【英语阅读】拜登将成为美国历史上最年长的总统

Kamala Harris becomes first woman elected vice president; Trump hasn’t conceded

Joe Biden speaking in Wilmington, Del., on Nov. 6.

Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States after crossing 270 electoral votes, the Associated Press said, following a campaign in which he focused on tackling the coronavirus pandemic and pledged to unite a deeply divided nation that voted in record numbers on each side.

The AP declared Mr. Biden the 46th president after saying he had won Pennsylvania four days after Election Day polls closed.

“In the face of unprecedented obstacles, a record number of Americans voted. Proving once again, that democracy beats deep in the heart of America,” Mr. Biden said in a statement from his Wilmington, Del., home. “With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation.”

President Trump hasn’t conceded the race and said in a statement Saturday that his campaign would continue with legal challenges in several states.

The Democratic ticket’s victory also makes Sen. Kamala Harris of California the first woman ever elected as vice president. She was the first Black woman and first of Indian descent nominated on a major party’s ticket, and would be the highest-ranking woman ever in the presidential line of succession as of the inauguration in January.

Mr. Biden is expected to give remarks Saturday evening at an outdoor event in Wilmington. The AP’s tally of votes remains preliminary until certified by individual states. The Electoral College votes in December, and the final results are announced in Congress in January.

Mr. Biden won by securing a slate of states won by Hillary Clinton in 2016 plus Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which voted last time for Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump’s campaign has filed lawsuits to contest the vote-counting process in several states, though it was unclear whether any, if successful, would meaningfully change a state’s results. The campaign has called for a recount in Wisconsin.

“Joe Biden has not been certified as the winner of any states, let alone any of the highly contested states headed for mandatory recounts, or states where our campaign has valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the ultimate victor,” the president said after he arrived at his golf course outside Washington Saturday.

Mr. Trump’s advisers privately have been urging him to prepare for a loss, according to people familiar with those conversations. Campaign officials met Thursday with White House counsel Pat Cipollone and determined they had pursued every legal option at that point.

Before the election, Mr. Trump casually discussed running again in 2024 if he lost, according to advisers who spoke to him about it. Such a move would be unusual, but not unprecedented. Mr. Trump received 91% of the vote on Tuesday from Republicans, compared to 95% of Democrats who supported Mr. Biden, according to the AP VoteCast survey of more than 110,000 voters.

The AP on Saturday also declared Mr. Biden the winner in Nevada, where the vote count had been close. Counting continued in Georgia and North Carolina, where the news organization hasn’t called the race.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who had gone to great lengths to court Mr. Trump during his presidency, tweeted his congratulations Saturday. “The US is our most important ally and I look forward to working closely together,” he wrote.

“Our two countries are close friends, partners, and allies,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeauwrote on Twitter. “I’m really looking forward to working together and building on that with you both.”

Republican leaders in Congress were largely silent on the results. Some conservative lawmakers rejected Mr. Biden’s victory, while more centrist members urged their colleagues to unite around the president-elect.

“It’s time to come together,” Rep. Will Hurd (R., Texas), who is retiring, said on Twitter. “America has spoken and we must respect the decision.”

Mr. Biden’s win caps a bitter and unusual campaign, the first in more than a century conducted amid a pandemic, in which some 100 million ballots were believed to have been cast before Election Day.

Mr. Biden, a longtime Washington figure who is 77 years old, campaigned with a promise to soothe a politically fractured nation, offering an alternative to Mr. Trump’s tumultuous governing style. A Biden administration faces major challenges in the White House, from containing a coronavirus pandemic that is setting new records for daily infections to restoring a struggling economy.

Mr. Biden’s transition team is considering whether to announce a coronavirus-focused task force made up of top health officials in the coming days, a person familiar with the matter said. The group also has prepared for a scenario in which Mr. Trump does not accept the outcome of the election.

While final results are still being tallied, Mr. Biden also faces a potentially divided government in Washington that could challenge his ability to enact some of his ambitious plans around taxes, health care and the environment.

Democrats appear likely to hold a narrower majority in the House of Representatives after losing seats to Republicans. Two runoff contests in Georgia left control of the Senate uncertain, though Republicans were optimistic they would keep their majority.

The hard-fought race reflected a politically polarized country. A handful of states required extra time to tally a surge in mail ballots as voters sought to avoid polling places.

