With a projected 306 electoral votes and more than 75 million votes, Joe Biden wins the election to take office as the next president and Kamala Harris as vice president of the United States. The U.S. election process is a complicated system that usually involves one-stop early voting and in-person voting on election day with a very small percentage of absentee voting.  Voters are actually voting for representatives to vote in the electoral college several weeks later.  This is the official vote that elects the next president.  With the exception of a few states, the majority of the popular vote determines to whom all the electoral votes for a state will go.  The number of electoral college representatives are based on the population of the state, so 14 million voters in California are represented by 55 electoral college votes and 1 million votes in Arkansas are represented by 6 electoral college votes.  Whoever gets 270 votes in the electoral college is elected president.  Sometimes this has meant even if a candidate won the total popular vote in the country they are still not elected.  This was the case for Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016.

As for third party candidates, it has been a long time since there were enough votes for a third-party for it to matter in the electoral college.  You can explore this interactive timeline of election maps here.  https://www.270towin.com/historical-presidential-elections/timeline/  In 1968, Richard Nixon was re-elected but the American Independent candidate, George Wallace, received 46 electoral votes.  (If you are interested, you can see that Theodore Roosevelt was elected as the Republican candidate in 1904 and ran as a Progressive candidate in 1912.)  It has also been a long time since any state in the south voted for the Democratic party.  Several states in the south voted for President Bill Clinton in 1996, including his home state Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Montana, Arizona, and Georgia.  This year, both Arizona and Georgia flipped and voted for Democratic candidate Joe Biden.  Eyes were on North Carolina also, who voted for President Barack Obama in 2008.  It was a very close call in Georgia, with the smallest margin, less than 10,000 more votes for Biden than Trump.  North Carolina will likely go to Trump who has a lead of 100,000 votes there.  Senator Thom Tillis is likely re-elected but there are still some votes to be counted yet.

The map can be deceiving making when many large states are all red or all blue when in fact many states are more evenly matched.  If we look at the ratio of voters, 13 states had nearly 2x as many votes for the Democratic candidate: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Washington DC (actually they voted 14:1), Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Virginia, Vermont and Washington.  They account for 154 electoral college votes.  19 states had nearly 2x as many votes for the Republican candidate: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming account for 120 electoral votes.  All the other states actually meet somewhere in the middle (264 electoral votes).

While the Democrat party still controls the House and now will have a candidate in Office, we will wait for runoff elections in Georgia to see if the Republican party will still have the Senate majority.  The Senate majority leader makes decisions about what the Senate will vote on and are important in confirming presidential nominations of federal judges.  They need 51 seats for a majority, both parties have 48 seats each, the vote for 2 seats (in North Carolina and Alaska) are still being counted, and 2 other seats in Georgia that will be determined in a runoff election.