They TikToked, they led marches and they stepped up as poll workers in their communities. Now, they’ve helped tap the next President of the United States.

After a contentious race, former Vice President Joe Biden is headed to the White House with the most votes cast for any presidential candidate in American history — and he’s got millions of young Black, Latino and Asian voters to thank for that distinction. Not only was youth voter turnout in this election the highest in over 100 years, youth of color backed Biden in several battleground states including Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona, according to new analysis of voting data.

Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE), which researches youth civic engagement in the U.S., analyzed the young electorate’s role in this election and found that 73-87% of Black, Asian and Latino voters between age 18 and 29 voted for Biden, compared to the 45-51% support from young white voters. In both Pennsylvania and Michigan, more than 75% of young voters of color voted for Biden.

“If they went more towards Republican or came out in lower numbers in some of these states by just a few percentage points, it could have gone the other way,” says CIRCLE team director, Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg.

According to CIRCLE’s analysis, Black and Latino youth also had a significant impact on Biden’s gains in Georgia and Arizona, both states that President Donald Trump won in 2016. In Georgia, where the race remains tight and a winner has yet to be projected, Biden received 90% of Black youth support, according to CIRCLE’s analysis, bringing in nearly 188,000 more total youth votes than Trump. In Arizona, which Associated Press has called for Biden though votes continue to be counted, 62% of youth voted for Biden, compared to 34% for Trump. Young Latinos in this traditional GOP stronghold were 15% more likely to support Biden than young white voters.

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Young Americans have not been reliable voters in past presidential elections. During the upsurge of protests over racial injustice this summer, politicians and critics of the demonstrations questioned whether youth participation in the massive civic movement would translate into stronger engagement at the polls in November. What’s now clear, says Kawashima-Ginsberg, is that it did. “The myth of them being on the street instead of them voting didn’t pan out,” she says. “It’s been such an active electorate.”

For many within this demographic, getting another white septuagenarian man into the nation’s highest office was not what moved them to action. On social media, many young Americans who have felt underrepresented by political candidates said they finally saw themselves in Vice-President elect Kamala Harris, who will be the first woman, the first Black American and the first Asian American in U.S. history to hold her position.

“I can’t explain how uplifting it feels to be represented by Kamala,” wrote Karsten Daniels, a 20 year-old California student in a tweet. “ I feel even more excited and hopeful to run for office in my career.”

Madeline Khare, 24, tweeted, “I bawled during Kamala’s speech. This is the most impactful biracial, South Asian female representation I have ever seen. And as a biracial, South Asian female who never saw myself in media, you have no no idea what that means to me.”

In the run-up to the election, both national and local get-out-the-vote organizations worked hard to get youth of color, a group that has been disproportionately impacted by voter suppression tactics, out to the ballot box.

In the wake of Russia’s meddling of the 2016 election and the President’s repeatedly raising unsupported concerns over this year’s increase of mail-in-voting due to COVID-19, many young voters of color lost confidence in the electoral process, according to the CIRCLE. The group’s data found, for instance, that 44% of non-white young voters still had concerns of foreign election interference, the highest amongst their age demographic.

The recent get-out-the-vote push is part of a broader effort that’s been happening nationally in battleground states. NextGen America, a progressive non-profit founded by Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer, has registered over 1.6 million young voters across swing states since 2014. This year, NextGen focused on getting all eligible young voters out to vote, including the more than 800,000 Latinos that have turned 18 since the last presidential election.

The group reached out to over 1.3 million young Latinos with calls, texts and digital ads across the country, according to executive director Ben Wessel. In the end, young Latinos in states like Nevada and Arizona came out in waves for Biden. In Nevada, Biden had another double-digit youth vote lead over Trump, with 18 to 29 year-olds making up the largest share of Latino voters in the state, according to Latino voter registration organization, Voto Latino.

“Two elections in a row now, we’ve seen a youthquake that completely shakes the pillars of how our politics have been built,” says Wessel. “I think that every Democrat, Republican or independent who’s running for office needs to recognize that Gen Z and Millennials are the most important political force in our country now.”

President-elect Joe Biden said Tuesday that he and his team would move steadily ahead with their transition plans, regardless of whether President Donald Trump concedes or he provides the resources traditionally offered to incoming administrations to assist in a transition.

“We’re well underway,” Biden said as he took questions from reporters after delivering remarks about the Affordable Care Act lawsuit. The Trump Administration’s failure to recognize the outcome “does not change the dynamic of what we’re able to do,” he said.”We’re going to be moving along in a consistent manner putting together our administration, our White House, reviewing who we’re going to pick for Cabinet positions, and nothing’s going to stop it.”