The country remains mired in the coronavirus pandemic that has claimed about 235,000 lives and a recession with 10 million fewer jobs than pre-pandemic levels. The racial-justice protests that have at times sparked violence in major U.S. cities have been viewed differently by many Democrats and Republicans, highlighting cultural divides in the country. Mr. Biden focused much of his campaign message on the idea that he would be a steadier leader than Mr. Trump.

Sen. Kamala Harris is set to become the highest-ranking woman ever in the presidential line of succession.

As of Saturday, Mr. Biden had won a record of 74.9 million votes across the nation, according to the AP tally. In a sign of the country’s deep divide, Mr. Trump’s popular-vote count, 70.6 million, was the second-highest ever received by a presidential candidate, exceeding the previous record of 69.5 million held by former President Barack Obama in the 2008 election.

A plurality of voters, 41%, said coronavirus was the top issue facing the country, and Mr. Biden won three quarters of those Americans, according to the AP VoteCast survey.

The race was closer in some key states than polls suggested ahead of Election Day, and both sides have been raising money for the possibility of an extended legal fight over vote counts.

The Trump campaign disputed the decision by the AP and Fox News to call Arizona and its 11 electoral votes for Mr. Biden.

In Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign asked the Supreme Court for permission to intervene in a pending Republican appeal to pull back the state’s three-day extended deadline for accepting ballots mailed by Election Day.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on Friday instructed Pennsylvania counties to hold ballots received in that three-day window separate from other ballots. State officials earlier said they were doing that. A spokeswoman for Allegheny County said Saturday that the county had not yet reported the results from its about 950 segregated ballots. A Philadelphia election official said the city also hadn’t reported results from its segregated ballots as of midday Saturday.

In Georgia, a judge dismissed a lawsuit aimed at stopping late-arriving mail-in ballots from being counted, and a Michigan judge on Thursday denied a legal effort by the Trump campaign to halt the counting of absentee ballots in the state.

Gwinnett County election workers look over absentee and provisional ballots at the Gwinnett Voter Registrations and Elections office on Friday in Lawrenceville, Ga.

The former vice president flipped Wisconsin and Michigan by winning support from suburban voters who had backed Mr. Trump four years ago and driving up turnout among Black voters in urban areas. He also became the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry Arizona since 1996, narrowly winning voters with a high school diploma or less education, according to VoteCast.

Mr. Biden’s win appeared to fall short of the kind of blue wave Democrats had pinned their hopes on in the final stretch of the race.

Mr. Trump’s loss halts a historic streak of three consecutive two-term presidents. He held on to Ohio, Iowa, Texas and the key prize of Florida, all states where Democrats invested millions and sought to expand their electoral map. He also made inroads with Latino voters, particularly in Florida and Texas.

Former President Obama said in a statement that the election shows the division in the country. “It will be up to not just Joe and Kamala, but each of us, to do our part—to reach out beyond our comfort zone, to listen to others, to lower the temperature and find some common ground,” Mr. Obama said.

Mr. Biden campaigned as a consensus builder, vowing to serve as a president for all Americans instead of just his fellow Democrats. That style of governing—drawn from his 36-year career in the U.S. Senate, in which compromise was traditionally rewarded over partisanship—will face immediate pressure from a more liberal wing of his party seeking to capitalize on momentum after winning the White House in three of the past four elections.

He also described himself as a transitional figure in his party, a bridge to a younger generation of progressive and racially diverse Democratic leaders. Many of these leaders have called for more comprehensive changes, setting the stage for a showdown on climate policy, Medicare expansion and changes to policing and the criminal justice system.

Mr. Biden is the first person since Ronald Reagan to win the presidency on his third try. He made unsuccessful attempts to capture the Democratic nomination in 1988 and 2008. He will be the oldest person ever elected to the White House.

Mr. Biden launched his campaign in April 2019 by billing himself as the antithesis of Mr. Trump, calling the race a “battle for the soul of this nation.” He defeated a crowded field of Democratic rivals, despite setbacks in early primary contests and fundraising struggles.

Elected in 2016 on a message of economic populism that resonated in many rural and working-class areas, Mr. Trump campaigned for re-election on promises to reopen the economy, enact a law-and-order agenda, and continue the policies of his first term, including trade fights and tax cuts.

The first president to seek re-election after being impeached, Mr. Trump’s campaign leveraged that House vote to raise millions from supporters and celebrated when he was acquitted by the Senate. But amid the pandemic, many voters said he failed to take the contagion seriously from the start, according to Wall Street Journal/NBC News polls.

News from The Wall Street Journal