Election 2020 updates: Biden warns of 'dark winter,' pushes masks in pandemic plan
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.
Top headlines:
Trump projected to win Louisiana, Biden to take New Hampshire
Trump will hold onto Louisiana's eight electoral votes and Biden will gain four from taking New Hampshire, ABC News projects, raising Trump’s Electoral College standing to 83 votes and Biden’s to 93.
Tuberville projected to win Alabama Senate seat
Shortly after Democrats picked up a Senate seat in Colorado, they lost another in the South.
In the first Senate seat to flip for Republicans, former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville will defeat Democratic Sen. Doug Jones for Alabama’s Senate seat, ABC News projects.
Jones won a special election in 2017 but ultimately lost to Tuberville, who became a close Trump ally as he beat out Jeff Sessions, Trump's first and former attorney general, in the primary earlier this year.
New Jersey votes to legalize marijuana
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."
When to expect election results in every state
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.