The transition is moving steadily ahead even though Biden has not yet been afforded any of the privileges typically offered to a President elect, such as office space in Washington and intelligence briefings. It helps that Biden, as a former Vice President himself, is already intimately familiar with most of the levers of the federal government. “There’s nothing that slows up our effort to put things together,” he said. The additional funding and classified information typically shared with the President-elect would be nice, he said, but aren’t necessary. “We don’t see anything that’s slowing us down, quite frankly.”

Biden said he had not yet spoken to the President, who has so far refused to accept the results of the election, or to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who supports President Trump’s long-shot lawsuits to overturn the results. The General Services Administration, led by Trump appointee Emily Murphy, has not yet certified that Biden is the winner, which is why Biden’s team does not yet have the funding, office space, or access to federal agencies typically offered to a transition team. Biden has also not been given access to the Presidential Daily Brief, the national security briefing that normally gets shared with the President-elect. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence told NBC Biden could not get intelligence briefings until his election was certified by the GSA.

Normally, the incumbent President “has generally seen it in his own interest in terms of his legacy of preserving the presidency as an institution” to ensure a smooth transition of power,” says Martha Kumar, an expert on presidential transitions. ““The tone of the transition is set at the top by the incumbent president.”

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Still, the Biden team has forged ahead. Yesterday, Biden and Vice-President elect Kamala Harris met with members of a newly formed COVID-19 Advisory Board, and today the transition team announced the names of “agency review teams” who will be tasked with coordinating the transition of power and the federal government’s biggest agencies.

Except, unlike the Trump Administration “landing teams” formed after the 2016 election, Biden’s “agency review teams” don’t yet have any access to federal agencies until GSA Head Emily Murphy certifies that Biden won the election. “We must be prepared for a seamless transfer of knowledge to the incoming administration to protect our interests at home and abroad,” said Senator Ted Kaufman, a longtime Biden ally and Co-Chair of the Biden-Harris Transition, in a statement. “The agency review process will help lay the foundation for meeting these challenges on Day One.”

Despite the efforts to block his transition, Biden says nothing the Trump Administration does can slow him down. “We’re just going to proceed the way we have,” he said. “We’re doing exactly what we’d be doing if he conceded and said we’d won, which we have. So there’s nothing really changing.”

When a reporter asked what he would say to President Trump, President-elect Biden flashed a grin and said “Mr. President, I look forward to speaking with you.”

Another reporter asked how he would work with Republicans who wouldn’t even acknowledge his win.

Biden seemed unperturbed. “They will,” he said. “They will.”

—With reporting from Tessa Berenson

One week after voters chose not to reelect Donald Trump to another term as president, the Supreme Court will hear arguments Tuesday in a case that centers on a long-held goal of Trump and other Republicans: abolishing the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

The stakes could not be higher. If the Supreme Court were to overturn the law, the move would upend the U.S. health system in ways that affect nearly every American in the middle of a worsening pandemic. More than 20 million people would lose health insurance, protections for people with pre-existing health conditions would disappear, preventive care—including a future coronavirus vaccine—would no longer be free, and most health plans could charge patients more and cover less care.

Without a political fix, “the results would be immediate and calamitous,” Nicholas Bagley, a health law expert at the University of Michigan Law School told TIME recently.

Tuesday’s case, brought by a group of Republican state officials and backed by the Trump Administration, is the third time the ACA is facing a major challenge before the Supreme Court. During its first test in 2012, Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s four liberal justices upheld the law’s “individual mandate” that Americans must buy insurance or pay a penalty: the court ruled that Congress could impose a tax on those who did not have insurance.

In the years since, Republicans have failed to make good on their repeated promises to repeal and replace the ACA, but they’ve chipped away at the law’s powers. In 2017, Congressional Republicans effectively killed the individual mandate by reducing the tax penalty to zero. The current case centers on that decision. The Republican states, led by Texas, are arguing that because the penalty is now set at zero, it is no longer a meaningful tax and so is unconstitutional. If the mandate goes, they argue, the entire ACA should go with it.

The case puts the Obama administration’s landmark law in significant danger. The Supreme Court is now much more conservative than when it heard challenges to the ACA in 2012. Trump has appointed three justices, and his most recent, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, has criticized Roberts’ reasoning in the 2012 opinion.

But the case is not a done deal. A group of liberal states, led by California and backed by the House of Representatives, is defending the law. They argue that a tax penalty is still a tax even if it’s set at zero—and that even if the Justices strike down the penalty, the rest of the law can be “severed” from it.

Several recent Supreme Court decisions suggest at least some justices favor that view. This summer, Roberts wrote an opinion ruling that the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau could remain even as the court struck down part of the law creating the federal agency, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a similar opinion in a case about robocalls.

