OFM News: Biden’s Win and a Tumultuous Transition to Power

On November 7, four days after the election, the Associated Press declared former Vice President Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 election and the 46th president of the United States. People around the country, including hundreds in the deeply blue city of Denver, poured into the streets to celebrate the victory. However, months later, the incumbent Trump administration, as well as select republicans, continue to fight election results. 

The counting of ballots lasted a nail-biting four days, with some states being barred from opening mail-in ballots until election day. A record-breaking 66.8 percent of the 239.2 million eligible American voters turned out for an incredibly close race, making this the highest voter turnout since 1900. 

Key battleground states such as Arizona (D), Florida (R), Georgia (D), and Michigan (D) were hard-won by small margins. Voters and analysts kept a close eye on Nevada and Pennsylvania, both of which Biden took with just over 50 percent of the vote, coming mostly from the metropolitan areas of Philadelphia and Las Vegas. Biden took Colorado with just over 400,000 votes, with counties like Denver and Pueblo remaining blue despite the surrounding sea of red.  

The election results depict a country deeply divided, an issue President-elect Biden addressed in a speech given after his election was called. 

“Today, once again, we are a house divided, but that, my friend, can no longer be. We are facing too many crises. We have too much work to do. We have too bright a future to leave it shipwrecked on the shoals of anger and hate and division.” 

In the weeks and months that followed, President Trump continued his legal battle against the results while refusing to concede. While there is no legal obligation for an incumbent president to formally concede, the tension between the two parties began to cast doubts on whether we’d see the same smooth transition to power we’ve become accustomed to. 

The people in charge of that transition to power make up Biden’s appropriately named Transition Team, whose diversity made headlines with LGBTQ members such as Shawn Skelly, Chai Feldblum, Pamela Karlan, and Dave Noble. In addition to his transition team, Biden has begun assembling the members of his cabinet. The following is a list of those he has named thus far: 

Vice President

 Kamala Harris

Secretary of State

Antony Blinken

Secretary of the Treasury 

Janet Yellen

Secretary of Defense 

Lloyd Austin

Secretary of the Interior 

Deb Haaland

Secretary of Transportation

Pete Buttigieg

Secretary of Agriculture 

Tom Vilsak

Secretary of Health and Human Services

Xavier Becerra

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development 

Marcia Fudge

Secretary of Veterans Affairs 

Denis McDonough

Secretary of Homeland Security 

Alejandro Mayorkas

Secretary of Energy 

Jennifer Granholm

Secretary of Education

Miguel Cardona

Biden has also named some of his cabinet-level staff members such as Ron Klain, who will be acting White House chief of staff, or John Kerry, who has been named U.S. special presidential envoy for climate. President-elect Biden will continue to name members throughout the end of the year. 

Meanwhile, the incumbent President Trump has continued to fight election results through every exhaustible legal method. Yet on Friday, December 11, the Supreme Court ruled against a bid from the Texas attorney general to block the ballots of millions of voters in battleground states that went in favor of President-elect Joe Biden. 

The court’s order, issued with no public dissents to dismiss the challenge, is the strongest indication yet that Trump has no chance of overturning election results in court, and that even the justices whom he placed there have no interest in allowing his desperate, legal bids to continue.

The Electoral College convened on December 14 to affirm Biden’s win.