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WASHINGTON (AP) – Joe Biden won the Michigan and Wisconsin battlefield awards on Wednesday, reclaiming a key part of the “blue wall” that Democrats missed four years ago and dramatically narrowing the path to the president’s re-election. Donald Trump.
A full day after Election Day, neither candidate had passed the 270 electoral college votes needed to win the White House. But Biden’s victories in the Great Lakes states left him at 264, meaning he was a battlefield state from crossing the threshold and becoming president-elect.
Biden, who has received more than 71 million votes, the most in history, was joined by his running mate Kamala Harris at an afternoon news conference and said he now hoped to win the presidency, although he did not testify. openly 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 Trump, who on Wednesday falsely proclaimed that he had won the election, even though millions of votes remained uncounted and the contest was far from over.
The Associated Press called Wisconsin for Biden after election officials in the state said all pending ballots had been counted except for a few hundred in one municipality and a small expected number of provisional votes.
The Trump campaign called for a recount, it thought the state recount in Wisconsin has historically changed the vote count by just a few hundred votes. Biden led by 0.624 percentage points out of nearly 3.3 million ballots counted.
Since 2016, Democrats had been haunted by the collapse of the Blue Wall, the trio of Great Lakes states (Pennsylvania is third) 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 by a total margin of just 77,000 votes.
This year, both candidates fought fiercely for the states, with the political persona of all of Biden’s men resonating in working-class towns, while his campaign also pushed for increased turnout among black voters in cities like Detroit and Milwaukee.
Pennsylvania stayed too early to call Wednesday night.
It was unclear when or how quickly a national winner could be determined after a long and bitter campaign dominated by the coronavirus and its effects on Americans and the national economy. But Biden’s possible paths to the White House were expanding rapidly.
After the victories in Wisconsin and Michigan, he was just six votes away from the Presidential Electoral College. A victory in any undecided state, except Alaska, but including Nevada, with its six votes, would be enough to end Trump’s term in the White House.
Trump spent much of Wednesday at the White House residence, huddled with advisers and furious at media coverage that showed his Democratic rival picking up key battlefields. Trump falsely claimed victory in several key states and amplified 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 in Wisconsin, citing “wrongdoing” in several counties. And the campaign said it was filing a lawsuit in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia to demand better access for campaign watchers to the locations where ballots are being sent. processed and counted, and to raise concerns about absentee voting.
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 the counting of mail-in ballots there. However, the campaign also argued that it was the pending votes in Arizona that could reverse the outcome there, showing an inherent inconsistency with its arguments.
In other closely followed contests, Trump chose Florida, the largest of the swing states, and held on to Texas and Ohio, while Biden stuck with New Hampshire and Minnesota and flipped Arizona, a state he had reliably voted on. to Republicans in recent elections.
The unstable nature of the presidential race reflected a somewhat disappointing night for Democrats, who hoped to deliver a complete repudiation of Trump’s four years in office while demanding that the Senate have firm control over all of Washington. But the Republican Party held several Senate seats that had been deemed vulnerable, including in Iowa, Texas, Maine and Kansas. Democrats lost seats in the House, but were expected to maintain control there.
The high-stakes elections were held in the context of a historic pandemic that has killed more than 232,000 Americans and wiped out millions of jobs. The United States set another record for daily confirmed coronavirus cases on Wednesday, as several states hit record highs.
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, which he continued on Twitter Wednesday, saying he would take the election to the Supreme Court to stop the count. It was not clear exactly what legal action it might try to take.
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 Wednesday that “claiming he 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 met. That is established by federal law.
Dozens of protesters gathered in Detroit Wednesday afternoon, in a plaza outside the office of the city’s electoral commission. Many wore yellow sweatshirts and carried signs that read “Count every vote.” Rai Lanier, one of the organizers, said they had planned the meeting so that anxious people could come together and channel that energy into hope.
“This is how democracy is supposed to work,” he said.
Several states allow votes sent by mail to be accepted 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 “.
The push for early voting carried over to Election Day, when an energetic electorate generated long lines at polling places across the country. Turnout was higher than in 2016 in numerous counties, including all of Florida, nearly every county in North Carolina, and more than 100 counties in both Georgia and Texas. That count seemed certain to increase as more counties reported their turnout figures.
Voters defied coronavirus concerns, threats of intimidation at polling places, and expectations of long lines caused by changes to voting systems, but appeared unfazed when it appeared that turnout would easily exceed 139 million votes cast. four years ago.
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Jaffe reported from Wilmington, Delaware. Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani and Andrew Taylor in Washington, Kathleen Ronayne in Sacramento, California, and Sophia Tulp in Atlanta contributed reporting.
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Find AP’s complete election coverage at APNews.com/Election2020.
