Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., the 47th vice president of the United States in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2017, has been elected 46th President of the United States, defeating President Donald Trump.
The United States has also elected its first female President, Kamala Harris, a Democrat from California.
Harris is the first black and Asian American female Vice President.
Biden, who would become the 46th President of the United States on January 20, 2021, replaces the 45th President Donald J. Trump.
Biden’s official profile shows he was raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and New Castle County, Delaware, and studied at the University of Delaware before earning his law degree from Syracuse University in 1968.
He was elected a New Castle County Councillor in 1970, and became the sixth-youngest senator in American history when he was elected to the U.S. Senate from Delaware in 1972.
Biden was a longtime member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and eventually its chairman. Biden’s vote as a Senator have varied over time. For instance, he opposed the Gulf War in 1991, but supported expanding the NATO alliance into Eastern Europe and its intervention in the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.
He supported the resolution authorizing the Iraq War in 2002 but opposed the surge of U.S. troops in 2007. He also chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee from 1987 to 1995, dealing with drug policy, crime prevention, and civil liberties issues; he led the effort to pass the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and the Violence Against Women Act, and oversaw six U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings, including the contentious hearings for Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. He ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 and again in 2008, but won the nomination in 2020.
