Biden wins Pennsylvania and becomes the new President of the United States

After four frantic days of counting votes in the United States, Barack Obama's Vice President of the Interior, Joe Biden, became the President-Elect of the United States this Saturday after conquering the key state of Pennsylvania.

These elections were marked by the coronavirus pandemic, which has caused millions of Americans to decide to vote by mail instead of going to the polls. This has led to an unprecedented event, in which states have broken records in counting mail ballots.

For the last 48 hours, all the spotlights have been on Pennsylvania because of its 20 pledges that would give Biden the advantage to finish the job of the new president. Finally, with his victory, Biden joins those 20 supporters and will be left with a total of 273 electoral votes compared to the 214 of his Republican rival and current president, Donald Trump. 

"America, I am honored to be chosen to lead our great country," Biden wrote on Twitter shortly after the projections from all the major television networks arrived.

"The work ahead of us will be hard, but I promise you this: I will be a president for all Americans, whether they voted for me or not. I will live up to the faith you have placed in me," he added.

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His running mate, Kamala Harris, thus becomes the first female Vice President of the United States, as well as the first black woman to hold that office. Harris, 55, will also be Biden's natural successor from four years ago, as the president-elect has stated that he will not stand for re-election.

Both winners wanted to express themselves first through the social network Twitter. "This election is about much more than Joe Biden or me. It's about the soul of America and our willingness to fight for it. We have a lot of work ahead of us, let's get started," Kamala said on Twitter.

A few hours after the results were announced in Pennsylvania, the media released their forecast for the state of Nevada, where Biden won with 49.9% of the vote to Trump's 47.9%. These figures were given with 90% of the votes counted. This would give Nevada 6 votes in the electoral college, giving the final figure of 279 voters to the Democrats.

Meanwhile, the count continues and local authorities expect to provide new results throughout the day in Nevada, Georgia and Arizona, but warn that the process could slow down further. In North Carolina, results will still have to wait a week, the state election authorities announced yesterday.

Although their victory has already been proclaimed, there are still votes to be counted. If Biden were to win in Arizona, he would add 284 delegates. These figures will be released over the course of the afternoon and weekend. 

In the state of Georgia (sixteen delegates to the Electoral College), the race remains tight with Biden accumulating 49.4 % of the votes compared to 49.3 % for the current president, although local authorities have already announced that there will be a recount due to the small margin of the results. Only 2 % of the votes remain to be counted, most of them by mail and ballots sent by US military personnel deployed abroad.

Meanwhile, in Arizona, with 97% counted, the Democrat is leading with 49.6% compared to 48.7% for the ruler with less than 29,000 votes, a margin that has narrowed overnight. Arizona is scheduled to release new data today at 09:00 local time (16:00 GMT) and 19:00 local time (02:00 GMT on Sunday).

Biden, who will be the oldest president in U.S. history, will take office at 78 after a lifetime of public service. He has been a former Vice President and "friend" of Barack Obama during 2009 and 2017. History will remember Biden as the president who won the election by persistence, after two failed attempts in 1988 and 2008.

The Democrat decided to run for the White House under the banner of recovering the legacy that Obama built and that Trump has destroyed after Hillary Clinton lost the election in 2016.

Over the last year he has had to face all kinds of questions about his age and mental health, and his constant lapses have been the cause of much talk and an electoral weapon against him. The rumours increased during the campaign as, due to the pandemic, he has spent much of his time locked up in his Delaware residence.

Since polling stations closed in the United States, Donald Trump has pursued all kinds of strategies to gain media attention. First he announced that he was going to win while denouncing the election as a fraud. He has tried to stop the vote count in Michigan and, as the results came out in favour of Biden, has started a smear campaign against the American electoral system.

Such has been the commotion that some of the main US television stations, such as ABC, CBS and NBC, cut off Trump's speech on Friday in unison at prime time, while Fox News, the Republican Party's news reference, contradicted his words.

Just half an hour before the Pennsylvania results were announced, President Donald Trump proclaimed on Twitter that he had won re-election "by a landslide", something that has been denied by the media.

President Trump assured this Saturday that "the election is far from over" and criticised the fact that the Democratic candidate had "rushed to claim victory falsely". The US President clung on Friday to the legal route to re-election as his chances of winning were reduced, and again questioned without evidence "the integrity of the entire electoral process" in his country.

The president's statements last Friday make clear his position: "I will never stop fighting for you and for our country," he said in a statement distributed by his campaign. 

The president, who was playing golf at his club in Sterling (Virginia) when the media gave Biden the victory, added that "from Monday, our campaign will begin to defend our case in court to ensure that the electoral laws are fully complied with and the appropriate winner is proclaimed", he stressed.

The factor that experts are most concerned about is not so much the possibility that Trump will refuse to acknowledge victory, but the possibility that the legal challenges presented by his campaign in several key states will prolong the count of the remaining votes to be published.

The state authorities have until 8 December to settle any disputes that may arise over the election of their Electoral College pledges, and on 14 December its members meet in their states and formally vote for the president, a vote that is to be endorsed by Congress on 6 January.

The vote count in the House of Representatives gives 210 seats to Democrats and 225 to Republicans. The House of Representatives consists of 435 legislators, and 218 are needed to be the majority and most powerful party. 

The question of who will dominate the Senate, currently at 48, remains open until January as the ballot count continues.

The distribution of the Senate will not be decided on until 5 January, when the second round of voting will be held for the two seats belonging to the state of Georgia, as none of the candidates secured 50 percent of the votes, according to the projections of the major media.

Georgia, traditionally a conservative state, has gained unexpected prominence in these elections as it will probably decide which party will dominate the Senate and has furthermore given impetus to the Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden, who is leading the count in that state pending the final results.

At present, the vote count shows a technical tie with 48 of the 100 Senate seats for the Democrats and a further 48 for the Republicans, although it is expected that the latter will score a victory in North Carolina and another in Alaska, which would enable them to take 50 seats.

Furthermore, the House of Representatives will be attended from January by Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, the first congresswoman to openly join the QAnon movement, which promotes conspiracy theories and has been labelled by the FBI as a potential threat of domestic terrorism.

In contrast, Democrat Cori Bush became the first activist of the "Black Lives Matter" movement to reach the federal Congress, after a year marked by the protests led by that group against racism and police brutality.