Joe Biden wins the presidential race, defeating Donald Trump

By Christopher Zara

November 07, 2020
 
After several days of furious ballot counting, multiple major decision desks have now called the 2020 presidential race for former Vice President Joe Biden, bringing a higher degree of certainty and much-anticipated relief to an election that saw record participation from American voters despite a multitude of converging national crises.

The Associated Press, the gold standard for elections results, projected Biden as the winner on Saturday after Pennsylvania delivered the Democratic candidate its 20 electoral votes, putting him above the 270 threshold he needs to win the White House. That projection came after Decision Desk HQ, a relatively young but widely trusted data firm, called the race for Biden earlier on Friday morning.

The contest had been tipping in Biden’s favor since Wednesday as more early and mail-in votes were counted. With NBC, CNN, AP, and Fox among others now weighing in, the projection meets the standard of effectively “calling” the race set by many outlets, including Twitter, which said last week that it would use such a standard for deciding which tweets to label as containing false or misleading election statements.

Biden’s presumptive win (AP puts Biden at 50.6% of the vote with 74,847,834 votes and counting, around 4 million votes ahead of Trump) weakens continued objections from President Donald Trump, who has made increasingly vocal false claims of election fraud throughout the process in an unprecedented effort by a sitting president to undermine America’s own voting systems.

After the Decision Desk HQ projection on Friday, the Trump campaign vowed to keep fighting, insisting in a statement that the election is “not over.” The Trump team has indicated that it will pull every legal lever at its disposal to drag out the election and has already filed a number of state-level lawsuits.

The news also has history-making implications for the vice presidency, advancing Senator Kamala Harris of California to the nation’s second highest office, making her the first woman and ever elected to one of the top two offices in the executive branch.

A Biden victory—along with the sunsetting of the Trump era—will have a profound and lasting impact on the future of business, innovation, technology, and culture for the foreseeable future. We’ve already covered a few of these stories below.

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