It’s official: Biden won, Trump lost

No concession from the White House as more Republicans abandon Trump

The Electoral College decisively confirmed Joe Biden yesterday as the United States’ next president, ratifying his November victory in an authoritative state-by-state repudiation of President Donald Trump’s refusal to concede he had lost.

The presidential electors gave Biden a solid majority of 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, the same margin that Trump bragged was a landslide when he won the White House four years ago.

Heightened security was in place in some states as electors met to cast paper ballots, with masks, social distancing and other pandemic precautions the order of the day. The results will be sent to Washington and tallied in a January 6 joint session of Congress over which Vice-President Mike Pence will preside.

For all Trump’s unsupported claims of fraud, there was little suspense and no change as every one of the electoral votes allocated to Biden and the President in last month’s popular vote went officially to each man. On Election Day, the Democrat topped the incumbent Republican by more than 7 million in the popular vote nationwide.

California’s 55 electoral votes put Biden over the top. Vermont, with three votes, was the first state to report. Hawaii, with four votes, was the last.

In Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the six battleground states that Biden won and Trump contested — electors gave Biden and Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris their votes in low-key proceedings.

“Once again in America, the rule of law, our Constitution, and the will of the people have prevailed. Our democracy — pushed, tested, threatened — proved to be resilient, true, and strong,” Biden said in an evening speech in which he stressed the size of his win and the record 81 million people who voted for him.

He renewed his campaign promise to be a president for all Americans, whether they voted for him or not, and said the country has hard work ahead on the virus and economy.

But there was no concession from the White House, where Trump has continued to make unsupported allegations of fraud. Trump remained in the Oval Office long after the sun set in Washington, calling allies and fellow Republicans while keeping track of the running Electoral College tally, according to White House and campaign aides. The President frequently ducked into the private dining room off the Oval Office to watch on TV, complaining that the cable networks were treating it like a mini-Election Night while not giving his challenges any airtime. Trump had grown increasingly disappointed with the size of “Stop the Steal” rallies across the nation as well as efforts for the GOP to field its own slates of electors in states. A presidential wish for a fierce administration defence led to TV appearances yesterday by Stephen Miller, one of his most ferocious advocates, to try to downplay the importance of the Electoral College vote and suggest that Trump’s legal challenges would continue all the way to Inauguration Day on January 20.

Despite that, for the first time yesterday a groundswell of leading Republicans accepted that Democrat Joe Biden is the winner of the presidential election, essentially abandoning Trump’s assault on the outcome after the Electoral College certified the vote.

With states affirming the results, the Republicans faced a pivotal choice — to declare Biden the President-elect, as the tally showed, or keep standing silently by as Trump wages a potentially damaging campaign to overturn the election.

Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell was quiet on the issue yesterday. But a number of senators said the time has come.

“At some point you have to face the music,” said Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the second-ranking Republican leader. “Once the Electoral College settles the issue today, it’s time for everybody to move on.”

Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, the chairman of the inaugural committee, said the panel will now “deal with Vice-President Biden as the President-elect”. Just last week, the

Republicans on the inauguration committee had declined to publicly do so. He said yesterday’s Electoral College vote “was significant”.

Many Republicans were unwilling to declare Biden the winner for the same reasons they avoided standing up to Trump during his presidency.

Trump remains popular with Republican voters, and they are reluctant to risk public retribution from him on Twitter and beyond. As Trump prepares to leave office, his supporters are voters that lawmakers need for their own re-elections.

Overhanging their calculations is the Georgia run-off elections on January 5 that will decide control of the Senate. Incumbent GOP senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler need Trump’s support to defend their seats against Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and Rafael Warnock.

Trump’s efforts to undermine the election results also led to concerns about safety for the electors, virtually unheard of in previous years. In Michigan, lawmakers from both parties reported receiving threats, and legislative offices were closed over threats of violence. Biden won the state by 154,000 votes, or 2.8 percentage points, over Trump.

Georgia state police were out in force at the state Capitol in Atlanta before Democratic electors pledged to Biden met. There were no protesters seen.

Even with the Electoral College’s confirmation of Biden’s victory, some Republicans continued to refuse to acknowledge that reality. Yet their opposition to Biden was just pageantry — the Democrat to be sworn in next month.

Republicans who would have been Trump electors met anyway in a handful of states Biden won. Pennsylvania Republicans said they cast a “procedural vote” for Trump and Pence in the event courts that have repeatedly rejected challenges to Biden’s victory somehow decide Trump had won.

In North Carolina, Utah and other states across the country where Trump won, his electors turned out to duly cast their ballots for him.

Following weeks of Republican legal challenges that were easily dismissed by judges, Trump and Republican allies tried to persuade the Supreme Court last week to set aside 62 electoral votes for Biden in four states, which might have thrown the outcome into doubt.

The justices flatly rejected the effort on Saturday.