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WASHINGTON: Democrat Joe Biden won the vital Wisconsin battlefield, trading a state won by Donald Trump in 2016 and increasing his own chances of winning the White House.
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 an expected small number of provisional ballots.
Neither candidate has passed the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House, and the margins were tight in several other battle states. Top advisers to Biden and Trump on Wednesday morning expressed confidence that, respectively, they had the most likely path to victory in the leading states.
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The Trump campaign has requested a recount. State counts in Wisconsin have historically changed the vote count by only a few hundred votes; Biden leads by 0.624 percentage points out of nearly 3.3 million ballots counted.
At the same time, hundreds of thousands of votes still remained to be counted in Pennsylvania.
Barack Obama won Wisconsin by seven points in 2012. But the famous Hillary Clinton didn’t even bother to campaign there in 2016, and ended up suffering an embarrassing loss to Trump, by less than a percentage point.
Poll workers process absentee and mail ballots for the 2020 United States General Election at West Chester University on November 4, 2020, in West Chester, Pennsylvania. (Photo: AP / Matt Slocum)
Margins were extremely tight in states across the country, and candidates traded victories on the battlefields. Trump chose Florida, the largest of the swing states, while Biden switched to Arizona, a state that has reliably voted Republican in recent elections.
The rocky presidential race came as Democrats entered election night relying not only on Biden’s prospects, but also on the party’s chances of taking control of the Senate. But the Republican Party held several seats that were deemed vulnerable, including in Iowa, Texas and Kansas. Disappointed 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. Both candidates spent months pushing dramatically different visions for the future of the nation, 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. It was not clear exactly what legal action it might try to take.
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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.”
The president remained out of the public eye, but took to Twitter to suggest, unsubstantiated, that the election was tainted by late votes. Twitter flagged a series of tweets from Trump, noting that some of the information shared was “disputed and could be misleading about an election or other civic process.”
Biden, who appeared briefly in front of his supporters in Delaware, urged patience and said the election “doesn’t end until all the votes are counted, all the ballots are counted.”
“It is not my place or Donald Trump’s to declare who won this election,” Biden said. “That is the decision of the American people.”
A poll worker handles the ballots as the vote counting continues in the general election at State Farm Arena on November 4, 2020 in Atlanta. (Photo: AP / Brynn Anderson)
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.
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 Nov. 3 can be accepted if they arrive up to three days after the election.
Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf said he had “promised Pennsylvanians that we would count every vote and that’s what we’re going to do.”
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. “Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, made a pitch on Twitter for fans to offer $ 5 to help pay for a fight that could” go on for weeks. “
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Democrats typically outnumber Republicans in voting by mail, while the Republican Party seeks to regain ground in turnout on Election Day. That means the initial margins among candidates could be influenced by the type of votes (early or on Election Day) that states reported.
Throughout the campaign, Trump questioned the integrity of the election, repeatedly suggesting that mail-in ballots should not be counted. Both campaigns had teams of attorneys ready to move into battlefield states if there were legal challenges.
Trump kept several states, including Texas, Iowa and Ohio, where Biden had made a strong play in the final stages of the campaign. But Biden selected states where Trump sought to compete, including New Hampshire and Minnesota. But Florida was the largest and most fiercely contested battlefield on the map, with both campaigns fighting for the 29 Electoral College votes that went to Trump.
The president adopted Florida as his new home state, courted his Latino community, particularly Cuban Americans, and held rallies there incessantly. For his part, Biden deployed his top replacement, former President Barack Obama, there twice in the final days of the campaign and benefited from a $ 100 million pledge in the estate of Michael Bloomberg.
The momentum from early voting carried over to Election Day as an energetic electorate produced 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.
Election staff handle ballots as vote counting continues in the general election at State Farm Arena on November 4, 2020 in Atlanta. (Photo: AP / Brynn Anderson)
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.
On Wednesday, some woke up with new anxiety about an undecided election and what could happen.
“Honestly, I’m more concerned about what will happen after we find out,” said Deion Flan, 30, a voter in Atlanta. “I just want everything to go back to the American way. It’s the tension of what could happen, what could happen, what is going to happen next. “
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With the coronavirus now rising again, voters ranked the pandemic and the economy as the top concerns in the Trump-Biden race, according to the AP VoteCast, a national poll of the electorate.
Voters were especially likely to rate the public health crisis as the nation’s biggest problem, with the economy closely following. Less healthcare, racism, law enforcement, immigration, or climate change
The poll found that Trump’s leadership featured prominently in voters’ decision-making. Nearly two-thirds of voters said they were voting for Trump, either for him or against him.
