “‘Madam Vice President’ is no longer a fictional character.“
The Trump campaign, for its part, said it would continue to pursue its legal challenges, and Mr. Trump released a statement in which he said he would “not rest until the American People have the honest vote count they deserve and that Democracy demands.”
Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House and one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest supporters, baselessly insisted that the media had jumped the gun and declared a winner in the race before recounts had started and legal challenges had unfolded.
Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, similarly objected to the presidential race call on Saturday. “The media do not get to determine who the president is. The people do. When all lawful votes have been counted, recounts finished, and allegations of fraud addressed, we will know who the winner is.”
But in one of the first statements to surface from a Republican lawmaker on Saturday, Representative Fred Upton of Michigan affirmed a Biden victory. “I am raising my hand and committing to working with President-elect Biden,” he said.
Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, extended his own congratulations to Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris, conferring the titles “president-elect” and “vice president-elect” on them in his tweeted statement.
“We know both of them as people of good will and admirable character,” he said. “We pray that God may bless them in the days and years ahead.”
And Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida who failed to defeat Mr. Trump in the 2016 Democratic primary, said it was time to “heal deep wounds” and added that he would be “praying” for Mr. Biden’s success.
Congratulations to President-elect Biden. I have prayed for our President most of my adult life. I will be praying for you and your success. Now is the time to heal deep wounds. Many are counting on you to lead the way.
— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) November 7, 2020
The specter of a prolonged legal battle could not temper the enthusiasm of Democratic Party leaders who have known and worked with Mr. Biden for years.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in a statement, said that voters had “elected a unifier who values faith, family and community, and who will work tirelessly to heal our nation.” And Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, said the American people had “placed their faith in Joe Biden and Kamala Harris” to confront challenges posed by the virus, the economy and global warming in the coming years.
In statement, Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee said that by electing Mr. Biden, “The American people chose hope" and “dignity and opportunity for all.”
“This is a historic victory,” he said.
“To the families of those who’ve lost loved ones to COVID-19, and to all our Americans yearning for change, our message is simple: You will finally get the leadership you deserve.”
And Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic nominee who won the popular vote but ultimately lost to Mr. Trump, said voters had issued a “repudiation” of the president and offered a riff on one of his campaign slogans.
“Thank you to everyone who helped make this happen,” she said. “Onward, together.”
The voters have spoken, and they have chosen @JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris to be our next president and vice president.
It's a history-making ticket, a repudiation of Trump, and a new page for America.
Thank you to everyone who helped make this happen. Onward, together. pic.twitter.com/YlDY9TJONs
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) November 7, 2020
Emily Cochrane, Catie Edmondson and Luke Broadwater contributed reporting.
The election of Joseph R. Biden Jr. elicited powerful reactions across the nation but few are resonating as deeply as the emotional on-air response to President Trump’s defeat by the CNN contributor Van Jones — who invoked George Floyd’s dying words in expressing his sense of relief and vindication.
“‘I can’t breathe’ — that wasn’t just George Floyd, that was a lot of people who felt they couldn’t breathe,” said Mr. Jones, a former Obama administration official, breaking down in tears moments after the network called the race for Mr. Biden.
“You spend so much of your life energy just trying to hold it together,” added Mr. Jones, who is Black. “And this is a big deal for us just to be able get some peace and have a chance for a reset.”
Mr. Jones said that Mr. Trump had made it acceptable to show “racism” overtly, and said he feared for his family’s safety under his presidency.
“And it’s easier for a whole lot of people,” after Mr. Trump’s defeat, he said. “If you’re Muslim in this country, you don’t have to worry that the president doesn’t want you here. If you’re an immigrant, you don’t have to worry if the president is going to be happy to have babies snatched away.”
As thousands of people cheered, danced and honked their horns in New York, Philadelphia and Atlanta, Mr. Jones summed up the feelings of many Trump critics, overcome with relief that Mr. Trump had been vanquished.
“This is vindication for a lot of people who really have suffered,” he said, as he began to sob. “It is a good day for this country. I am sorry for the people who lost, but for most, this is a good day.”
Mr. Jones’s opinion was not universally shared, not even on CNN’s set.
Former Representative Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a Republican, questioned calling the race in his home state until all provisional ballots were tallied, saying the race was “not over."
Senator David Perdue, Republican of Georgia, was fighting for his political life on Saturday in a contest that could determine which party controls the Senate, as his re-election bid headed to a January runoff against Jon Ossoff, his Democratic challenger.
