After nearly 50 years in public life and three White House attempts, former Vice President Joe Biden is the clear winner for the presidency, defeating incumbent Donald Trump with a delayed vote counting victory and facing potential legal challenges.
After Florida, Pennsylvania boasted the second-highest number of electoral votes at stake among the major battlefield states, making it crucial to the arithmetic of winning the presidency, but for Biden, a native of Scranton, Pennsylvania also held some sentimental value.
Portraying the election as a "battle for the soul of the nation," Biden won with a message of unity about division, sympathy for anger, and reality about what he called "Trump's thinking" as the coronavirus pandemic that has cast a deep shadow over a campaign.
In what many saw as a referendum on Trump's handling of the pandemic and civil unrest across America, voters ultimately rejected Trump's troublesome leadership - and in record numbers.
Trump falsely claimed victory in the early hours of Wednesday and then Thursday, in startling statements by a president speaking from the White House who questioned the integrity of the US election process without providing any evidence. Nonetheless, it became clear that, as mailed votes and absentee votes continued to be counted, Biden would narrowly win the Electoral College and also win more popular votes than any presidential candidate in history. Trump won second place.
Biden presented himself as a leader who would be "the president of all Americans - not just those who vote for me" - in stark contrast to Trump, who spoke of a country divided into blue and red states.
Uniting the nation, given all Americans have experienced it, will be an uphill and unprecedented challenge.
At the age of 78 in less than three weeks, Biden will be the oldest president to hold the office.
More than that: The world is watching the US elections. What are they thinking?
He persevered through repeated political setbacks and personal tragedy - losing his wife Nelia and young daughter Naomi in a terrible car accident in 1972 in which his young sons Bo and Hunter were severely injured. Poe died of a brain tumor in 2015 at the age of 46. Biden himself mostly overcame a stutter from his childhood.
Many Democrats were less completely confident in Biden's chances against a formidable political force like Trump.
But Biden's long record in public office has made his campaign complicated: his opposition to federally mandated buses in the 1970s, his support for the 1994 Crimes Bill seen as harmful to African Americans and his handling of Anita Hill's charges of sexual harassment against Supreme Court candidate Thomas in 1991 as president. For the Senate Judiciary Committee.
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