At last! The highly anticipated result of the 2020 Presidential Election has been announced: Joe Biden has been named as the next President of the United States of America. Biden’s victory was announced by CNN on November 7, four days after Election Day on November 3.
This presidential election has been eye-opening regarding the deep-rooted polarization in the United States, a metric that has been on a steady incline since President Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Reports from CNBC show that states such as Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Wisconsin had extremely close races. In many of these states, a Trump lead on election night shifted to a Biden lead after many mail-in ballots were counted. As of Friday, November 13, the Associated Press (AP) has reported that Biden won over 77 million votes while Trump won about 72 million votes. AP has also reported that Biden has gained 290 electoral votes, surpassing the requirement for victory of 270 electoral votes. According to CBS, these numbers are record-breaking; Biden has won the most votes any presidential candidate has ever earned.
According to The Guardian, early national polls showed Biden leading Trump by several points. These early polls were similar in nature to the 2016 presidential election, where Hillary Clinton was leading Trump by a decile but ultimately lost the race due to the electoral college. As always, many analysts believed that the largest deciding factor in this election would be “swing states” like Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Before the election results, Biden led Trump in all swing states except for Ohio, where Trump maintained a two-point lead.
Through a combination of mail-in voting, early voting, and in-person voting on Election Day, many are concerned about the validity of the election results and consider voter fraud to have played a large role. According to The New York Times, this pool of concerned voters includes Trump, along with a band of Republicans. Trump has tweeted several times about the illegitimacy of this election. CNN has shown that Trump’s tweets, however, are misinformation; about a third of Trump’s tweets were assigned warning labels to indicate that the tweet contained false information. Additionally, a recent BBC article has shown that “there remains overwhelming evidence that voting by post is safe and secure.” Yet still, the Trump campaign has filed several lawsuits in battleground states where the race has been very close, according to ABC News.
The election, while seemingly close to its end, is far from over because the Congressional Election is still ongoing. According to The Guardian, the Democrats have secured 219 seats in the House of Representatives, giving them a House majority. The Republicans have 202 seats confirmed in the House. In the Senate, Republicans have secured 50 seats, which is only one seat away from a Senate majority. The Democrats have 48 seats confirmed in the Senate.
Image courtesy of NYT.
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