Joe Biden came close to reclaiming the presidency from Donald Trump on Thursday, and a handful of states were hoping to complete his vote count despite Republicans opening legal battles to stop counting in at least two states.
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Biden got 264 Electoral College votes out of the 270 needed to win the White House, according to the Associated Press, Trump has 214.
Biden just needs to win an additional outstanding state, like Nevada, where he leads, or Georgia, where his campaign believes absentee votes will take him to the top.
The former vice president said he hopes to prevail. “I am not here to declare that we have won, but I am here to report that when the count is over, we believe we will be the winners,” he told reporters in Wilmington, Delaware.
His comments came Wednesday afternoon after he scored a victory over Trump in Wisconsin, closing one of the president’s best routes to reelection.
Trump was enraged on Twitter by the vote surge for Biden and fueled anger among his most fervent supporters with the baseless accusation that fraud prevented him from winning. His campaign said he is suing in Pennsylvania and Michigan to stop the counting of votes that has biased toward Biden.
Trump falsely declared victory in Pennsylvania, one of the five states that has not yet been summoned by the Associated Press (AP). The president was ahead in the state by 383,000 votes, but Pennsylvania officials said more than a million ballots still need to be counted.
To win the Electoral College vote, you would have to win all the battlefield states that have not yet been summoned.
Biden’s victories in Wisconsin and Michigan reverse two of Trump’s surprises in 2016, when he defeated Hillary Clinton.
The Trump campaign said it would require a recount in Wisconsin, where the candidates were separated by less than 1 percentage point.
The president tweeted throughout the day, casting doubt on the counting of mail ballots, which were largely Democratic, after votes were counted in person on Election Day, which were leaning Republican.
“How is it that every time they count the landfills by mail they are so devastating in their percentage and power of destruction?” The president said on Twitter. Another tweet reflected on his clues “magically” disappearing in states run by Democratic governors.
Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, insisted that the president was heading for re-election and that the campaign was grooming his lawyers to challenge the results in some states.
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The unresolved outcome, due to an unusually large number of mail-in ballots due to the coronavirus, risks further stoking tensions in the US, beset by an economic recession and the raging virus.
Biden’s campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, said in a statement early Wednesday that Trump’s comments were “scandalous, unprecedented and incorrect” and “a naked effort to take away democratic rights from American citizens.” .
In Nevada, where the counting stopped until Thursday, Biden was clinging to a nearly 8,000-vote lead. In the popular vote nationwide, he leads by about 3 million.
There were few surprises between the states where the Associated Press announced winners, and the Republican and Democratic states generally lined up, despite expectations for several surprises.
Trump won Florida, a crucial award in the White House race that shut down Biden’s hopes of an early knockout. The president also won Texas, which Democrats hoped would completely change the electoral map.
Trump won Ohio and Biden won Minnesota, he claims each candidate had tried to take the other away but ended politically unchanged from 2016.
Trump still has small advantages in North Carolina and Georgia, although there are votes pending on each. Trump won both states in 2016. But his lead in Georgia was narrowing Wednesday night.
Biden won Michigan, Wisconsin, the Second Congressional District of Nebraska, Minnesota, Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, New York, Virginia, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Rhode Island, New Mexico, Delaware, District of Columbia and New Hampshire, according to AP.
Trump won the other four Electoral College votes from Nebraska, Ohio, Florida, Texas, Iowa, Idaho, Kansas, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, West Virginia, North Dakota, South Dakota , Wyoming, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Missouri.
Read also |2020 US elections: Trump may become the first US president to lose re-election since 1992
Nebraska is one of only two states, with Maine, to grant an Electoral College vote to the winner of each Congressional district. Trump won two districts and Biden won one. Trump won the state overall, giving him the two remaining Nebraska Electoral College votes.
Trump won the Second Maine Congressional District and Biden won the first, plus the state’s two general electoral votes.
Even if Democrats still claim the White House, a wave of support that they hoped would also give them control of both houses of Congress could fall short.
Democrats would have to win three of the five still-undecided Senate seats to leave the Senate with a 50-50 split, giving the party control in the White House.
Biden’s advantage appears to be due to his holding onto Latino and African-American voters in numbers similar to what Clinton had four years ago. And it lowered Trump’s margin among white voters, AP voter polls show.
Trump had a 12-point lead among white voters in Tuesday’s election. Exit polls four years ago showed him with a 20-point advantage among those voters. Biden led among Latino voters with 30 points, black voters with 82 points and women with 12 points.
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