Millions of legally cast votes are being counted in elections offices around the country as the presidential race between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden comes down to a handful of battleground states.
Biden holds the lead in the Electoral College at this stage in the night, 238-213; 270 electoral votes are needed to become president.
Experts had warned for months that a result may not be known on election night, or even days afterward, as voters voted by mail in record numbers. As of early Wednesday morning, it was still too close to call. Biden has however Won in Michigan, Maine, Georgia and the potentially critical state of Pennsylvania.
Trump won a close race in Florida, which was one of the states Biden had hoped to peel away from the President’s 2016 map and has a narrow edge in North Carolina. The former vice president has taken the lead in Wisconsin and is hoping that Arizona, where he has a 5-percentage point lead with 82% of the ballots counted, could be his first victory of the night that turns a red state blue.
With more than 90% of the vote counted in Wisconsin, Biden holds a narrow lead over Trump in that state of just more than 20,000 votes, with all of Milwaukee’s vote counted.
The state of Nevada, which Clinton won by a slender margin in 2016, also appeared to be a much closer race than Democrats had expected. With 85% of the votes counted in that state, Biden leads by less than a percentage point.
Increasingly, it appears that the result of the entire election could hinge on whether Biden can restore the Democratic “blue wall” in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, a scenario that could stretch into the coming days as large numbers of mail-in votes are counted.
The night unfolded as the most unorthodox election night in modern memory. At times it appeared like one candidate or the other was heading for an early win in important states. But batches of mail-in and early votes meant the count often dramatically shifted one way or the other.
Polls are now closed across the US on a nerve-jangling night that will set the nation’s course for the next four years and cast judgment on the most tumultuous presidency of the modern age. Results are flowing in from battlegrounds and it’s too early to make a projection in many key states.
CNN projects Biden will win Hawaii, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Virginia, California, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, Delaware, Washington, DC, Maryland, Massachusetts and one of Nebraska’s five electoral votes. Nebraska awards two electoral votes to its statewide winner and divides three others over its three congressional districts.
CNN projects Trump will also win in Montana, Texas, Iowa, Idaho, Ohio, Mississippi, Wyoming, Missouri, Kansas, Utah, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, North Dakota, South Dakota, Arkansas, Indiana, Oklahoma, Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee and four of Nebraska’s five electoral votes.
Trump’s chilling threat to vote counting
Trump attempted to claim victory in the presidential race and called for a halt to legitimate vote counting that is underway around the country in a chilling threat to American democracy
In fact, the election is far from over with millions of votes outstanding in key states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan — ballots that were cast before Election Day that have yet to be counted. Yet Trump sought to mislead his loyal supporters by conflating the legitimate counting of ballots with voting as he falsely claimed Democrats were trying to “steal the election.”
Facing the real possibility that he could lose, Trump — as expected — appeared to be seizing the opportunity to confuse his supporters about the democratic process and suggest that there was something nefarious about the fact that many states are still counting votes. The lengthy vote count, which could extend for several days, was widely anticipated because so many Americans cast vote-by-mail ballots to protect themselves from exposure to the coronavirus in the middle of a pandemic.
While making the ludicrous suggestion that the counting of legally cast votes should stop as he watched his margins narrow in several key swing states, Trump made a wild threat that his lawyers would take their case to the Supreme Court even though it remains unclear what their legal rationale would be.
Even within Trump’s short speech there was a glaring inconsistency in his position as he advocated for votes to continue to be counted in Arizona, a state that he believes is more favorable to him, while expressing anger that one network had called it early. CNN has not projected a winner in Arizona.
He celebrated his victories in Florida and Ohio, and claimed to win multiple states that CNN has yet to project. His call for an end to the counting was the kind of dangerous election night speech that political observers long feared Trump would make, in which he falsely claimed, “This is a major fraud on our nation.”
Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon ripped Trump’s speech as “a naked effort to take away the democratic rights of American citizens.”
“The President’s statement tonight about trying to shut down the counting of duly cast ballots was outrageous, unprecedented, and incorrect,” she said, adding, “It was unprecedented because never before in our history has a president of the United States sought to strip Americans of their voice in a national election. Having encouraged Republican efforts in multiple states to prevent the legal counting of these ballots before Election Day, now Donald Trump is saying these ballots can’t be counted after Election Day either.”
Biden was the first candidate to speak to supporters early Wednesday morning, after a night of results didn’t deliver a quick winner, saying that “we believe we’re on track to win this election.”
The former vice president said it was not up to him or Trump to decide the winner of the election and that the votes would be counted.
“Keep the faith guys, we’re going to win this,” Biden said.
Trump wins two must-have states
Wins for Trump in the Sunshine State and Ohio are crucial to keep open his pathway to win a second term.
Florida Democrats were concerned early in the night about populous southern Miami-Dade County where Biden appeared to be underperforming Clinton’s mark in 2016.
The early Biden deficit in Miami-Dade could be a sign of what was apparent in pre-election polls that suggested the President had been making incursions into traditional Democratic support with Black and Latino men. Former President Barack Obama made two trips to Miami-Dade in the closing days of the race to drive up turnout.
Miami-Dade, which Biden is still likely to win, has large concentrations of voters of Cuban and Venezuelan descent who tend to be more conservative than other Latino groups and were targeted by the President with claims that Democrats were akin to socialists.
The President also opened up a solid lead in Ohio after early returns showed Biden in the lead. The Buckeye State was another battleground that Trump’s campaign thought he must win in order to earn another four years in Washington. Biden spent time in the state on Monday and was another place that the Democrat had hoped to flip.
Biden does not need to win Florida and Ohio in order to win the presidency, but his campaign had hoped to flip those states after several encouraging polls in the final weeks of the campaign.
Biden performs well in Arizona.
Biden appears to have made significant gains in Arizona where demographic changes have accelerated the state’s shift from traditional Republican territory to a potential Democratic pick up. The President’s unpopularity and the rapid growth of the state — from its rising Latino population to the influx of retirees from the Midwest and other parts of the country — has made its politics more unpredictable, even in just the four years since 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the state 49% to 45.5%.
Clinton built up Democratic margins in populous Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and its suburbs — and the majority of the state’s voters — and Biden appears to be continuing that trend Tuesday night, with turnout looking strong in that key county.
Even within the patchwork of early returns, some trends were emerging that pointed to the fact that is a very different race than 2016. In states like Ohio and parts of Florida, Biden appears to be performing better in the suburbs than Clinton did four years ago. At the same time, the President’s team seems to have succeeded in turning out their voters as promised — in some cases making up for what appeared to be an advantage for Democrats in the early vote count in key swing states.
Results may not be known for days
Source: CNN