Health law experts from across the political spectrum say that the Republican challengers’ legal arguments are weak, especially given the court’s preference for this “severability” legal doctrine. “The case urges the court to adopt an approach to severability that is not only at odds with existing Supreme Court precedent, it is also at odds with originalist understandings of severability,” Jonathan Adler, a libertarian law professor at Case Western Reserve University whose research helped spur the 2015 challenge to the ACA, told TIME earlier this fall. Some scholars expect that Kavanaugh, and possibly other conservative justices too, may side with Roberts and the court’s remaining liberal bloc, ruling to keep most of the law intact.

The Obama administration did say in 2012 that the mandate was necessary for some other key portions of the law to function, but that has proven not to be the case. After the penalty was set to zero in 2017, Americans have continued to sign up for insurance using the ACA exchanges, and the rest of the ACA’ s protections have continued to exist largely as before.

Legal experts also question whether those challenging the constitutionality of the law even have standing to sue. They question whether the Republican states, which are joined by two individual plaintiffs, have been sufficiently harmed by the lack of a penalty to give them the standing in court.

Still, lower courts have sided with the challengers. A federal judge in Texas struck down the whole law in December 2018, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit agreed the individual mandate was unconstitutional, but sent the case back to the lower judge to examine which parts of the law might be kept.

President-elect Joe Biden has said he wants to build on and expand the ACA. The high court likely won’t rule on the case until near the end of its term in June, and political fixes are possible in that time. Theoretically, Congress could make the case moot by re-revising the legislation to include a tax penalty, however small. It could also add in language to the law saying the rest of it is severable from the mandate or could repeal the mandate altogether.

Those options will be difficult with a divided Congress. So far, many Republican lawmakers, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have declined to throw their weight behind the lawsuit in recent months, instead insisting that the ACA is unlikely to be struck down.

After years of controversy, the ACA now enjoys near record popularity. Most Americans do not want to see it overturned. While Republicans still support the court striking down the law, majorities of Republicans, independents and Democrats want its protections for people with pre-existing conditions to remain intact.

Over the last decade, the ACA has become deeply enmeshed in not only how the public, but also how hospitals, doctors, insurance companies and state governments see health care in the United States. With the COVID-19 pandemic on pace to worsen this winter, Biden and Congress will face enormous pressure to act to keep the health system afloat if the court does overturn the law next year.

It felt like the country held its breath over four long days, anxiously awaiting one of the presidential candidates’ electoral votes to reach 270. On the morning of Nov. 7, the Associated Press finally called Pennsylvania for former Vice President Joe Biden, pushing his total vote count to 284, a divided America poured onto the streets.

Since Election Day, TIME’s photographers have been spread out across the country to capture it all. With limited access to the candidates at events due to pandemic-related precautions, they sought out creative ways to tell the story. In the end, it somehow feels closer to what we all experienced watching the election unfold on our screens — like Tony Luong’s photos of his dinner sitting before the TV in his hotel room. They saw the anxious faces over the long counting of absentee ballots in an election that saw the highest voter turnout in history.

On Saturday afternoon, jubilant celebrations sprang up in New York, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis and California and went on into the night. That evening, crowds gathered around at the Chase Center in Wilmington, Del., to cheer and see President-Elect Joe Biden and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris address the nation after their victory for the first time.

At the same time, since Election Day, President Donald Trump’s lawyers have been contesting the totals in many states in a series of lawsuits that have gained little traction so far. In states like Florida and Arizona, our image-makers documented protests making convoluted arguments over the tabulation process.

Here are their images and first-hand accounts of this historic moment in America.

“These are fragments I remember from the long week: The President’s usually defined and controlled expressions dropping for a brief moment into melancholy and unease.

The nearly empty Black Lives Matter Plaza on election night at 4AM, a woman dressed as a clown dancing flamboyantly and taping anti-Trump signs to the asphalt.

The boarded up store-fronts and empty streets in a normally bustling neighborhood near the White House.

A young White House staffer in a small alley at night outside the West Wing, her face catching the light for a split second revealing a tear streaked-face before turning quickly back into the shadow.

The swell of a cheer from a small crowd, followed by a few car honks, then more honking then cheers from every direction, as Joe Biden was announced as President-elect.

I’ve never seen such joy and relief in such numbers in an American city in my life. It also made me think of all the people disconsolate that their beloved president had lost the race.” —Peter van Agtmeal

“I must admit that I don’t know much about the United States. This trip I have chosen to do right now, during one of the most polarizing moments in its history, is precisely to get to know this country better.

