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Joe Biden, 77, needs a total of 270 votes to capture the Electoral College that determines the winner of the White House and the magic number was within his grasp and several states were expected to announce their results Thursday.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden speaks at an election night event at the Chase Center in the early morning of November 4, 2020 in Wilmington, Delaware. Image: AFP
WASHINGTON – Former Vice President Joe Biden, who made his third run in the White House, came tantalizingly close to victory Thursday as President Donald Trump tried to avoid defeat with scattered legal challenges and his campaign insisted he would be reelected.
Biden, 77, needs a total of 270 votes to capture the Electoral College that determines the winner of the White House and the magic number was within his grasp and several states were expected to announce their results Thursday.
The former Delaware senator and aspiring Democrat currently has 253 electoral votes, or 264 if you include the 11 electoral votes from the southwestern state of Arizona.
Trump, 74, is trailing with 214 electoral votes, but Jason Miller, his top campaign strategist, said the Republican incumbent “will win the race again.”
“We believe that as soon, possibly late tomorrow, on Friday it will be clear to the American public that President Trump and Vice President (Mike) Pence will serve another four years in the White House,” Miller told reporters.
Current Electoral College counts say otherwise with Biden on track to win Arizona and Nevada and possibly even eliminate Georgia and Pennsylvania.
“Let me be very clear, our data shows that Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States,” his campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, told reporters. “We are very confident, whatever happens with the count and time, we will move forward.”
Trump is currently leading the way in Georgia and Pennsylvania, but Biden has been narrowing his advantages as votes continue to be counted, slowly in some states this year due to high volume of mail-in ballots due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump had a roughly 18,000 vote lead in Georgia early Thursday with about 60,000 votes left to count, much of which came from the heavily Democratic suburbs of Atlanta.
He led by about 122,000 votes in Pennsylvania with 91 percent of the vote counted, but Biden has been narrowing the margin.
“STOP THE COUNT!” Trump tweeted Thursday morning. “ANY VOTE THAT ARRIVED AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!”
STOP COUNTING!
– Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 5, 2020
While Trump demanded that the counting of votes be stopped in Georgia and Pennsylvania, where he leads, his supporters and his campaign insisted that it continue in Arizona and Nevada, where he lags behind.
Trump prematurely declared victory on Wednesday and threatened to request the Supreme Court to intervene to stop the vote counting, but he has nonetheless continued.
‘STOP THE COUNT!’
Fox News and the AP news agency screened Biden as the winner in Arizona on Tuesday night. But other outlets have yet to do so, and vote counting continues in the state, where Biden has a fairly healthy lead of 69,000 votes.
With 86% of the votes counted, Biden had a minimum lead of 8,000 votes in Nevada, which has six electoral votes.
Nevada was won by Hillary Clinton in 2016 and much of the pending votes come from areas of the western state that lean toward Democrats.
In Georgia, Gabriel Sterling of the Secretary of State’s office called for patience and dismissed claims from the Trump campaign about wrongdoing among poll workers.
“These people are not involved in voter fraud,” Sterling said.
“This is a long process, but I think we would all agree that having an accurate count is much more vital,” he added.
Pennsylvania, Biden’s birthplace, has 20 electoral votes and was considered one of the top prizes in Tuesday’s election.
Georgia, with 16 electoral votes, has been a reliable Republican state, but it could land in the Democratic column for the first time since Bill Clinton won it in 1992.
Trump won both states in 2016 with his surprise victory over Hillary Clinton.
With possible defeat looming, Trump has launched multiple legal challenges, announcing lawsuits in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania and demanding a recount in Wisconsin, where Biden won by just 20,000 votes.
Bob Bauer, a lawyer for Biden’s campaign, dismissed the large number of lawsuits as “without merit.”
“All of this is meant to create a big cloud,” Bauer said. “But it is not a very thick cloud. We see through it. Also the courts and election officials.”
‘COUNT THE VOTES!’
In Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign said a court had given the green light for its “observers” to observe the counting of votes in the Democratic stronghold of Philadelphia. Previous Trump supporters had kept a distance of up to 30 meters.
Attempts to stop vote counting in states where Trump leads were not limited to the courts.
In the city of Detroit, Michigan, a mostly black Democratic stronghold, a crowd of Trump supporters, mostly white, was shouting “Stop the count!” tried to break into an electoral office on Wednesday before being blocked by security.
Television networks have projected a Biden victory in Michigan, but the final ballots are still being counted.
In Arizona’s Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, an aggressive pro-Trump crowd gathered in front of a counting office shouting “Count the votes!” – some of them openly carried firearms, which is legal in the state.
In stark contrast to Trump’s unprecedented rhetoric about being duped, Biden has tried to project calm, reaching a nation torn by four years of polarizing leadership and traumatized by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We have to stop treating our opponents as enemies,” Biden said Wednesday. “What unites us as Americans is much stronger than anything that can separate us.”
The tight race for the White House and the recriminations have evoked memories of the 2000 election between Republican George W Bush and Democrat Al Gore.
That contest, which depended on a handful of votes in Florida, eventually ended in the Supreme Court, which stopped a recount while Bush led the way.
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