The Latest: Biden to deliver remarks following Trump’s win, House control hangs in the balance

President Joe Biden is scheduled to deliver remarks to the nation in what will be his first appearance on camera in the aftermath of Donald Trump ’s decisive victory over Kamala Harris.

Control over the U.S. House of Representatives hangs in the balance, teetering between a Republican or Democratic majority with dozens of races left to be called.

The Republicans won control of the U.S. Senate early Wednesday.

Follow the AP’s Election 2024 coverage at: https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.

Here’s the latest:

Federal Reserve officials are poised Thursday to reduce their key interest rate for a second straight time, responding to a steady slowdown of inflation pressures that exasperated many Americans and contributed to Donald Trump’s presidential election victory.

Yet the Fed’s future moves are now more uncertain in the aftermath of the election, given that Trump’s economic proposals have been widely flagged as potentially inflationary. His election has also raised the specter of meddling by the White House in the Fed’s policy decisions, with Trump having proclaimed that as president he should have a voice in the central bank’s interest rate decisions.

The Fed has long guarded its status as an independent institution able to make difficult decisions about borrowing rates, free from political interference. Yet during his previous term in the White House, Trump publicly attacked Chair Jerome Powell after the Fed raised rates to fight inflation, and he may do so again.

▶ Read more about interest rate cuts

Less than 24 hours after Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the United States, social media users began pushing two conflicting narratives to suggest election fraud, one that revived false claims by Trump that the 2020 vote was stolen from him and the other questioning how Vice President Kamala Harris could have received so many fewer votes in 2024 than President Joe Biden in 2020.

Both narratives hinge on a supposed 20 million vote gap between Harris and Biden.

Here’s a closer look at the facts.

CLAIM: President Joe Biden won approximately 20 million more votes in the 2020 election than Vice President Kamala Harris earned in the 2024 race, proving either that Trump has cheated his way to a second term or that there was widespread fraud four years ago.

THE FACTS: The claims are unfounded. Votes from Tuesday’s presidential election are still being counted, so any comparison with previous races would not be accurate. In addition, election officials and agencies monitoring the vote have reported no significant issues with Tuesday’s election. Claims of widespread fraud in 2020 have been debunked countless times.

▶ Read more on this fact focus

Iranians, like many around the world, are divided on what Donald Trump’s next presidency will bring: Some foresee an all-out war between Tehran and Washington, particularly as other conflicts rage in the region. Others hold out hope that America’s 47th president might engage in unexpected diplomacy as he did with North Korea.

But nearly all believe something will change in the U.S.-Iran relationship.

And while Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has final say on all matters of state, has repeatedly expressed his own disgust with Trump, Iran’s new reformist president has kept the door open to talks with Trump to seek relief from international sanctions to buoy a cratering economy. The Iranian rial, in a free fall for years, hit its lowest value against the dollar on Wednesday before slightly recovering.

▶ Read more about the response in Iran to Trump’s election win

Trump’s second term could realign U.S. diplomacy away from traditional international alliances and more toward populist, authoritarian politicians, according to both those leaders and outside observers.

Among them are:

1. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán

2. President Vladimir Putin of Russia

3. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi

4. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey

5. President Javier Milei of Argentina

6. Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico

▶ Read more about these leaders and their diplomatic approaches

Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders did not mince words in a scathing statement Wednesday.

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Sanders, Vermont’s senior senator, said.

“First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well,” Sanders said.

Sanders won reelection to a fourth term on Tuesday. He singled out wealth inequality, a slipping standard of living in the U.S., a lack of full health care guarantees and support for Israel’s recent military campaigns as problems Democrats need to focus on. Sanders’s 2016 presidential run was a key factor in pushing the dialogue in the Democratic party to the left. Sanders has built his political career outside — and often criticizing — the Democratic Party, but he caucuses with Democrats in the Senate.

“At the start of his mandate, we wish him much wisdom because this is the main virtue of rulers according to the Bible,” Cardinal Pietro Parolin said, speaking on the sidelines of a Rome conference on Thursday, according to Vatican News.

While acknowledging no one had a “magic wand” to end wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Parolin said the Holy See hoped Trump “can indeed be an element of détente and pacification in the current conflicts that are bleeding the world.”

Parolin also said he hoped Trump would work to end polarization in the U.S., including over abortion. On migration, he recalled Pope Francis’ call to welcome those fleeing wars, poverty and climate change.

After visiting the U.S.-Mexico border in 2016 and asked about Trump’s call to build a wall, Francis famously said anyone who builds a wall to keep out migrants was “not Christian.”

