Joe Biden has been elected president of the United States, after his projected victory in Pennsylvania took him over the winning line.

President-elect Biden now has 279 electoral college votes, taking him past the 270 needed to win. Donald Trump has 214.

Mr Biden will become the 46th president in January, pending the outcome of any legal challenges.

Mr Biden’s running mate, Kamala Harris, will make history as the first woman vice-president, as well as the first black and the first Asian American vice-president.

Click or tap on the map below to get detailed results.https://news.files.bbci.co.uk/include/newsspec/28748-test-reuters-embed/english/app/pym-iframe.html?v=2.0.6&initialWidth=800&childId=responsive-embed-newsspec-28748-test-reuters-embed-app&parentUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fnews%2Felection-us-2020-54783016

For full results click or tap here

Votes are still being counted in four states after Mr Biden was also projected to win in Nevada.

Georgia, where Mr Biden has a narrow lead, will go to a recount. He also leads in Arizona while Mr Trump is ahead in North Carolina and Alaska.

The winds of change

This map shows where either the Republicans (red arrows) or Democrats (blue arrows) have performed better than in 2016.

It is far from a consistent picture, with both parties gaining in some areas and losing support in others.

Narrow gains for Mr Biden in MichiganWisconsin and, crucially, Pennsylvania, were enough for him to flip those states and win the presidency.

Unfortunately for Mr Trump, his gains were concentrated in states he already won last time around – for example strongholds such as IdahoUtahArkansas and Tennessee.

Share change by county - Trump won in states where he already had a lot of support

How Biden won Pennsylvania

With nearly all of the votes in Pennsylvania counted, Mr Biden has been projected to overturn Mr Trump’s narrow 2016 win with a narrow win of his own.

A strengthening of support in some areas where the Democrats also did well in 2016 – particularly around Philadelphia in the south east corner – has been enough to generate this result.

How Biden won Pennsylvania: Map showing results in 2016 compared with 2020

As well as Pennsylvania, Mr Biden also managed to flip two other states that Mr Trump won in 2016 – Wisconsin and Michigan.

All three of those states had been Democrat strongholds for decades before favouring Mr Trump over Hillary Clinton four years ago.

Time series chart showing election data for states that Biden has won from Trump

The results in context

In the US electoral system, the results in each state have a widely varying impact on the final result, with states that have larger populations given more say than those with smaller populations.

The map below represents each state and the District of Columbia as a square, with its area corresponding to the number of votes its representatives will cast in the electoral college that ultimately decides whether Mr Biden or Mr Trump has won the presidency.

Cartogram of results

It shows that both the Republicans and the Democrats have won their share of larger and smaller states, but Mr Biden has now picked up states worth more than the 270 he needed to win the presidency.

The key battlegrounds

Mr Trump managed to hold off challenges from Mr Biden in three of the four biggest battleground states – TexasFlorida and Ohio.

But the wins in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – worth 46 electoral college votes altogether – have been enough for Mr Biden to win the presidency.

Chart showing how the battleground states were won

High turnout

Mr Biden is also leading the national popular vote with 50.6% to Mr Trump’s 47.7%, a lead of over four million votes.

The president-elect has received more votes than any candidate in US electoral history – more than 75 million.

Mr Trump has also increased his vote tally compared with 2016 by more than 8 million votes, to over 71 million this year.

Preliminary figures show the highest turnout since 1900, with 66.4% of eligible voters turning out compared with 60.1% in 2016.

chart of turnout since 1900

How Trump kept hold of Florida

Mr Trump has been projected to win the closely-fought state of Florida, with 51% of the vote compared with Mr Biden’s 48%.

Despite taking what is typically a bellwether state, Mr Trump failed to win a second term in the White House.

How Trump kept Florida - increased vote share compared to 2016

Exit poll estimates put Mr Trump on a 61% share of the white vote in Florida.

Mr Biden appears to have made up ground on Hillary Clinton’s performance with this demographic in 2016.

However, Mr Trump is also estimated to have gained 12 points among Latino voters, bringing him nearly level with Mr Biden.

How the results stacked up

Here’s how the map coloured up, from the first states to be projected on election night, to Pennsylvania on Saturday.

Animated map: How Joe Biden was projected to win the presidency

Electoral college votes: Biden 0; Trump 0. Source: NEP/Edison via Reuters, 23:27 GMT (18:27 EST)

Race for the Senate

The two parties are neck and neck in the Senate, with both of them on 48 seats each. The Democrats having made a net gain of one seat.

Both of the Georgia senate races have gone to a run-off after no candidate secured more than 50% of the votes.

There will now be another vote, on 5 January 2021, to separate the two top candidates in each race.https://news.files.bbci.co.uk/include/newsspec/28748-test-reuters-embed/english/senate/pym-iframe.html?v=2.0.6&initialWidth=800&childId=responsive-embed-newsspec-28748-test-reuters-embed-senate&parentUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fnews%2Felection-us-2020-54783016

Key details from the exit poll

Exit poll data from across the United States gives a glimpse into voters’ priorities and an indication of how different demographic groups cast their ballots.

The figures suggest the proportion of total voters who are white has fallen by six percentage points on 2016, while remaining the largest group by ethnicity.

The proportion of white voters backing Mr Biden has risen by five points on Hillary Clinton’s figure at the last election, but Mr Trump still takes the largest share of this group, the preliminary polling suggests.

Meanwhile, Mr Biden appears to have gained support among under 30s and the middle-aged.

Key demographics updated 4 Nov

The exit polls are carried out across the US by Edison Research and are a combination of election day interviews and telephone polling, designed to reach early and absentee voters.

What voters thought about the key issues

Nationally, more than a third of voters said the economy was the most important issue in deciding who to choose as president, with a further 20% naming racial inequality and 17% saying the coronavirus pandemic.

Issues exit poll chart

However the issues were split along partisan lines with more than four times as many Trump voters saying the economy was the deciding factor, and Biden voters answering racial inequality and the virus.

Voters were evenly split on how the US economy was faring, with 48% saying it was in “excellent or good” condition and 50% saying it was “not so good or poor”.

Similarly, 50% said that the US was doing “somewhat or very badly” at containing the pandemic and 48% thought the country was doing “somewhat or very well”.

The possibility of voter fraud has been raised repeatedly by the Trump campaign but a large majority of voters (87%) told the researchers they were confident that votes in their state would be counted accurately.

Methodology

The exit polls are made up of a national exit poll and 22 state exit polls which are carried out by Edison Research for the National Election Pool (ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC).

For the national poll, a total of 15,590 voters who cast ballots on Election Day were interviewed at 115 polling places as they exited the polling places. This survey also includes 4,919 absentee and/or early voters interviewed by telephone.

The data is then weighted to be representative of the population and are adjusted further as votes are counted.

All samples are approximations and are subject to a margin of error which will be wider for small sub-groups such as smaller ethnic groups.

By Daniel Dunford, Christine Jeavans, John Walton, Ed Lowther, William Dahlgreen and Irene de la Torre Arenas

Source: BBC

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *