BREAKING: Joe Biden Defeats Donald Trump In 2020 Presidential Election

Democratic presidential candidate and former vice president Joe Biden, 77, has been declared the winner of the 2020 U.S. election, defeating impeached incumbent President Donald Trump, 74, in one of the most contentious elections in American history. Biden has surpassed former President Barack Obama’s 2008 popular vote total, breaking the record for the most votes ever received by a U.S. presidential candidate in American history — the first candidate to surpass 70 million.

With a major win officially flipping the state of Pennsylvania Saturday morning, Biden has now exceeded the threshold of the 270 electoral college votes needed to secure the presidency. Trump won the state by about 44,000 votes in 2016. The former vice president gave remarks in Delaware on Friday evening where he once again called for every vote to be counted, and said, “the numbers tell us it’s clear…we’re going to win.”

By Saturday morning, that was true. Biden has 273 electoral votes with the Pennsylvania win, and is currently ahead in Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona, who are still tabulating final counts.

Meanwhile, Trump spent the past few days baselessly contesting the election on false claims and trying to stop the vote count in states where he is losing — going so far as to file lawsuits to do that in multiple key swing states, though judges had already begun striking them down.

What Biden’s win represents
Biden’s win comes as a rebuke to a chaotic almost-four years of the Trump presidency, during which the country became increasingly polarized; saw record unemployment; experienced a rollback in human and civil rights, particularly for Black and brown people; and suffered a once-in-a-century pandemic that has killed more than 232,000 Americans — a higher death toll than that of any other country.

Biden often said this election was a “battle for the soul of our nation” and campaigned on the promise of returning honor, decency, pro-democracy values, and competence to the White House.

His running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), 56, makes history as the first woman, first Black American, and first Indian American to be elected vice president. Biden makes history as the oldest person ever elected to the presidency as well as the first to call the state of Delaware home.

Their victory marks a major shift in American governance, which atrophied under Trump, a businessman with no previous experience serving in public office who frequently used the levers of government in the most powerful country in the world for his own personal gain.

Biden and Harris ran on the most progressive platform ever proposed by a major party’s presidential ticket, with a focus on expanding health care access, fighting the climate crisis, building a caregiving and education workforce, and committing to comprehensive immigration and criminal justice reform.

Their agenda calls for a public option for the Affordable Care Act — Biden has recently called it “Bidencare,” the next version of Obamacare. The president- and vice president-elect plan to quadruple federal assistance for low-income housing and triple federal funds for low-income K-12 schools. They’ve also committed to an aggressive plan to combat climate change, proposing a $2 trillion investment in green jobs and clean-energy infrastructure to address environmental injustice and make the U.S. carbon neutral by 2050.

Trump and the Republican party failed in their attempts to repeal and replace Obamacare, and Trump never proposed a replacement health care plan during his years in office.