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Joe Biden is approaching a record 80 million votes, ballots are still being counted, and has already recorded the highest number of votes for a US presidential election winner, as Donald Trump persisted on Thursday in deny the result and try to revoke it.
In a mammoth turnout by the American electorate, Trump now has a record number of votes for a losing candidate.
With more than 155 million votes counted and California and New York, Democratic bastions, still counting, turnout stood at 65% of all eligible voters Thursday, the highest since 1908, according to data from the Associated Press and the Project. Elections of the United States
Biden’s rising tally and his leadership in the popular vote, nearly 6 million votes, have been overshadowed by Trump’s escalation in his false insistence that he actually won the Nov. 3 election and his campaign and supporters. they now intensify efforts to stop or delay results that are certified by state officials. .
“There is a lot of noise, because Donald Trump is a bull carrying his own china shop,” said Douglas Brinkley, presidential historian at Rice University. “Once the noise subsides, it will be clear that Biden won a very convincing victory.”
In fact, some experts are saying that the way the lame duck president is investigating his false claims of victory and an election stolen by widespread fraud, as his legal challenges fall one by one, actually serves to cement his failure. .
“Each [legal] the loss further consolidates Biden’s victory, “said election law expert Richard Hasen, Axios reported Thursday.
But Trump’s latest ditch could also be dangerous.
“History shows that any leader who builds a major myth, which is later shown to be false, will eventually fall,” Harvard science historian and Merchants of Doubt author Naomi Oreskes told Axios.
She added: “The risk is that he takes his country with him.”
Trump has filed as many as 30 legal challenges so far and by Thursday morning, more than two weeks after the polls were closed for in-person voting and most of the ballots were received by mail, 19 of those lawsuits had been denied, dismissed and resolved. or retired, NBC reported.
He is fighting the outcome in various ways in Pennsylvania, tipped the election to Biden when he declared for the Democrat on November 7 and passed the crucial 270 electoral college vote mark, also in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada. and Arizona. .
Biden currently has a 290-232 electoral college lead. But that doesn’t include voters in Georgia, where Biden leads Trump by 0.3 percentage points as officials conduct a manual recount that concluded Wednesday night with all expectations that Biden would be confirmed the winner on Thursday.
The Associated Press, the news agency whose projections of winners in each state are tracked by The Guardian, had not called the race in Georgia on Thursday morning, despite CNN already calling it for Biden.
If Biden’s advantage holds, he will win the electoral college that determines the winner of the White House with 306 votes to 232 for Trump, the identical margin that Trump won in 2016 over Hillary Clinton, which he later described as a “landslide.” .
On Thursday, Trump mounted an all-out assault on the outcome of the Michigan election, allegedly planning to blow up state lawmakers to meet him in Washington and phone county officials in an apparent attempt to derail Biden’s certification of victory. with 150,000 votes in the state. .
Some analysts believe that the noise and confusion Trump generates is an end in itself, and wreaking havoc is the goal rather than an actual attempt to reverse an election that Trump, and increasingly those around him, should know that he has. lost.
“It’s about keeping your ego and visibility,” said Judd Gregg, a former Republican governor and United States senator from New Hampshire.
He added: “He is raising a lot of money and he intends to use it.”
The confusion and doubt scenario is exactly what Trump spent much of 2020 laying the groundwork for, particularly with his baseless claims that mail-in ballots would be subject to systemic fraud. That was not true before 2020 or in these elections.
“Your answer shouldn’t surprise anyone. He foreshadowed it long before the election and continues his pattern of declaring victory regardless of the actual events, ”said Tim Pawlenty, former Republican governor of Minnesota.
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