It became apparent yesterday that Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, will become the 46th President of the United States of America after taking a lead over incumbent Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, putting him on course to secure more than the 270 electoral college votes needed to win the presidency.
Absentee ballots in Pennsylvania gave Biden enough votes to beat the incumbent President Donald Trump in the battleground state.
As of the time of filing this report, Biden was up by more than 12,000 votes in the battleground state as state officials continued to tabulate ballots from the heavily Democratic precincts in and around Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s largest city
Political analysts in that country have said the Democratic candidate is on the brink of winning the race for the White House, starting a new chapter in American history after the turbulence of Mr Trump’s four years in office.
Biden’s lead over Donald Trump in Pennsylvania has placed him on course to win more than the 270 electoral college votes needed to become the next US President.
According to experts, if Biden wins Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes, he would have more than enough to win the presidency.
He maintained leads in three other states that were yet to be declared yesterday.
Polls overstated the standing of the Democratic nominee and former Vice President in key states, leaving Biden to slog to victory over the Republican president by flipping the midwestern states of Michigan and Wisconsin after a bitter campaign dominated by the coronavirus and its effects on Americans and the economy.
With his re-election chances fading, Trump escalated his attacks on the results, appearing at the White House to claim the election was being “stolen” from him.
As Biden moved closer to victory, hundreds of Democrats gathered outside Philadelphia’s downtown vote-counting site, wearing yellow shirts that read, “Count Every Vote.”
Trump’s campaign is pursuing a series of lawsuits across battleground states, but legal experts described them as unlikely to succeed in altering the election outcome.
Judges in Georgia and Michigan promptly dismissed two lawsuits on Thursday.
The campaign’s general counsel, Matt Morgan, asserted in a statement yesterday that the elections in Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania all suffered from improprieties and that Trump would eventually prevail in Arizona.
“This election is not over,” he said. “Biden is relying on these states for his phony claim on the White House, but once the election is final, President Trump will be re-elected.”
He also said the campaign expected to pursue a recount in Georgia, as it has said it will do in Wisconsin, where Biden won by more than 20,000 votes.
Biden, who spent four decades in Washington as former President Barack Obama’s vice president and a longtime Delaware senator, called for all votes to be counted on Thursday.
He offered reassurance that the counting could be trusted and declared “each ballot must be counted.”
“I ask everyone to stay calm,” he said. “The process is working.”
Biden will turn 78 in two weeks, making him the oldest elected President. He has placed himself in the center of the Democratic Party from the 1970s through today, even as a recent progressive movement sweeps his party.
He will take over the response to the coronavirus, which has killed 233,000 Americans as cases continue to rise across the country and caused a deep recession with no end in sight.