Joe Biden Wins 2020 US Presidential Election

Joe Biden has won the 2020 US Presidential election after gaining the two hundred and seventy electoral college votes that were needed to take him in to the White House. He brings with him Kamala Harris who is going to become the first woman and person of colour to be elected as Vice President of the United States of America.

Women have been included on Presidential tickets before including Sarah Palin who was the Republican Vice Presidential nominee in 2008 and the Democrats nominated Geraldine Ferraro in 1984. In the past women have served in minor party roles such as radical civil rights activist Angela Davis who stood for the Communist Party in 1980 and 1984.

Ms Harris was the second black woman to be elected to the senate after Illinois’s Carol Moseley Braun, who served one term in the 1990s. 

The vice president-elect was born to an Indian mother, Shyamala Gopalan, and Jamaican father, Donald Harris, in 1964 and spent her early years in Berkeley, California.

When Mr Biden picked her as his running mate, Sen. Harris tweeted a picture of herself as a toddler with her mother. 

“My mother always use to say, ‘Don’t just sit around and complain about things. Do something,’” she wrote. “I dearly wish she were here with us this week.”

As the results came in after the election, it was a very tight contest between Joe Biden for the Democrats and Donald Trump for the Republican Party. The American voting system works based on the Electoral College system where States are awarded a different number of votes depending on the population who live in that State. California gets 55 while Delaware gets 3.

Every state except Maine and Nebraska awards all its votes on a ‘winner takes all’ system.

That means if Donald Trump gets 49% and Biden gets 48%, Trump gets all that state’s electoral votes.

Trump was projected to keep Florida, Iowa, Ohio and Texas despite hopes some or all of them would fall to Biden.

But Arizona “flipped” to the Democrat challenger. And Biden took a crucial electoral vote in split state Nebraska - a good sign for battlegrounds that are yet to declare.

One of Joe Biden's main campaign promises is to put more effort in the fight against the Covid 19 virus. America has the highest rate of Covid 19 infections and deaths in the world and more money and effort has to be put in to finding possible treatments and cures for the disease. Some of Mr Biden's other policies include:

The setting up of a national test and trace programme. This is the most immediate and obvious challenge facing he country and facilities have to be adequate for free testing for all and hire 100,000 people to set up a national contact-tracing programme.

Mr Biden wants to establish at least 10 testing centres in every state, call upon federal agencies to deploy resources and give firmer national guidance through federal experts. He says all governors should mandate wearing masks.

A raise in the minimum wage and invest more in green energy. Mr Biden has vowed to spend what ever it takes to extend the green loan scheme for businesses and increase direct money payments to families. Among the proposals are an additional $200 in Social Security payments per month, rescinding Trump-era tax cuts and $10,000 of student loan forgiveness for federal loans.

Criminal justice reform grants for minority communities.

Joining the global climate accord again.

Restore America's reputation and take on China.

Expand Obamacare. This was the public health insurance scheme passed when he was President Barack Obama's deputy.

Undo Donald Trump's policies on imigration.

he has endorsed several big pieces of education policy that have become popular within the party - student loan debt forgiveness, expansion of tuition-free colleges, and universal preschool access. These would be paid using money gained back from withdrawing the Trump-era tax cuts.

Mr Biden also plans for full participation and equality for people with disabilities. This should hopefully give disabled people more equal opportunities in society and make the country a fairer place to live in.

Although Mr Biden has been declared the winner of the election, and will be installed as president in January, Donald Trump is mounting a number of legal challenges to the results of the election claiming that there has been voting fraud due to the postal voting system. We will just have to wait and see what happens next.