One of the things that surprised me was having these big rallies inside airports or in what look like shopping mall parking lots. I tried to return to these places at the end of the great events trying to make sense of it but without finding it.

In Italy or France, such a rally would probably take place in symbolic places like the Piazza del Popolo rather than in sterile places decorated for the occasion.

I found the election system particularly complicated, and am heartened by the fact that the current President is also finding it difficult to understand who won.

Although I am particularly happy to see my American friends and colleagues rejoice in Biden’s victory, as a photographer who has worked for many years in the Middle East, I hope that the United States, democratic or republican, will be more careful with their foreign policies.” —Lorenzo Meloni

“I had been sitting in a park in Philadelphia with a friend on Saturday morning, and all of a sudden, people around us started screaming, car horns honking, collective cheering, and a literal church bell ringing. It was a domino effect of people realizing Pennsylvania had been called for Biden.

There had been a cloud of anxiety and tension that was palpable in the city since Tuesday, but once it was announced, it was as if a dam had broken. I remember a band in Rittenhouse Square had been playing, and when the news came out, they started to play “When the Saints Go Marching In.” People were running out of their houses towards Broad Street and City Hall, dancing to someone’s stereo playing “Party in the USA.” The one word I heard the most in Philadelphia and later in Wilmington was “relief.”

In Wilmington, when the fireworks went off at the end of Biden’s speech, looking around at so many varieties of people in; race, gender, and age, all chanting “USA! USA! USA!” together. You could feel this electric unity running through everyone in that crowd.” —Michelle Gustafson

“Pretty much everyone I’ve spoken to in LA spent the days after the election was in a weird state of limbo, where they were unable to get any work done, or read a book, or concentrate on TV, or even sleep. Election Day simultaneously feels like it was yesterday, and also three months ago. It was difficult for me to put together the captions for these photos just now because everything that’s happened since the election has just sort of melted together into one long anxiety dream.” —Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

“It is here, in the center of a Trump supporters’ rally, that I found myself coming home, with Ruddy Roye in tow, only to be cast out by my community. The crowd last night outside La Carreta on Bird Road first turned on a cameraman for Telemundo before shifting focus toward running us out of the lot. They asked why we’d come here, and Ruddy answered: ‘Because I have always been interested in the eyes of the other.’

Four years ago, it was the eyes of the Democrats we looked into in order to understand how a nation carries on beyond the fervor of a national election. The lessons are in that disappointment. And these eyes in Florida betrayed the same pain we saw then — disenfranchisement, fear for moral values, work, culture and more. The community is raw, visceral and animalistic in its anger.

It’s important to come to know that insidious mistrust that would provoke someone to put hands on people they don’t know, who are just trying to do their jobs. To call through megaphones for the destruction of the ‘communists’ they claimed we were. To call for the truth and transparency Cuba’s dictatorship refused, only to then hunt down anyone there to hear it, using the Cuban flag as the banner under which to drive them out. As a community and as a culture, we have to ask ourselves what we fled for.” —Reported by Rebecca Lee Sanchez

“Here in Phoenix, Trump supporters have been very vocal since the election, with protests each day and into the late evening. It’s a fascinating melange of the Trump faithful: evangelicals, internet provocateurs, heavily armed militia members and white nationalists. They don’t trust the election results and conspiracy theories fly around like MAGA flags in the wind.

The hard core supporters here don’t seem like they’re going anywhere. They’re distrustful of the legitimacy of the process, and I don’t see them accepting the results.” —Sinna Nasseri

I saw and felt an overall sense of calm in Wilmington on Election Day, consisting of equal parts of nervousness and confidence. From 7AM to 7PM, I drove all around Wilmington through various neighborhoods, both urban and suburban. Folks were commuting to their jobs, kids playing in their yards, construction workers resuming their projects, and lastly, voters waiting to vote. I saw Biden/Harris signs every few houses or so.I didn’t see any agitators at any polling locations or major gathering areas, nor did I see any rallies or conflicts between Trump and Biden supporters. Still, the one thing I did feel was this sense of anticipation that couldn’t be outwardly expressed within the wait for the results to come in.

One moment that stood out to me was in the evening at the Chase Center, where President-elect Biden held his event. As everyone waited for the first states to begin calling their vote counts, a few Biden supporters began to trickle in hopes of seeing the President-elect speak or even being let in. That was impossible due to the coronavirus and restrictions. I walked along the barricade and noticed this mother and her daughter quietly staring at the massive American flag that hung from the cranes inside the event area. There was something hopeful and incredibly quiet about that, being on one side of the fence gazing at a symbol of freedom and hope. It seemed to sum up the voices of everyone in the country and where it was headed and how we were going to move forward regardless of the outcome. — Tony Luong