After four long stressful days of counting ballots, Joe Biden has been elected the 46th U.S. president, according to projections from the Associated Press, CNN and other news outlets.
Biden was elected after winning 279 electoral votes to President Donald Trump’s 214, according to The New York Times.
It’s not uncommon for election results to be delayed a few days if the race is close, said Matthew Record, a San Jose State political science professor.
“In this case, what we have are a lot of states that were decided by very, very thin margins,” Record said.
Amid the coronavirus pandemic, many Americans, especially Democrats, voted early by using mail-in ballots according to an Oct. 18 NPR article.
About 160 million Americans voted in the 2020 election and more than 100 million Americans cast their ballots during the early voting period, according to a Nov. 4 CNBC article.
In Biden’s acceptance speech, he talked about the historic number of people who voted and the importance of coming together when America is so politically divided, according to a Saturday article by The New York Times.
“There’s never, never been anything we’ve tried and not been able to do,” Biden said. ”Spread the faith.”
Americans waited while several key states counted the vast amount of mail-in ballots.
Ten swing states, including Wisconsin, Texas, Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, Nebraska, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona, became vital in determining the votes for the election.
According to a Nov. 4 New York Times article, swing states have two major political parties with similar levels of support among voters.
In many swing states, such as Georgia and North Carolina, Trump and Biden had between a 2% to 7% voting difference.
“Most of the states were reporting their in-person vote counts before they were reporting their mail-in ballots,” Record said.
Such was the case in swing state Pennsylvania where far more Democrats voted using mail-in ballots than voted in person. After almost all the mail-in ballots were counted, Biden took the lead and won Pennsylvania, giving him 20 electoral votes and the presidential election, according to a Nov. 7 article by Politico.
He said even though it’s unusual not knowing the winner of the election after four days of counting ballots, it was still too close to call.
This long period of waiting to hear who won the election was especially agonizing for political science junior Britney Ortiz.
“I had so much anxiety. I cried because I felt like this election was just so personal,” Ortiz said. “I was scared for democracy.”
Ortiz said she felt like a weight was lifted off her shoulders after hearing Biden won the election Saturday morning.
“I feel really relieved. I feel like I’ve heard so many people say we can finally breathe,” Ortiz said. “I’m able to do my schoolwork for the week now, just because I’m so relieved.”
SJSU President Mary Papazian congratulated Biden in a campuswide email, expressing her pride in the SJSU campus community for turning out to vote in the election.
“The electorate should be proud that the two presidential candidates, collectively, received the most votes ever tabulated in a U.S. election,” Papazian said. “This is all the more impressive given the challenges posed by the pandemic, and it speaks volumes about our ability to engage in civic and political matters we find important.”
Papazian said she is appreciative of SJSU’s efforts to be inclusive of all of our communities, including those who are not eligible or unable to vote.
She also congratulated Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, an Oakland native.
“We will now have, for the very first time, a woman holding the second-highest office in the land . . . and her Jamaican and Asian Indian ancestry symbolizes the rich diversity and possibilities of our nation,” Papazian said.
Harris is set to make history as the first woman, Black and Asian American vice president of the U.S., according to a Nov. 7 CNN article.
“Symbols matter, narratives matter, and the fact that we just elected a female vice president seems to matter to a non-trivial number of people,” Record said. “In that sense . . . I definitely think there’s a strong historical aspect to this.”
Ortiz said that seeing a Black and Asian American woman elected as vice president is extremely inspiring.
“I feel like a lot of barriers have been broken down for women who want to represent our country,” Ortiz said. “I’m just so happy that there’s more representation. I feel like it’s been past due that we’ve needed a person of color and a woman in that position.”
Political science junior Ashley Guerrero said the outcome of the U.S. 2020 election is a step in the right direction.
“I feel like right now the most important thing is harm reduction,” Guerrero said.
On Friday, Trump announced on Twitter that he believes Biden should not “wrongfully” claim the presidency, and that “legal proceedings” would begin.
Guerrero said Americans will not face the same troubles under Biden’s administration as they did with Trump’s, and the fear many have felt will soon fade away.
“There’s still other things that we have to worry about, such as making [Biden and Harris] accountable to what they said they would do,” she said.
After such a fraught election, Biden made his first address as president-elect on Saturday and assured Americans that “this is [the] time to heal in America.”
