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Democrat Joe Biden is closing in on the 270 Electoral College votes needed to run the White House, securing victories on the “blue wall” battlefields of Wisconsin and Michigan, and narrowing US President Donald Trump’s path to victory. re-election.
With only a handful of states still at stake, Trump tried to take his case to court in some key states. It was unclear whether any of his campaign’s legal maneuvers on voting would turn the race in his favor.
Two days after Election Day, neither candidate had accumulated the votes necessary to win the White House. But Biden’s victories in the Great Lakes states left him at 264, meaning he was a battlefield state away, anyone would, from becoming president-elect.
Carolyn Kaster / AP
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden says he believes he will win the presidency.
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.
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With millions of votes yet to be tabulated, Biden had already received more than 71 million votes, the most in history. At an evening press conference on Wednesday (local time), the former vice president said he hoped to win the presidency, but did not go so far as to openly declare 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. ”
Paul Sancya / AP
Former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate, arrives to speak to his supporters.
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 flurry of legal activity to try to improve the 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 the political persona of all of Biden’s men resounding in working-class towns, 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 232,000 Americans.
Matt Slocum / AP
Poll workers from Chester County, Pennsylvania process absentee and mail ballots for the 2020 United States General Election at West Chester University.
Trump spent much of Wednesday in the White House residence, huddled with advisers and enraged by media coverage that showed his Democratic rival picking up battlefields.
Trump used his Twitter account to falsely claim victory in several key states and amplify unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about Democratic gains while tabulating absentee and early votes.
Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien said the president would formally request a recount from Wisconsin, citing “wrongdoing” in several counties.
Evan Vucci / AP
President Donald Trump speaks in the East Room of the White House in Washington.
And the campaign said it was suing 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 the existing Supreme Court litigation over mail ballot counting 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 fill its majority in the House.
David Goldman / AP
People attend a rally calling for every vote in yesterday’s general election to be counted near the Detroit Elections Department building.
But while the vote generated seats in the House and Senate, it ultimately left Congress as it began: deeply divided.
Candidates spent months pushing dramatically different visions for the nation’s future, including racial justice, and voters responded in large numbers, with more than 100 million people casting votes before Election Day.
Trump, in an extraordinary move by the White House, issued premature claims of victory and said he would take the election to the Supreme Court to stop the count.
Brynn Anderson / AP
Elections staff handle the ballots as the general election vote counting continues at State Farm Arena in Atlanta.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell dismissed the president’s swift claim of victory and said it would take a while for states to carry out their vote counts. The Kentucky Republican said “claiming you won the election is different than ending the count.”
Vote tabulations routinely continue after Election Day, with states largely setting the rules for when the count must end. In presidential elections, a key point is the December date when the presidential voters meet. That is established by federal law.
Dozens of Trump supporters shouting “Stop the count!” They descended on a vote-counting center in Detroit, as thousands of anti-Trump protesters demanding a full recount of the votes took to the streets in US cities.
The protests, sometimes about elections, sometimes about racial inequality, took place Wednesday in at least half a dozen cities, including Los Angeles, Seattle, Houston, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis and San Diego.
Several states allow votes sent by mail to be accepted after Election Day as long as they are postmarked Tuesday. That includes Pennsylvania, where ballots postmarked November 3 can be accepted if they arrive up to three days later.
Trump appeared to suggest that those ballots should not be counted and that he would fight for that outcome in superior court.
But legal experts doubted Trump’s statement. Trump has appointed three of the nine superior court justices, including, most recently, Amy Coney Barrett.
The Trump campaign on Wednesday pushed Republican donors deep into their pockets to help fund legal challenges.
The chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, during a call to donors, spoke clearly: “The fight is not over. We’re on it ”.
