Joe Biden beats Donald Trump to win the presidency — from his basement

Joe Biden has been elected the 46th president of the United States, defeating incumbent Donald Trump in Tuesday’s general election despite repeated attacks from his predecessor about campaigning from his “basement.”

Kamala Harris will become America’s first female vice president, as well as the first Black and Asian American person to hold the office.

Biden, who represented the state of Delaware in the Senate from 1973 to 2009 and served two terms as vice president under President Barack Obama, ran on a promise to rebuild a nation struggling with a mass pandemic, an economic downturn, institutional racism, and the impacts of climate change. He styled the campaign as a “battle for the soul of the nation” and emphasized his empathy and desire to serve all Americans — even those who did not vote for him.

He won despite an onslaught of negative attacks, ageist aspersions, and outright lies from Trump and his campaign, who also sought to paint Biden as a “basement” dweller who refused to campaign in person, even amid the raging pandemic. Biden for his part was following the advice of health experts’ to help slow the spread of the virus by minimizing contact with others and encouraging his supporters to do the same.

Republicans also repeatedly pushed this election to make it harder for people to vote and tried to discredit the officials working to allow more people to cast ballots safely during the pandemic. Both GOP officials and the Trump campaign attempted to steal the election itself, claiming as the results rolled in that the tabulations were off and that any mail-in ballots should not be counted.

Trump and his family repeatedly claimed victory in multiple states, even as experts predicted they would go for Biden. “We have claimed, for Electoral Vote purposes, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (which won’t allow legal observers) the State of Georgia, and the State of North Carolina, each one of which has a BIG Trump lead. Additionally, we hereby claim the State of Michigan if, in fact, there was a large number of secretly dumped ballots as has been widely reported!” he tweeted on Wednesday evening.

He did not provide any evidence to back his claim that there were a “large number of secretly dumped ballots” in Michigan.

Trump, who was narrowly elected in 2016 despite losing the popular vote by nearly 2.9 million, broke most of his prominent campaign promises and suffered from underwater approval ratings consistently since February 2017. His oft-repeated pledges to replace the Affordable Care Act with a “terrific” plan that covered everyone, to make Mexico pay for a massive wall along the entire U.S. southern border, to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, to balance the budget, and to unleash 5% or 6% economic growth proved to be little more than empty rhetoric.

Trump will likely be most remembered for his use of Twitter to belittle his critics, his lack of focus on policy, his lying to the American people tens of thousands of times, the Ukraine scandal that made him just the third American president to be impeached, and his botched handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

President-elect Biden has promised to implement a comprehensive plan to control the coronavirus crisis and rebuild the nation’s economy. He has also vowed to prioritize LGBTQ rights, racial equity, immigration reform, ending gun violence, protecting the climate, and expanding the health care access.

This election also marks the seventh time in the past eight elections that the Democratic nominee won the most popular votes.