Joe Biden Just Officially Won the Electoral College

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It’s officially official, again: Joe Biden has won the 2020 presidential election.

The Electoral College met in state Capitols across America on Monday and certified each state’s election results to confirm that Biden had won a majority of electors. Biden was officially handed a majority when California’s electors met at 5 p.m. ET and cast their 55 electoral votes for the Democrat, putting him above the 270 votes needed for a majority.

That makes Biden the next U.S. president—no matter what Donald Trump and his supporters want Americans to believe.

The win is a crucial symbolic and legal marker of Biden’s victory, achieved on Election Day Nov. 3 and confirmed by numerous recounts and court victories. And it comes in spite of a continuing onslaught against the election results and democracy itself by Trump and countless Trump-supporting members of the GOP, who still refuse to concede even though Biden beat the sitting president handily at the ballot box. The weeks of attacks turned the normally pro forma Electoral College vote into an important moment carried live by the cable news networks.

Biden plans to mark the results of the vote in a speech Monday evening where he’ll celebrate the strength of America’s democratic institutions.

“In America, politicians don’t take power—the people grant it to them,” Biden plans to say, according to prepared remarks released by the campaign. “The flame of democracy was lit in this nation a long time ago. And we now know that nothing—not even a pandemic, or an abuse of power—can extinguish that flame.”

But Trump continued to deny the results on Monday:

Trump’s allies even attempted a ludicrous new maneuver to deny his loss. In multiple states that Biden won, groups of Trump allies met Monday and voted to declare themselves the true electors. They’re not—legally, they have no claim to that title. And how they carried out their play-acting showed how well it would work. Trump’s Michigan “electors” weren’t even allowed into the Capitol building by police. Arizona Republicans’ attempt to overturn Biden’s win there amounted to them fraudulently sending in a letter claiming they were the true electors.

But their stunt could offer a flimsy justification for Republicans to fight on when Congress convenes on Jan. 6 to count the Electoral College’s state election certifications and sow more distrust among Trump supporters that Biden won fair and square.

“This is nothing more than pathetic political theater by a defeated campaign,” Marc Elias, Democrats’ top election attorney, told VICE News in an email.

That latest last-ditch effort comes after Trump and his allies lost nearly 60 lawsuits, including the Supreme Court’s nearly unanimous rejection on Friday of an extraordinary lawsuit from Texas seeking to overturn the election results in four states that Biden won.

But just because Trump keeps losing doesn’t mean his attacks aren’t doing damage.

Polls show that large majorities of Republicans don’t believe Biden won fairly: Four-fifths of Trump voters said in a recent CBS/YouGov poll that they didn’t view Biden’s victory as legitimate.

Pro-Trump protests over the weekend led to isolated incidents of violence, and Michigan lawmakers and Capitol staff were told to stay home on Monday because of credible threats of violence.

The GOP’s latest tantrum was enough to chase out one of their own members.

Retiring Michigan Rep. Paul Mitchell announced Monday that he’d leave the Republican Party and become an independent for the remainder of his term in Congress, slammed his GOP counterparts for backing Trump’s anti-democratic efforts to overturn the election, and warned that the violent threats they’ve inspired are threatening democracy itself.

“If Republican leaders collectively sit back and tolerate unfounded conspiracy theories and ‘stop the steal’ rallies without speaking out for our electoral process, which the Department of Homeland Security said was ‘the most secure in American history,’ our nation will be damaged,” Mitchell warned in an open letter announcing his resignation from the GOP. “However, with the leadership of the Republican Party and our Republican Conference in the House actively participating in at least some of those efforts, I fear long-term harm to our democracy.”

A few other key Republicans signaled that the Electoral College results were enough for them to speak out and declare Biden the victor, more than a month after it became clear that he’d won. 

South Dakota Sen. John Thune, a member of Senate GOP leadership, told reporters on Monday that he’d view Biden as the president-elect "as soon as he crosses the 270 vote threshold."

"In my view that's how in this country we decide presidential elections, that our Constitution and I believe in following the Constitution,” Thune said. 

But they are the exception, not the rule. Only a handful of Republican elected officials have clearly declared Biden the election winner and pushed back on Trump’s baseless attacks on democracy. As ludicrous as Texas’ lawsuit was, two thirds of House Republicans and three quarters of Republican attorneys general signed on to support it. 

Biden will be inaugurated president on January 20. But Trump’s damage to Americans’ faith in democracy may linger long after he’s left the White House.