Joe Biden, president-elect of the United States, at an event in Wilmington.JONATHAN ERNST / Reuters
Nine days after the US presidential elections, this Thursday night all the major media were finally in a position to mathematically project Joe Biden's victory in the State of Arizona.
The margin is minimal, 0.36%, which translated into just 11,000 votes difference out of a total of 3.3 million.
However, the mathematical models of NBC, CNN and
The New York Times
considered that the trend makes it impossible for Donald Trump to turn the result around.
The Associated Press,
The Wall Street Journal
and Fox News gave Arizona to Biden on the same election night, but the extremely narrow voting margin had prevented consensus until now.
Arizona has 11 votes in the Electoral College.
With the victory in that state, Biden already reaches 290 electoral votes (it takes 270 to be elected president).
Two states remain to be adjudicated: Georgia and North Carolina.
In Georgia, Biden had a 12,000 vote lead on Friday, 0.29%.
Although the experts practically take victory for granted, the mathematical models of the media still do not give the difference as irreversible.
In North Carolina Trump is ahead, by 1.3%, and has not been awarded either.
If the trend continues, Biden will end with 306 electoral votes and Trump, with 232.
Joe Biden is the first Democrat to win Arizona since 1996. That year, Bill Clinton claimed the traditionally Republican state, home to Barry Goldwater, but it was because a third candidate split the Republican vote.
Before Clinton, Arizona had not voted for a Democrat since Harry Truman in 1948.
Biden's victory in Arizona has a special meaning.
This has been an objective of the Democrats for a decade, when through immigrant organizations and unions they began to register and massively mobilize a Mexican-American population that until then had lived on the margins of politics.
Today, nearly 1.2 million Latinos are eligible to vote, 23% of the Arizona electorate, a higher percentage than Nevada or Colorado.
Apart from the Mexican-American vote, Biden has had the help, yet to be quantified, of a Republican sector that broke with Trump for his insults to Senator John McCain, a true political myth in Arizona.
Since the summer, posters of "Republicans for Biden" could be seen in Phoenix, a phenomenon of rejection of the president that has not occurred so openly in other states.
The senator's own widow, Cindy McCain, the matriarch of the Arizona Republican Party, publicly endorsed Biden, has campaigned for him and is a member of his transition team.
Biden and McCain were friends in the Senate.
Arizona was also the last Republican jewel of the West, where all states with a certain weight of population have been falling on the Democratic side in a consistent trend for 25 years.
The Latino, young and urban population made California a Democrat at the turn of the century, and then the phenomenon was repeated in Nevada and Colorado.
With Arizona, which had not voted Democratic this century, falls one of the most treasured pieces of Republicans in the West.
Neither Nevada, nor Colorado, nor California have turned back after voting Democratic.
Added to Biden's victory is astronaut Mark Kelly, who was running for the Senate as a Democrat and who won his seat by a greater margin than Biden.
Arizona did not have two Democratic senators at the same time since the 1950s. Kelly will take office at the end of November, replacing Republican Martha McSally, who was not elected, but was appointed by the governor to fill the John McCain seat.
Now, it will be occupied by a Democrat.
Subscribe here to the
newsletter
about the elections in the United States