Republicans in Congress acknowledged that Joe Biden would be the next US president after he secured the required 270 Electoral College votes on Monday, in a decisive break with Donald Trump’s refusal to concede defeat.
Several high-profile Republican senators, including Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, John Cornyn of Texas, and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, acknowledged for the first time that Mr Biden was president-elect after electors met to cast their ballots in 50 state capitals and the District of Columbia.
For weeks, most Republican lawmakers have declined to contradict Mr Trump, who has alleged, without evidence, that he would have won the November 3 election were it not for widespread voter fraud.
But on Monday evening, several senators told reporters on Capitol Hill that it was now time to accept Mr Biden would be sworn in as the 46th US president on January 20.
Mr Cornyn said Mr Biden was the “president-elect subject to whatever additional litigation is ongoing”, adding “we’ll see the page turned . . . we’ll have a peaceful transition”.
Rob Portman, the Republican senator from Ohio, said: “I think we need to respect this process the Founding Fathers established, and we must respect the will of the voters.”
Mr Graham, one of Mr Trump’s most loyal supporters, responded “yeah” when asked whether Mr Biden was president-elect, adding: “It’s a very, very narrow path for the president. I don’t see how it gets there from here.”
And the South Carolina Senator said that he had held a “pleasant” 10 minute phone conversation with Mr Biden in recent weeks, while indicating that he was supportive of several of the president-elect’s cabinet nominees.
The meeting of the Electoral College is usually a rubber stamp exercise that garners little attention, but it has become hotly politicised this year given Mr Trump’s refusal to concede defeat. The president and some of his aides had suggested that electors ignore the election day results and cast their ballots for Mr Trump instead.
In Michigan, a Midwestern swing state where Mr Biden defeated Mr Trump, authorities closed the state capitol because of “credible threats of violence” ahead of Monday’s meeting. A Republican state legislator there was censured by his party after refusing to rule out violence in a local radio interview.
But by Monday afternoon, electors in six battleground states where Mr Trump challenged the election results — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia — had all cast their ballots for Mr Biden.
Mr Biden is scheduled to deliver a speech on Monday night in which he will make a thinly-veiled reference to Mr Trump’s refusal to concede and his attempts to overturn the results.
“In America, politicians don’t take power, the people grant it to them,” Mr Biden will say, according to his transition team.
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“The flame of democracy was lit in this nation a long time ago,” he is expected to add. “And we now know that nothing, not even a pandemic or an abuse of power, can extinguish that flame.”
More than 150m Americans cast their ballots on election day, with a record of more than 80m votes cast for Mr Biden, the Democratic candidate, while roughly 74m Americans voted for Mr Trump, the Republican incumbent.
Under the US constitution, the president and vice-president are officially selected not by the popular vote, but by the Electoral College, an arcane system in which larger states have more electors and smaller states have fewer. Each state’s number of electors matches its numbers of representatives in Congress, and 270 electoral votes are required to win the White House.
Based on the November 3 results, Mr Biden is set to receive 306 Electoral College votes while Mr Trump will secure 232.
Mr Trump and his allies have repeatedly sought to use the US legal system to overturn the results of November 3. Their efforts, underpinned by unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud, have been repeatedly struck down by the courts.
The US Supreme Court on Friday rejected the state of Texas’s unprecedented attempt to throw out election results in four states where Mr Trump lost to Mr Biden. The legal effort was backed by 125 House Republicans, who signed an amicus brief.
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