Joe Biden Wins Pennsylvania and the Presidency Today

By Yehudit Garmaise

   After nearly a week of uncertainty over who would be our next president, when President-elect Joe Biden won Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral college votes this morning, he finally reached the 270 electoral college votes he need to win.

  In addition, Sen. Kamala Harris, made history as the first woman, African-American, and Asian-American to be elected vice president.

   “The people of this nation have spoken,” President-elect Biden said from the outside stage in the parking lot the Chase Center in his hometown of Wilmington, Del. “They delivered us a clear victory — a convincing victory, a victory for the people.”

   “I pledge to be a president who seeks not to divide but to unify,” said Biden, who vowed to be a leader for all American.

   Biden even empathized with his detractors.

  “For all those of you who voted for President Trump, I understand the disappointment tonight, Biden said. “I’ve lost a couple times myself. But now, let’s give each other a chance.

   “It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric, lower the temperature, see each other again, listen to each other again. They are not our enemies. They are Americans.

  “Let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end here and now.”

  Biden, who is 77, then said that the country cannot “cannot repair the economy, restore our economy or relish life’s most precious moments” without getting the coronavirus pandemic under control, which he promised to make a priority. 

   “I’m a proud Democrat, but I will govern as an American,” Biden pledged. “I will work as hard for those who didn’t vote for me, as those who did.”

   Although Biden promises to represent “all Americans,” as soon as he is inaugurated Jan. 20, the president elect has said that he intends to quickly sign a series of executive orders that signal how the country’s political winds have radically shifted.

    On the president-elect’s to-do list is to rejoin the Paris Climate Accords, and the World Health Organization, to repeal the ban on immigration from many Muslim countries, and a reinstatement of the program that allows the children, who are called “the dreamers,” and who were illegally brought to the United States to remain in the United States.

Photo by Adam Schultz / Biden for President