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His breakthrough came as the Trump campaign launched a series of multi-state lawsuits designed to prevent the former vice president from stepping out of line, including challenging Pennsylvania’s vote count in the Supreme Court.
Biden’s victory in Michigan means that he has now captured two-thirds of the vaunted “blue wall” in the Midwest and Pennsylvania that paved Trump’s path to victory four years ago. If Biden maintains his leadership in Nevada and Arizona, where the counts have yet to be completed, he will have enough votes in the Electoral College to be the 46th president. Biden’s camp is also confident of surpassing Trump in another key battlefield state, Pennsylvania, where hundreds of thousands of mail-in and early absentee votes are still being counted, which are expected to favor Democrats.
But the Trump campaign plans to ask the court to intervene in a case challenging a Supreme Court decision that allowed Pennsylvania ballots to be counted after Election Day. The justices had refused to expedite the appeal before the elections and are considering taking the case.
In a brief statement Wednesday afternoon, Biden said his campaign was on track to win 270 electoral votes, but that he would not declare victory until the count was completed in key states. He said he was encouraged by the extraordinary turnout in the election and dismissed Trump’s attempts to undermine the results.
“Here, the people rule. Power cannot be taken or affirmed,” Biden said, in a speech in which he tried to create the aura of a winner, vowing to unite the country and work for national healing as president.
Trump has not appeared in public since his brazen and false claim of victory in the early hours of Wednesday morning in which he demanded that votes not be counted legally in disputed states where he could be left behind.
Counting of votes by mail leads to late changes
Overnight, Biden scored a late victory in another vital state, Wisconsin, again based on mail-in votes and the first to be counted after the majority of ballots were cast in person on Election Day. But the Trump campaign said Wednesday afternoon that it will demand a recount and the campaign says it is increasing legal challenges in Michigan as well.
“The president is within the threshold to request a recount (in Wisconsin) and we will do so immediately,” Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien said in a statement.
Stepien said the results show “a very fine race as we always knew it would be” and said there were irregularities in several Wisconsin counties, but did not specify what the campaign believes those irregularities to be.
In essence, the Trump campaign is trying to stop the counting of votes in states where it is behind, such as Pennsylvania and Michigan, but demanding that all votes be counted in states where they believe they have a chance to catch up. Biden, like Arizona. and Nevada.
Candidates can request a recount in Wisconsin if they are within 1% of the winner’s total votes, but the recount cannot be formally requested until the count is complete, which could be until November 17.
It is very rare that a margin of 20,000 votes is reversed in a recount. But because Biden’s lead margin is less than 1%, the Trump campaign is within its right to request a recount.
Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf said Wednesday morning that the backlog of votes that have not yet been processed may delay the outcome so much that “we may not know the results even today,” he said.
Biden has few leads in Arizona and Nevada. Trump has won about 47,000 votes in Georgia, but several heavily Democratic counties have yet to finish their counts. By mid-morning Wednesday, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said about 200,000 votes remain to be counted, including in DeKalb and Fulton counties.
Trump’s campaign goes to court
While the Trump campaign advocates that the count continue in states that they believe are favorable to their Electoral College count, the campaign said in a statement that it filed a lawsuit in Michigan asking the state to stop its count because “it has not been so “. provided with meaningful access to numerous counting locations to observe the opening of ballots and the counting process, as warranted by Michigan law. “
Ryan Jarvi, spokesman for Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, responded to the threat from the lawsuit by saying in a statement that “Michigan elections have been conducted in a transparent manner, with access provided to both political parties and the public”.
Trump campaign officials said Wednesday afternoon that they believe the president can maintain his leadership in Pennsylvania, but are also suing the Commonwealth, alleging that Democratic election officials are “hiding the counting and processing of ballots” from Republican election watchers.
Trump’s deputy campaign manager, Justin Clark, said the campaign “is suing to temporarily halt the count until there is meaningful transparency and Republicans can ensure that the entire count is done in a lawful and legal manner.”
“As far as I’m concerned, we’ve already won it,” Trump said, painting a picture that doesn’t match the true state of the race. Earlier, Biden had warned that each side should wait for the votes to be counted, saying: “We will have to be patient until we finish the hard work of counting the votes.”
And while the president has long threatened to challenge legal elections, the vote itself was largely conducted peacefully, without violence at polling places or intimidation of people who voted, which had been widely feared. especially given Trump’s attempts to discredit voting procedures ahead of time.
A blue wave that many Democrats were seeking to wipe out Mitch McConnell’s Republican majority in the Senate has yet to take place, although some key races are still undecided. And despite trying to expand their majority in the House, Democrats lost several seats and some threatened Republicans held on to theirs.
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