Mr. Perdue had a razor-thin lead over Mr. Ossoff in a contest that demonstrated Democrats’ emerging strength in what was once a Republican stronghold in the Deep South. Neither candidate claimed a majority of votes amid a protracted count, according to The Associated Press.
The inconclusive result set up a drastic rematch between Mr. Perdue and Mr. Ossoff on Jan. 5, and thrust Georgia into the center of the nation’s political fray as Joseph R. Biden Jr. appeared on track to win the White House. The state had already been scheduled to decide the fate of its other Senate seat in a special-election runoff between the Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, and Senator Kelly Loeffler, a Republican, on the same day. That makes it nearly certain that the twin Georgia races will determine which party controls the chamber just two weeks before the next presidential inauguration.
“Change has come to Georgia,” Mr. Ossoff said at a rally on Friday, “and Georgia is a part of the change coming to America.”
If Mr. Biden wins the White House and Democrats take both of Georgia’s seats, they would draw the Senate to a 50-50 tie, effectively taking control of the chamber, given the vice president’s power to cast tiebreaking votes. But that is a tall order in a state with deep conservative roots, and Republicans felt reasonably confident they could hang onto at least one of the seats needed to deny Democrats the majority.
Two other Senate races, in North Carolina and in Alaska, had not yet been called. But Republicans were leading in both and expected to win, putting them at 50 seats to the Democrats’ 48.
ATLANTA — The presidential race in Georgia is so close that a recount is inevitable, Georgia’s secretary of state said on Friday.
As of Saturday morning, Joseph R. Biden Jr. led President Trump in Georgia by more than 7,000 votes.
“With a margin that small, there will be a recount in Georgia,” the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, said on Friday at the state Capitol.
He added: “The final tally in Georgia at this point has huge implications for the entire country. The stakes are high and emotions are high on all sides. We will not let those debates distract us from our work. We will get it right, and we will defend the integrity of our elections.”
Gabriel Sterling, an official with the secretary of state’s office, said that a pool of about 4,200 ballots — most of them absentee ballots — remained to be tallied in four counties: Floyd, Cobb, Cherokee and Gwinnett, where the largest tranche is to be counted and which contains Atlanta suburban communities that have gone from leaning Republican to leaning Democratic in recent years.
The state must also deal with ballots from military and overseas voters, which will be counted if they arrived in the mail before the end of business on Friday and were postmarked by Tuesday.
Mr. Sterling said that the unofficial tally of the votes could be completed by the end of the weekend.
Flipping Georgia, a state last won by a Democrat in 1992, and where Mr. Trump won by more than 200,000 votes four years ago, would represent a significant political shift this year. The state has shown signs of trending blue, and when Mr. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the state in 2016, he did so by five percentage points, a far slimmer margin than Republicans had enjoyed in previous presidential elections.
Stacey Abrams, who earlier this year was on the Biden campaign’s short list of potential vice-presidential candidates, was celebrated as Mr. Biden took the lead on Friday, a sign of her remarkable ascent as a power broker since her failed bid for governor of that state in 2018.
Celebrities, activists and voters across Georgia credited Ms. Abrams with building a well-funded network of organizations that highlighted voter suppression in the state and inspired an estimated 800,000 residents to register to vote.
Ms. Abrams declined to comment on Friday. But in a tweet, she wrote, “My heart is full” and cited the work of other activists.
Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the state of Nevada on Saturday, according to The New York Times, defeating President Trump by two percentage points.
The country had anxiously awaited the results in the battleground state for days, viewing it as a potential tipping point. But when they finally came, the moment was somewhat anticlimactic: Mr. Biden had already been declared the winner of the presidential race roughly an hour earlier, after Pennsylvania was called for him.
Still, that Mr. Biden has clinched Nevada’s six electoral votes adds to his lead in the Electoral College.
The Trump campaign had identified Nevada, which allows any losing candidate to request a recount, as one of the battleground states where it hopes to use the courts and procedural maneuvers to stave off defeat. Less than 24 hours before Election Day, a Nevada judge rejected a lawsuit filed by Republicans who had tried to stop early vote counting in Clark County.
In Nevada, where Hillary Clinton beat Mr. Trump by 2.4 percentage points in 2016, Democrats control the governor’s office and legislature, both Senate seats and all but one House seat. It was not widely expected to be a battleground state in the presidential election.
