Rep. Elissa Slotkin (MI-08) also won reelection after winning a majority of votes in Ingham County and Oakland County.

The race remained close as counting continued into Wednesday without a projected winner in multiple battleground states, including Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina.

This election brought new procedures and more than 100 million early and absentee voters nationwide. Young people in particular turned out with record enthusiasm, but a similar share of the national vote in 2016.

Facing rebuke within the Republican Party, Trump held a campaign event at the White House at about 2:30 a.m. to prematurely declare victory, even though no candidate was projected to receive 270 electoral college votes at that time.

The announcement of results after Election Day does not indicate fraud. It indicates that there are more ballots than county election officials are able to count and tabulate on the night of the election.

In Michigan, the election went as Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson expected: safe, full of misinformation and disinformation and slow results.

Benson said she knew the count would be slower than other states because while North Carolina had a two week start in processing millions of early and absentee ballots, Michigan could only begin counting those ballots on Election Day.

What's still unclear is the magnitude and direction of ensuing legal battles or protests, after the Trump campaign announced a lawsuit seeking to stop the vote count in Michigan.

However, two things are abundantly clear.

One, U.S. politics are deeply divided along urban-rural lines. The U.S. Congress is projected to continue its current division, with a Democratic-majority House of Representatives and a Republican-majority Senate.

Two, the U.S. is heading into a deadly phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus task force coordinator, sounded the alarm Monday, publicly rebuking the lack of a comprehensive strategy to contain the virus that infected more than 100,000 people in the U.S. on Nov. 4 alone.

Though the couches set aflame following a football win at U of M might have distracted some Michigan State students, the U.K., with conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson, announced new public health measures that closed bars, restaurants, gyms and hair salons amid an uptick in COVID-19 cases there.

What’s next ?

Many people overlook a lot of the process between Election Day and Inauguration Day

The votes for president don’t go directly to the candidates; they go to the party’s nominated slate of electors, equal to the number of state electoral votes.

Any disputes about this election have until Dec. 8 to be resolved. That date is the “Safe Harbor” deadline, six days before the Electoral College meets to vote for the U.S. presidency.

The importance of the deadline was in dispute during the legal battles concerning Florida’s recounts in the 2000 election, ultimately determined by the U.S. Supreme Court.

On Dec. 14, the electoral college meets in their respective states to physically cast electoral votes for president and vice president.

The newly elected House and Senate both meet on Jan. 6, 2021, to count electoral votes and declare results, leaving some time for objections from legislators before inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021.