Joe Biden was elected the 46th President of the United States of America on Saturday. After five days of vote counting, Biden won the election with 284 electoral college votes after multiple media outlets called Pennsylvania.
The last state from 2016 to flip from red to blue was Pennsylvania, the state that ultimately gave Biden the victory of President Donald Trump Saturday morning. Biden also flipped Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona in 2020.
President Donald Trump and his campaign moved to file lawsuits in multiple states before the race was even called. According to the Associated Press, lawsuits from the Trump campaign were “quickly dismissed” by judges in Michigan and Georgia.
NBC News reported that the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania on Wednesday to get more poll watchers into the counting rooms in Philadelphia. Another suit was filed the same day to decide if ballots could be corrected until the extended deadline of Nov. 12.
Biden pulled ahead in Georgia late Thursday night, a state which has not been won by a Democrat since 1992, as the counting of mail-in votes continued.
It was announced Thursday that Georgia would head to a recount due to the slim margin Biden won by.
Biden first ran for president in 1988, but his campaign was cut short due to a controversy around plagiarism of speeches. In 2008, Biden ran for president again, until another misstep early in his campaign. Biden would eventually join Barack Obama’s ticket as vice president, a position he would hold for the next eight years.
Biden and his running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, followed the same pattern during the primaries. Harris first ran as a rival for the presidency, before dropping out in December 2019. Kamala Harris was elected as the first woman Vice President in American history. Harris will also be the first Black person and the first South Asian American person to hold the office, according to Vox.
