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Joe Biden is about to win the presidency and needs to secure one more state on the battlefield to defeat President Donald Trump.
Biden has already won the fiercely contested Michigan and Wisconsin awards, part of the “blue wall” that Democrats missed four years ago.
Two days after Election Day, neither candidate has accumulated the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House.
But Biden’s victories in the Great Lakes states have him at 264, meaning he is one battlefield state away from becoming president-elect.
Trump, with 214 electoral votes, faced a much bigger hurdle.
To get to 270, he needed to claim the four remaining battlefields: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, and Nevada.
With millions of votes yet to be tabulated, Biden had already received more than 71 million votes, the most in history.
At a press conference late Wednesday afternoon, the former vice president said he hoped to win the presidency, but fell short of openly declaring victory.
“I will rule as the American president,” Biden said.
“There will be no red states or blue states when we win. Only the United States of America. “
It was a stark contrast to the approach of Trump, who falsely claimed early Wednesday that he had won the election.
The Trump campaign engaged in a number of legal activities to try to improve the Republican president’s chances and cast doubt on the election results, calling for a recount in Wisconsin and filing lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia.
State counts in Wisconsin have historically changed the vote count by only a few hundred votes; Biden led with more than 20,000 votes out of the nearly 3.3 million counted.
For four years, Democrats have been haunted by the collapse of the Blue Wall, the trio of Great Lakes states (Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania) that their candidates had been able to count on every four years.
But Trump’s populist appeal struck a chord with white working-class voters, capturing all three in 2016 for a combined total of just 77,000 votes.
The candidates waged a fierce fight for the states this year, with Biden’s political persona resonating in working-class cities, while his campaign also pushed for increased turnout among black voters in cities like Detroit and Milwaukee.
It was unclear when a national winner would be determined after a long and bitter campaign dominated by the coronavirus and its effects on Americans and the national economy.
But even as Biden’s prospects improved, the United States set another record for daily confirmed coronavirus cases on Wednesday, as several states hit all-time highs.
The pandemic has killed more than 233,000 people in the United States.
Trump spent much of Wednesday at the White House residence, huddled with advisers and enraged by media coverage showing his Democratic rival on the battlefields.
Trump used his Twitter account to falsely claim victory in several key states and amplify unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about Democratic achievements as absentee and early votes were tabulated.
Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien said the president would formally request a recount from Wisconsin, citing “wrongdoing” in several counties.
And the campaign said it was filing lawsuits in Michigan and Pennsylvania to stop ballot counting on the grounds that it was not given adequate access to observe.
Even more legal action was launched in Georgia.
At the same time, hundreds of thousands of votes remained to be counted in Pennsylvania, and the Trump campaign said it was moving to intervene in an existing Supreme Court litigation over the counting of mail-in ballots there.
The campaign also argued that the pending votes could still change the outcome in Arizona, which was in favor of Biden, showing an inconsistency in its arguments about prolonged tabulation.
In other closely followed races, Trump took Florida, the largest of the changing states, and held on to Texas and Ohio, while Biden took New Hampshire and Minnesota.
Beyond the presidency, Democrats hoped the elections would allow the party to regain the Senate and increase its majority in the House.
But while the vote generated seats in the House and Senate, it ultimately left Congress as it began: deeply divided.
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