Across the country, there were parties and prayer after Democrat Joe Biden won the presidency.
On Portland’s Congress Street in Maine, cars honked their horns and people danced on the sidewalks, cheering in celebration of the election result.
In New York City, spontaneous block parties broke out Saturday. People ran out of their buildings, banging on pots. They danced and high-fived with strangers amid honking horns.
People streamed into Black Lives Matter Plaza near the White House, waving signs and taking cellphone pictures.
In Lansing, Michigan, Donald Trump supporters and Black Lives Matter demonstrators filled the Capitol steps.
The lyrics to “Amazing Grace” began to echo through the crowd, and the Trump supporters put their hands on a counterprotester and prayed.
Two former Democratic presidents are offered their congratulations to Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.
Bill Clinton tweeted that “America has spoken and democracy has won.” The 42nd president also predicted Biden and Harris would “serve all of us and bring us all together.”
Jimmy Carter, the 39th president, said in a statement Saturday that he and his wife, Rosalynn, are “proud” of the Democrats’ “well-run campaign and seeing the positive change they bring to our nation.”
Neither Clinton nor Carter mentioned President Donald Trump in their congratulatory remarks.
Biden was a young Delaware senator when Carter served as president from 1977 to 1981. Biden had risen in the ranks to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman by Clinton’s presidency in the 1990s and led confirmation hearings for Clinton’s two Supreme Court nominees: Justice Stephen Breyer and the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
President-elect Joe Biden is planning to address the nation on Saturday night.
His presidential campaign announced that Biden and his wife, Jill, and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff will appear at a drive-in rally outside the convention center in Wilmington, Delaware.