Ben Lowry: Joe Biden was always going to win the most votes in the this election but now he is set to win the presidency too

That is the total votes that each candidate gets.

It is an easy number to understand.

In 2008, for example, Barack Obama became America’s first black president when he won votes. 69,498,516 (52.9% of the total).

His Republican Party opponent Senator John McCain secured 59,948,323 votes (45.7% of the total).

Obama was 10 million votes ahead of McCain, and so moved to the White House.

But there is, as people around the world heard yesterday if they did not already know, also a less interesting figure in all US elections — the result in the so-called electoral college.

That is the number of ‘electors’ that each candidate gets, depending on how many US states they win.

If thy come top in a state, they then pick up its electoral college votes.

This is based on the number of representatives in Congress that each state has: senators (members of the senate) and congressmen (members of the House of Representatives).

Each state has two senators, regardless of size, and each has a number of congressmen that is linked to population size (Alaska has one, California has 53).

Thus Alaska has three electoral college votes, California has 55.

Since the founding of the United States, the distinction between the popular vote result and the electoral college result barely mattered.

This was because a candidate who got the most votes across America almost always also won in the electoral college.

But since 2000 there have been two elections where this did not happen — and possibly three, depending on what happens in the next few days.

Al Gore and Hillary Clinton got more votes overall than their republican opponents (respectively, 500,000 more votes than George Bush in 2000, and three million more votes than Donald Trump in 2016), yet they lost in the electoral college.

The reasons for this are complex, but the simplest way to explain it is due to the regional spread in key different types of voters.

In recent years, the electoral college has tended to give small rural, conservative areas disproportionate influence.

And that, in summary, is what has happened over the last 48 hours.

If the US presidency was a straight plebiscite, in which the candidate who got most votes won, Mr Biden would have been assured as the winner months ago.

The polls have been wrong in this race, because they have had him between 6% and 10% ahead (average 8%) of the Republican Party president Donald Trump for six months.

But they have only been wrong in the scale of Mr Biden’s lead, not in the fact of that lead.

It looks like, when all the votes are counted, Mr Biden will end up only 3% to 4% ahead in the popular vote across America. If so, the polls will have overstated his lead by 4% or 5%.

This evening the tally was roughly 71 million to Mr Trump’s 68 million, with at least 10 million ballots still to count.

In other words, Mr Biden has comfortably won the most votes, as every polling expert knew he would. He just hasn’t won by as a large a margin as they thought he would.

And that error was greater than the error in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was an average of 4% ahead of Mr Trump in opinion polls, yet on the day she was only 2% ahead.

The reason that Mr Biden was not announced as victor today was that he has found it much harder to win on the electoral college, due to the geographical spread of his votes, than in the overall total US vote count.

But this evening it became increasingly clear that he was going to win by that defining electoral college measure too.

In normal circumstances, he would be declared president and the defeated incumbent would concede.

Mr Trump, however, made clear early today that he is going to challenge the result in the courts.

This is not going to be easy if it looks clear that he has indeed lost on the electoral college. He has already fired up his supporters, with his remarkable comments this morning (met with cheers and applause) that America had suffered a fraud.

His lawyers are working on challenging the results.

But he will be badly isolated if senior Republican Party officials decline to support such legal actions.

While he was not directly contradicted by senior members of his party yesterday in his claims that he had won, nor was he supported by them.

It is clear from media accounts and from books, and indeed from the turnover of staff in the White House, that he has many influential enemies in the Republican Party.

Plenty of them will be happy to abandon him once they are sure he is finished.

There is a precedent for Mr Trump’s challenge: Florida in 2000, when Mr Bush, via the Supreme Court, stopped a recount that seemed set to put Mr Gore ahead (after Mr Bush was called to have ‘won’ the state).

But that was a remarkably close election in which the entire US outcome came down to a few hundred votes in that one state.

This evening it seemed that Mr Biden, while his lead was narrow, was further ahead in several states than was the case for either candidate in 2000.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter deputy editor

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