The president-elect emphasized how he would handle the pandemic response.
Joe Biden is set to become the 46th president of the United States, capping a tumultuous and tension-filled campaign during a historic pandemic against President Donald Trump. ABC News characterized Joe Biden as the apparent winner of his home state of Pennsylvania, putting him over the 270 vote threshold needed to capture the presidency.
The hard-fought battle against the president was set against the backdrop of racial unrest and the coronavirus pandemic and bitter divisions among the electorate.
Trump had falsely declared on election night, when he held a lead in several key states, that he won the contest and alleged without evidence, after the count started to swing the other way, that the election was being stolen from him and that fraud had been committed.
Painting the election as a "battle for the soul of the nation," Biden won on a message of unity over division, compassion over anger, and reality over what he called Trump's "wishful thinking" as the coronavirus pandemic cast a heavy shadow over the campaign.
The 2020 election has shattered voting records with votes totaling 147 million and counting, surpassing the 138 million who voted in 2016.
New Jersey has voted to legalize adult-use of recreational marijuana, ABC News projects, becoming the 12th state to do so.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, tweeted that the measure represents "a huge step forward for racial and social justice and our economy."
There’s a good chance we won’t know who won the presidential election on election night.
More people than ever are voting by mail this year due to the pandemic, and mail ballots take longer to count than ballots cast at polling places. But because each state has its own rules for how votes are counted and reported, some will report results sooner than others. Those disparate rules may also make initial returns misleading: The margins in some states may shift toward Democrats as mail ballots -- which are overwhelmingly cast by Democrats -- are counted, while states that release mail ballots first may experience a shift toward Republicans as Election Day votes are tallied.
FiveThirtyEight has put together a general picture of how much of the vote we expect to be counted on election night in all 50 states and Washington, D.C.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, took the stage at a coronavirus-compliant outdoor campaign event in Bangor, Maine, and reflected on the competitive Senate race she has had against Democratic Speaker of the Maine House Sara Gideon.
Collins said that her opponent has, "thrown everything at her but the kitchen sink but that's also coming." The moderate Republican also touted her history in the Senate, saying that she has never missed a vote -- more than 7,400 over 24 years, and that she co-wrote the Paycheck Protection Program in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Collins, the only Republican holding federal office in New England, has deep institutional support in Maine -- most notably from the Bush clan -- but the state, like many other battlegrounds, has trended increasingly blue since 2016, when Trump nabbed an electoral vote by winning Maine’s 2nd Congressional District.
Gideon has repeatedly outraised Collins, and public polling has shown Gideon ahead of the four-term senator.
-ABC News' Stephanie Ramos, Christopher Donato, Benjamin Siegel and Kendall Karson
