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WASHINGTON (BLOOMBERG) – Joe Biden won Michigan and Wisconsin on Wednesday (Nov. 4), putting him on the brink of taking the White House from President Donald Trump, hours after the president’s team opened legal fights to stop the count. of votes in at least two states. .
Both CNN and NBC projected that Biden would win Michigan, which Trump took in 2016, giving him 264 Electoral College votes out of the 270 needed to win the presidency. Trump has 214.
Biden just needs to win an additional outstanding state, like Nevada, where he leads, or Georgia, where his campaign believes absentee votes will take him to the top.
Biden said he hopes to prevail. “I am not here to declare that we have won, but I am here to report that when the count is over, we believe we will be the winners,” he told reporters in Wilmington, Delaware.
His comments came after he won a victory over Trump in Wisconsin, closing one of the president’s best routes to re-election.
The Trump campaign said it is suing in Pennsylvania and Michigan to stop the counting of votes that has had a bias toward Biden.
Trump falsely declared victory in Pennsylvania, one of six states that has yet to be summoned by the Associated Press. The president was ahead in the state by 383,000 votes, but Pennsylvania officials said more than a million ballots still need to be counted.
Trump faces a tougher path to victory. Trump would have to win all the battlefield states that have not yet been called.
Biden’s victories in Wisconsin and Michigan reverse Trump’s surprise in 2016 when he defeated Hillary Clinton.
The Trump campaign said it would require a recount in Wisconsin, where the candidates were separated by less than 1 percentage point.
Biden’s campaign said it hopes to declare overall victory Wednesday afternoon, earlier than many expected.
Election officials continued to count votes in various battle states as Democrats, whose expectations of a “blue wave” faded.
Trump tweeted throughout the day casting doubt on the tally of mail-in ballots, which were largely Democratic, after votes were counted in person on Election Day, which were leaning Republican.
“How is it that every time they count the landfills by mail they are so devastating in their percentage and power of destruction?” The president said on Twitter. Another tweet reflected on his clues “magically” disappearing in states run by Democratic governors.
Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, insisted that the president was heading for re-election and that the campaign was grooming his lawyers to challenge the results in some states.
In a midnight White House speech, Trump threatened to ask the US Supreme Court to intervene to stop what he called the disenfranchisement of Republican voters, without offering evidence that any crime had been committed. .
“Frankly, we won this election,” Trump said, noting that he had an advantage in several states where the results were still uncertain. “So we will go to the Supreme Court of the United States. We want the voting to stop. “
It was not immediately clear what Trump was referring to, as states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada counted votes cast legally. It’s routine for states to continue counting votes after Election Day, and Pennsylvania said the results likely won’t be finalized for several days.
US stocks held their gains after the news, led by tech stocks, on speculation that a divided Congress would ensure the extension of key bull market elements, such as Trump’s 2017 corporate tax cuts. Treasury bonds also recovered.
The unsolved outcome, due to an unusually large number of mail-in ballots due to the coronavirus, risks further stoking tensions in the US, beset by an economic recession and the raging virus.
But the Biden campaign was optimistic about the outcome and criticized Trump’s efforts to stop the vote counting.
“When all the votes are counted, we are confident that Vice President Joe Biden will be the next President of the United States,” said Biden Campaign Manager Jen O’Malley Dillon.
O’Malley Dillon said in a statement early Wednesday that Trump’s remarks were “outrageous, unprecedented and incorrect” and “a naked effort to take away the democratic rights of American citizens.”
In Nevada, where the counting stopped until Thursday, Biden was clinging to a nearly 8,000-vote lead. In the popular vote nationwide, Biden leads by roughly two million.
There were few surprises between the states where the Associated Press announced winners, and the Republican and Democratic states generally lined up, despite expectations for several surprises.
Trump won Florida, a crucial award in the race for the White House that shut down Biden’s hopes of an early knockout in the election. The president also won Texas, which Democrats hoped would completely change the electoral map.
Trump won Ohio and Biden won Minnesota, he claims each candidate had tried to take the other away but ended politically unchanged from 2016.
Trump still has small advantages in North Carolina and Georgia, although there are votes pending on each. Trump won both states in 2016. But Trump’s lead in Georgia was narrowing Wednesday night.
In addition to Wisconsin, Biden won the second congressional district of Nebraska, Minnesota, Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, New York, Virginia, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Rhode Island, New Mexico, Delaware, District of Columbia and New Hampshire, according to AP.
Trump won the other four Electoral College votes from Nebraska, Ohio, Florida, Texas, Iowa, Idaho, Kansas, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, West Virginia, North Dakota, South Dakota , Wyoming, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Missouri.
Nebraska is one of only two states, with Maine, to grant an Electoral College vote to the winner of each Congressional district. Trump won two districts and Biden won one. Trump won the state overall, giving him the two remaining Nebraska Electoral College votes.
Trump won Maine’s second congressional district and Biden won the first, plus the state’s two general electoral votes.
Even if Democrats still claim the White House, a wave of support that they hoped would also give them control of both houses of Congress could fall short.
Democrats would have to win three of the five still-undecided Senate seats to leave the Senate with a 50-50 split, leaving the White House party in control.
Biden’s advantage appears to be due to his holding onto Latino and African-American voters in numbers similar to what Clinton had four years ago. And it lowered Trump’s margin among white voters, AP voter polls show.
Trump had a 12-point lead among white voters in Tuesday’s election. Exit polls four years ago showed him with a 20-point advantage among those voters. Biden led among Latino voters with 30 points, black voters with 82 points and women with 12 points.
For live results and updates, follow our live coverage of the US elections.
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