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.
Trump will win Iowa’s six electoral votes, ABC News projects, raising his Electoral College standing to 171 votes, while Biden stands at 205.
Republican Sen. Joni Ernst is projected to defeat Democratic candidate Theresa Greenfield in what became a high-profile race for the key Senate seat.
Biden beat Trump in being the first to address the nation on election night, telling Americans from Wilmington, Delaware, that he's "feeling good" about the race.
"We feel good about where we are, we really do," Biden said to supporters as states continue to count ballots. "We're feeling real good about Wisconsin and Michigan," adding that he has confidence in Pennsylvania too.
He also offered a reminder that it's going to take more time to finish counting all of the votes.
"We're going to have to be patient until the hard work of tallying the votes is finished. And it ain't over until every vote is counted, every ballot is counted," Biden said.
"As I've said all along, it's not my place or Donald Trump's place to declare who's won this election. That's the decision of the American people," he added.
On the heels of Biden's address, Trump tweeted that he, too, will be making a statement.
Gwinnett County is experiencing a technical issue that is delaying the counting of absentee ballots, county communications director Joe Sorenson told ABC News.
The county had processed the over 118,000 absentee ballots it received that were ready to be pushed through the system to be counted Tuesday night, but "when the time came to push them, the software system (held) a little more than half of the ballots for adjudication," Sorenson said.
Adjudication means the ballots need to be reviewed by a human being and reentered.
According to Gowri Ramachandran, an election security expert at the Brennan Center, ballots are loaded into voting machines in large batches. When the machines determine that one ballot in the batch requires additional human review, it may flag the entire batch of ballots as requiring additional review. Poll workers would then need to go through the batch to determine which ballots needed to be reviewed to determine voter intent. There were 3,200 batches of mail-in ballots that received the error.
The county told ABC News it does not know how many ballots have been affected.
Sorenson said the county is determined to count these ballots overnight.
"We're gonna stay as long as it takes, up to a certain point," Sorenson said.
He said no determination has yet to be made about when to stop trying.
Gwinnett, the second most populated county in the state, is a key former Republican stronghold in the Atlanta suburbs that has been trending Democratic. In 2016, it went for Hillary Clinton by 5.8 points, but it was the first time it voted for the Democratic presidential candidate since 1976, when Georgia native Jimmy Carter won every one of the state's 159 counties. In 2018, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams won the county again -- and by a bigger margin taking Gwinnett by 14.4 points.
-ABC News' John Santucci
Trump will win Florida’s 29 electoral votes, ABC News projects, boosting his Electoral College standing to 165 votes, while Biden’s remains at 205.
Florida was considered a must-win state for Trump to keep a viable pathway to reelection.
