Welcome to the rest of your life. After three days and sleepless nights of counting and waiting, waiting and counting, the Associated Press, CNN, and MSNBC have called the state of Pennsylvania for Joe Biden on Saturday. Biden had been perched at 253 electoral votes, just shy of the 270 needed to win; adding his native Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes puts him at 273 and delivers the White House. At 11:28 a.m., the Associated Press declared Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 election, defeating President Donald Trump.
Trump will leave office without ever having won the popular vote. Biden now leads the overall tally by more than 4 million votes, with the count still going on. He also holds narrow leads in Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia. As Trump threatens or files lawsuits around the country to try to claim that he was somehow robbed, the networks are so far unanimously refusing to take his complaints seriously. Even with Trump’s influence on the state of the judiciary and of the country, a multiple-state margin of victory would leave him little room to enact revenge via the courts.
The whirlpool of attention that powered Trump’s presidency is draining away. Joe Biden has defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Trump likely won’t concede, but it won’t matter. It’s over now.
