By GEORGE SMITH, student reporter
Former Vice President Joe Biden collected the electoral votes on Friday to put him past the tipping point of the 270 needed to win the presidency.
“I am honored and humbled by the trust the American people have placed in me and in Vice President-elect [Kamala] Harris,” Biden said in a statement after being declared the president-elect.
Biden gave his acceptance speech shortly after 8 p.m. Nov. 7 — four days after the Nov. 3 election.
“Now that this campaign is over,” he said in his acceptance speech, “what is the will of the people? What is our mandate? I believe it’s this: America has called upon us to march to the forces of decency, the forces of fairness, to march to the forces of science, and the forces of hope and the great battles of our time. The battle to control the virus, the battle to build prosperity, the battle to secure your family’s healthcare, the battle to achieve racial justice and root-out systemic racism in this country.”
Freshman political science major Austin Rankin said Biden was aiming to give a clear, unifying message in his speech.
“From the start, Biden has ran a unifying campaign, whereas Donald Trump — in almost every circumstance — has been divisive,” Rankin said. “It’s always been my opinion that he (Trump) just wants to divide people.”
Rankin, who is the president of the 4-H Club at Northwestern, also said that Biden’s policies are more in-line with his own governmental views.
After Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes were called for Biden on Saturday, President Donald Trump and his staff began filing lawsuits in battleground states in an effort to overturn the results with a recount.
Biden currently has leads in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania. To win reelection, Trump would need to overturn at least three of those states.
“Very seldom do recounts overturn a decision,” said Dr. Roger Hardaway, a professor of history at Northwestern.
Recounts move hundreds of votes, not the thousands Trump needs to win those states, Hardaway said.
Before the election was called in Biden’s favor, Dawson Maxwell, a junior criminal justice major and the vice president of the Northwestern student government association, said he expected Trump to win a second term.
Maxwell said his support for Trump comes from his major.
“The career field that I’m going into is criminal justice, and law enforcement overwhelmingly supported his platform, and being pro-police myself, it felt obligatory,” he said.
This presidential election had the highest number of votes of any presidential election in history.