But while recent polls consistently showed Mr. Biden ahead of Mr. Trump in Nevada, Democrats worried that some of their base working-class voters, many of whom lost their jobs during the coronavirus pandemic, might not show up at the polls because of they would be focused on immediate concerns, like feeding their families. The state has reported more than 107,000 coronavirus cases.
PHILADELPHIA — Joseph R. Biden Jr. defeated President Trump in Pennsylvania, winning its 20 electoral votes and presidency.
Mr. Biden had steadily erased Mr. Trump’s early lead in the state — at one point, the president led by half a million votes — as ballots, mostly absentee and mail-in votes, were counted over the past few days. Most of the remaining uncounted votes in the state are in Democratic-leaning areas.
The Biden campaign hoped further counting could push its lead above 0.5 percent, obviating the need for a recount there and setting the stage for victory. [After this post was published, Mr. Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania reached above 0.5 percent and news outlets declared him president-elect.]
The biggest fight in the state has been over ballots that were postmarked by Election Day but arrive later. Nearly a dozen lawsuits filed by Mr. Trump and his allies are working their way through the courts in Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia, trying — so far unsuccessfully — to stop ballot counting and invalidate enough votes to erase Mr. Biden’s leads there. In September, the state Supreme Court ruled, over Republican objections, that election officials could accept ballots arriving up to three days later. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to intercede, but left open the possibility that it could revisit the question.
Separately, the Supreme Court did grant the Trump camp a minor victory in Pennsylvania on Friday evening, when Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. ordered election officials there to keep the late-arriving ballots separate from other ballots, and not to include them, for now, in announced vote totals. But the victory was essentially in name only: Pennsylvania’s secretary of state had already given that instruction.
In Allegheny County, a predominantly Democratic area that includes Pittsburgh, election workers were going through roughly 20,000 mail-in ballots and additional provisional ballots on Saturday, Rich Fitzgerald, the county executive, said in a televised interview.
The county’s mail-in ballots have so far been won overwhelmingly by Mr. Biden, as have the provisional ballots.
Mr. Fitzgerald cautioned that the last ballots to count would be the trickiest, requiring additional checks to ensure they were not duplicates, which could slow the process.
Responding to baseless allegations by the Trump campaign of vote-counting secrecy, he said that observers and journalists had access to the vote-counting site and that there were as many surveillance cameras there as in a casino.
PHOENIX — Joseph R. Biden Jr. held onto a narrow lead in Arizona after elections officials added thousands more votes to the results there on Saturday morning in what is likely to be one of the last large reports of new vote data from the state.
Just before 11 a.m. on Saturday, roughly 6,800 more votes were added to the statewide tally, shrinking Mr. Biden’s lead slightly to about 28,000 votes. Then, about 10 minutes later, the tally of more than 45,000 additional votes was reported by Maricopa County, the largest county in the state, winnowing Mr. Biden’s lead further to about 20,000 votes. Officials in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, said the Saturday afternoon data dump would be the last large report of tallied votes they planned to release.
Although ballots counted on Friday and Saturday have tilted in Mr. Trump’s favor, Mr. Biden was firmly ahead of the president in Maricopa County after the latest batch of votes were tallied. If the results hold, 2020 will be the first time that Maricopa County voters have chose a Democrat for president in more than 70 years.
The scene was calm on Saturday morning at the tabulation site near downtown Phoenix where Maricopa County employees were continuing their work. Only two protesters were standing in the parking lot where protests, some involving armed supporters of Mr. Trump, had unfolded this week.
One of the men in the parking lot held an American flag and said he was at the site as a single-issue voter, explaining that he was an anti-abortion campaigner. He declined to give his name.
The other pro-Trump protester was Franklyn Olivieri, 50, a Brooklyn-born construction worker who has lived in Arizona for more than two decades.
“We just want a fair count,” Mr. Olivieri said. “If it needs to go to the courts, go to the courts.”
Both of the men said they hoped any demonstration on Saturday would be peaceful.
Even Mr. Biden’s narrow edge in Arizona after days of ballot counting underscored a profound political shift in the state, a longtime Republican bastion that has lurched left in recent years, fueled by rapidly evolving demographics and a growing contingent of young Latino voters who favor liberal policies.
In one of the brightest spots for Democrats so far, the former astronaut Mark Kelly defeated the state’s Republican senator, Martha McSally, in a special election, making Mr. Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema the first two Democrats to represent Arizona in the Senate since the 1950s.
Reporting was contributed by Trip Gabriel, Pranshu Verma, Lucy Tompkins, Julie Bosman, John Eligon.
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