It took only seconds after Joe Biden was declared the winner over President Trump for a divided country's relief, frustration, anger and joy to begin spilling into the streets.
The president was at his golf course in Virginia when a slew of networks announced Joe Biden had won the race for the presidency. Trump vowed he would go to court but presented no evidence of fraud.
"I am honored and humbled by the trust the American people have placed in me and in Vice President-elect [Kamala] Harris," Joe Biden said in a statement.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden delivers an address in prime time Friday evening from Delaware as the vote count continues in the presidential race with President Donald Trump.
After notching narrow victories in Michigan and Wisconsin on Wednesday, Joe Biden holds a lead in the march to 270. All eyes are on four key states: Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina.
Joe Biden now has 16 additional electoral votes in his column. In one of the biggest upsets of the 2016 election, Trump won Michigan by just under 11,000 votes.
Trump spoke after the AP called Texas, Florida, Ohio and Iowa for him. Tight races, strong turnout and record amounts of mail-in voting left millions of legitimate votes still to be counted.
A national survey measures the demographics, policy views, voting behavior and other attributes of Americans who participated in the election. This is an alternative to traditional exit polls.
The decision means about 127,000 ballots cast by drive-through voting in the Houston area will be counted. It follows similar rulings by a federal judge and the Texas Supreme Court.
"I think it's terrible when we can't know the results of an election the night of the election in a modern-day age of computers," Trump said. But the vote totals are never fully counted the same day.
President Trump may end the campaign with an election eve rally in Grand Rapids — the place where he held a late-night event in 2016 before winning Michigan and the presidency.