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J

oe Biden will become the first Syracuse University alumnus to serve as president of the United States.

The former vice president defeated President Donald Trump after obtaining at least 290 electoral votes with victories in battleground states, including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. Biden graduated from SU’s College of Law in 1968 and has maintained connections with the university throughout his political career.

His running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-California) will be the first woman, first Black person and first Asian American person to serve as vice president.

Biden’s victory came four days after Election Day, as the country waited for several key states to count a massive volume of mail-in ballots. Almost 60 million voters opted to vote by mail in this election after states expanded mail-in and early voting options due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Associated Press, CNN and NBC News have projected Biden as the winner of the 2020 election after he secured a substantial lead in Pennsylvania, winning the state’s 20 electoral votes. AP has also called Arizona and Nevada for Biden, but Georgia, North Carolina and Alaska remain undecided.

The former vice president won despite the Trump campaign filing longshot lawsuits in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia to dispute, without any evidence, the legitimacy of the ballot-counting process. Since Election Day, Trump and his campaign pushed a false narrative claiming that Democrats were “stealing” the election — haphazardly calling for vote counts to continue in some states and to stop in others.

Biden served as a Delaware senator for 36 years before he was elected in 2008 to serve as the 44th vice president alongside former President Barack Obama. He served another term as vice president to Obama in 2012.

Throughout the race, Biden has based his campaign around a promise to “build back better,” which includes restoring the economy following the coronavirus pandemic and healing political division in the country.

His victory comes as COVID-19 has killed over 235,000 Americans and after protesters across the country swept the streets this summer in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in May.

Trump has faced criticism over his response to the coronavirus, but Biden plans to expand rapid COVID-19 testing across the country and implement a national mask mandate. Biden also pledged to provide “clear guidance” for how schools and businesses should operate during the pandemic and a plan for an equitable distribution of vaccines.

While Biden has firmly rejected calls to defund police departments, he plans to spend an additional $300 million a year on community policing initiatives and other reforms. He would also seek to decriminalize recreational marijuana but would not attempt nationwide legalization.

Republicans are likely to hold on to the Senate and Democrats to the House. Biden will inherit a divided Congress, further challenging his ability to transform campaign promises into legislative action as the country fails to overcome the pandemic.

Following his graduation from SU, the president-elect made several visits to the university and delivered three commencement addresses.

He was the commencement speaker for the College of Law in 2006 and the keynote speaker during SU’s 2009 commencement ceremony. During his second address, which came a little over a year into his term as vice president, he reflected on his experiences at SU and how they contributed to his political career.

“Since I’ve been in public life, there has never been a graduating class that is graduating into a moment where they actually have a chance to make more than incremental change,” Biden said in the speech. “That’s why Barack and I ran. That’s why I believe so passionately we have a shot like hasn’t occurred in the lifetime of anyone in this Dome. And now we’re here. Imagine what we can do.”

Biden visited campus again in 2015, toward the end of his second term as vice president. During the visit, Biden spoke about preventing sexual assault and domestic violence on college campuses as part of the “It’s On Us” campaign. Biden and Obama created the campaign in 2014.

The president-elect made his most recent visit to SU in 2016, when he delivered another commencement address to the College of Law. During this speech, he spoke about his son Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in May 2015. Beau Biden graduated from SU’s College of Law in 1994 and delivered the college’s commencement address in 2011.

In November 2019, Biden said he was “deeply disturbed” by a series of racist incidents that occurred on and near campus last fall.

Biden’s first presidential campaign collapsed in 1987 after he admitted to plagiarism, including a law review article for an essay in his first year of law school at SU. The president-elect told The New York Times in 1987 that while he made a mistake by plagiarizing, he had just misunderstood the assignment’s citing requirements. Shortly after the scandal, Biden dropped out of the presidential race.

Biden also dated and married his first wife, Neilia Hunter, during his time at SU. They lived together about three miles from SU’s campus before moving to Delaware after Biden graduated.

Neilia died in a car crash in 1972 that also killed the couple’s infant daughter, Naomi Biden, and severely injured his two sons, Hunter and Beau Biden. During his first commencement speech at SU, Biden discussed how his life experiences taught him how to handle adversity.

His victory represents a shift from Trump on many key issues, including climate change, immigration and health care.

The president-elect plans to support an active federal role in reducing greenhouse gases and has introduced a $2 trillion plan to fight climate change by eliminating carbon emissions from the electric sector by 2035.

Trump, however, has dismissed the science behind climate change and withdrew the country from the Paris agreement among the United Nations, which aims to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees. Biden has said he will rejoin the agreement and urge other nations to increase their commitments to the climate.

Trump and Biden also significantly diverge on immigration. While Trump had built nearly 321 miles of barriers on the U.S.-Mexico border as of September, Biden has said he would immediately stop the construction of the border wall and focus his immigration policy on improving screening systems across the border.

The former vice president has also said he would work to raise the limit of refugees allowed in the country. Trump limited the number to 15,000 in October, the lowest it has ever been.

Biden supports the Affordable Care Act, a comprehensive health care reform law passed while Biden was serving as vice president under Obama. Trump has opposed the ACA but has yet to produce an alternative plan.

The president-elect has also endorsed Dana Balter, the Democratic candidate for New York’s 24th Congressional District and a former professor in SU’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Balter’s platform focused on progressive policies such as strengthening the Affordable Care Act and raising the minimum wage.

The race between Katko and Balter remains undecided, as Balter refuses to concede until the district’s nearly 70,000 absentee ballots are counted next week.