More recently, Francis recommended U.S. voters choose the “lesser evil” when asked how a U.S. Catholic should vote given Trump’s pledge to deport migrants and Vice President Kamala Harris’ support of abortion rights.

“I have long admired the United States of America as the champion of democracy, freedom and the rule of law,” the Tibetan spiritual leader said in a message to Trump from the northern Indian town of Dharamshala where he has lived in exile since fleeing Tibet in 1959.

“The Tibetan people and I have been honored to have received the support of respective U.S. Presidents and the American people, in our endeavor to protect and preserve our ancient Buddhist culture — a culture of peace, non-violence and compassion that has the potential to benefit humanity as a whole,” he said.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan conveyed his hopes in a call for strengthened cooperation between their two countries during Trump’s new term in office, according to a statement from the Turkish president’s office.

Trump’s impending return to the White House means he’ll want to stand up an entirely new administration from the one that served under President Joe Biden. His team is also pledging that the second won’t look much like the first one Trump established after his 2016 victory.

The president-elect now has a 75-day transition period to build out his team before Inauguration Day arrives on Jan. 20. One top item on the to-do list: filling around 4,000 government positions with political appointees, people who are specifically tapped for their jobs by Trump’s team.

That includes everyone from the secretary of state and other heads of Cabinet departments to those selected to serve part-time on boards and commissions. Around 1,200 of those presidential appointments require Senate confirmation, which should be easier with the Senate now shifting to Republican control.

▶ Read more about Trump’s transition

The House contests remain a tit-for-tat fight to the finish, with no dominant pathway to the majority for either party. Rarely, if ever, have the two chambers of Congress flipped in opposite directions.

Each side is gaining and losing a few seats, including through the redistricting process, which is the routine redrawing of House seat boundary lines. The process reset seats in North Carolina, Louisiana and Alabama.

Much of the outcome hinges on the West, particularly in California, where a handful of House seats are being fiercely contested, and mail-in ballots arriving a week after the election will still be counted. Hard-fought races around the “blue dot” in Omaha, Nebraska and in far-flung Alaska are among those being watched.

With a win in Wisconsin early Wednesday, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency. But his exact margin of victory is still unclear — there are two presidential races that the AP has yet to call:

Arizona: Officials in Arizona’s Maricopa County said late Wednesday they’ve got more than 700,000 ballots left to count, which means the races for president and senate were too early to call. In all, AP estimates there are at least a million ballots to be added to the results in Arizona. County election officials are expected to firm up those numbers on Thursday.

Nevada: AP estimated late Wednesday evening that there are more than 200,000 ballots left to count in Nevada — including more than 130,000 in Clark County. Given the narrow margins in the races for president and U.S. Senate, both are too early to call. The AP will further review results released by Nevada election officials on Thursday.

Arizona: Officials in Arizona’s Maricopa County said late Wednesday they’ve got more than 700,000 ballots left to count, which means the races for president and senate were too early to call. In all, AP estimates there are at least a million ballots to be added to the results in Arizona. County election officials are expected to firm up those numbers on Thursday.

Nevada: AP estimated late Wednesday evening that there are more than 200,000 ballots left to count in Nevada — including more than 130,000 in Clark County. Given the narrow margins in the races for president and U.S. Senate, both are too early to call. The AP will further review results released by Nevada election officials on Thursday.

The U.S. House majority hung in the balance Wednesday, teetering between Republican control that would usher in a new era of unified GOP governance in Washington or a flip to Democrats as a last line of resistance to a Trump second-term White House agenda.

A few individual seats, or even a single one, will determine the outcome. Final tallies will take a while, likely pushing the decision into next week — or beyond.

After Republicans swept into the majority in the U.S. Senate by picking up seats in West Virginia, Ohio and Montana, House Speaker Mike Johnson predicted his chamber would fall in line next.

“Republicans are poised to have unified government in the White House, Senate and House,” Johnson said Wednesday.

▶ Read more about control of Congress

The remarks to the nation will be Biden’s first appearance on camera in the aftermath of Trump’s decisive victory over Harris.

Donald Trump spent his first day as president-elect receiving congratulatory phone calls from his defeated opponent, world leaders and President Joe Biden as he began the process of turning his election victory into a government.

Trump was keeping a low profile, staying out of the public eye after addressing supporters in Florida during the wee hours of Wednesday morning.

Vice President Kamala Harris called Trump to concede the race and to congratulate him, while Biden invited the man he ousted from the White House four years ago to an Oval Office meeting to prepare to return the keys.

Biden’s chief of staff later Wednesday nudged the Trump team to sign the required federal agreements necessary to begin an orderly presidential transition, a White House official said.

▶ Revisit how the news unfolded with Wednesday’s live coverage