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WASHINGTON: As Election Day progressed into “Election Week,” it became increasingly clear that Democrat Joe Biden would remove President Donald Trump from the White House.
Late counting ballots in Nevada, Pennsylvania and Georgia continued to keep Biden in the lead and offered him multiple paths to victory.
The questions, rather, were: where would it win, when would it happen and by how much.
On Saturday (Nov. 7), The Associated Press declared him the winner in his home state of Pennsylvania at 11:25 a.m. M. EST (Sunday, 12:25 AM Singapore Time). That earned him 20 electoral votes from the state, pushing him above the 270 electoral vote threshold needed to prevail.
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It was the last piece to fall into place after the former vice president made his way to the White House by reclaiming the “blue wall” from the Democrats, a trio of Great Lakes states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan) that Trump narrowly won. in 2016. Those states had long served as a bulwark against Republican presidential candidates.
But he also made historic strides in the Sun Belt, becoming the first Democrat to win Arizona since 1996. He also held a narrow lead of more than 7,000 votes Saturday in Georgia, where a Democrat has not won since 1992.
Democrats entered Election Day confident that Biden would win. But his hopes for a landslide that would swiftly repudiate Trumpism, something the polls helped amplify, did not materialize.
Florida, the state adopted by the president and one of the largest electoral awards, went to Trump on Tuesday.
And a promising Biden early lead in North Carolina eroded. Trump continues to hold a narrow lead there, although the contest is still too early to call and mail ballots postmarked from Election Day Nov. 3 that can still be counted through Thursday.
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On election night, both candidates racked up victories in predictable places. Biden won the West Coast and won the Democratic states in New England and the Mid-Atlantic. Trump won much of the south, Texas, and the rural, sparsely populated states in the western and midwest mountains.
And the slow nature of the vote count? Blame the COVID-19 pandemic. The election, in many ways a referendum on Trump’s mismanagement of the virus, led to widespread use of vote-by-mail for the first time in many states.
Although five states held elections by mail, most did not. Concerns that voters could contract the virus by lining up at crowded polling places led election officials across the United States to fight to swiftly adopt the practice of voting.
But mail ballots also take a long time to verify, process, and count, delaying the count.
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Trump, who refused to concede the race on Saturday, declared victory prematurely during a press conference at the White House early Wednesday morning, arguing he was ahead and “it’s not like, ‘Oh, it’s close.'” .
But as mail-in ballots continued to be counted, they overwhelmingly favored Biden, and their lead continued to grow.
A big reason for that? For months, Trump has discouraged his supporters from voting that way, falsely claiming that voting by mail would lead to widespread electoral fraud.
It was a message that he continued to amplify on Saturday.
