TALLY WHOA
Biden, inching closer to victory, believes he has the votes to win when all ballots are counted, but Trump sues to halt count in Michigan and Pennsylvania, seeks Wisconsin recount
WASHINGTON — Joe Biden won the battleground prizes of Michigan and Wisconsin on Wednesday, reclaiming a key part of the “blue wall” that slipped away from Democrats four years ago and dramatically narrowing President Donald Trump’s pathway to reelection.
A full day after Election Day, neither candidate had cleared the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House. But Biden’s victories in the Great Lakes states left him at 264, according to the Associated Press count, meaning he was one battleground state away 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 expected to win the presidency, though he stopped short of outright declaring victory.
“I will govern as an American president,” Biden said. “There will be no red states and blue states when we win. Just the United States of America.”
It was a stark contrast to Trump, who early on Wednesday falsely proclaimed that he had won the election, even though millions of votes remained uncounted and the race was far from over.
The Associated Press called Wisconsin for Biden after election officials in the state said all outstanding ballots had been counted, save for a few hundred in one township and an expected small number of provisional votes.
Trump’s campaign requested a recount, though statewide recounts in Wisconsin have historically changed the vote tally by only a few hundred votes. Biden led by 0.624 percentage point out of nearly 3.3 million ballots counted.
The Associated Press also called Arizona for Biden, though other news organizations had not done so.
In Georgia, one of the undecided states, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said he was pushing counties to complete vote tallies, with just under 100,000 ballots left to count as of Wednesday night.
There was a narrow margin between Trump and Biden in Georgia, a close race in a state that has not backed a Democrat for president since 1992. There is no automatic recount, but a candidate can request one if the margin is within 0.5%.
“We have long anticipated — and said publicly — that counting would most likely take place into Wednesday night and perhaps Thursday morning,” Raffensperger said in a statement issued earlier in the day. “We’re on pace to accomplish that responsibly, ensuring that the voice of every eligible voter is heard. It’s important to act quickly, but it’s more important to get it right.”
The outstanding vote was primarily in the Atlanta area, which tends to lean Democratic. On Wednesday, about 50 people were counting votes inside State Farm Arena, the home of the Atlanta Hawks NBA team. Counties have until 5 p. m. on Nov. 13 to certify results.
At stake in Georgia are 16 electoral votes. All absentee ballots were due Tuesday.
Meanwhile, the top elections official in Nevada’s most populous county said more results will be released Thursday morning that include mail- in ballots received Tuesday and Wednesday.
Clark County Registrar of Voters Joe Gloria said at a news conference Wednesday afternoon that he did not yet have a number of how many ballots had been received but
uncounted in the Las Vegas- area.
Unofficial results showed Biden with a slim lead over Trump, but it was too early to declare a winner in the race Wednesday with a large number of ballots yet to be counted. Ballots would continue to be accepted if they were postmarked by Election Day.
In North Carolina, elections officials were working through the remaining ballots and would continue to process and count those delivered by the Postal Service through Nov. 12, as long as they were postmarked by Election Day.
Though Trump is correct that he held a nearly 77,000- vote lead in the state early Wednesday, the race is too early to call with up to 116,000 mail ballots left to count, as well as the potential of thousands of provisional ballots.
Since 2016, Democrats had been haunted by the crumbling of the blue wall, the trio of Great Lakes states — Pennsylvania is the third — that their candidates had been able to count on every four years. But Trump’s populist appeal struck a chord with white workingclass voters, and he captured all three in 2016 by a total margin of just 77,000 votes.
Both candidates this year fiercely fought for the states, with
Biden’s everyman political persona resonating in blue- collar towns while his campaign also pushed to increase turnout among Black voters in cities like Detroit and Milwaukee.
Pennsylvania, where an estimated 1 million ballots had yet to be counted, remained too early to call Wednesday night.
After the victories in Wisconsin and Michigan, Biden was just six Electoral College votes away from the presidency, according to the AP tally. A win in any undecided state except for Alaska — but including Nevada, with its six votes — would be enough to end Trump’s tenure in the White House.
Trump spent much of Wednesday in the White House residence, huddling with advisers and fuming at media coverage showing his Democratic rival picking up key battlegrounds. Trump falsely claimed victory in several key states and amplified unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about Democratic gains as absentee and early votes were tabulated.
Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said the president would formally request a Wisconsin recount, citing “irregularities” in several counties. And the campaign said it was filing suit in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia to demand better access for campaign observers to locations where ballots are being processed and counted, and to raise absentee ballot concerns.
At the same time, hundreds of thousands of votes were still to be counted in Pennsylvania, and Trump’s campaign said it was moving to intervene in the existing Supreme Court litigation over counting mail- in ballots there. Yet, the campaign also argued that it was the outstanding votes in Arizona that could reverse the outcome there, showcasing an inherent inconsistency with their arguments.
Trump, in an extraordinary move from the White House, issued premature claims of victory — which he continued on Twitter Wednesday — and said he would take the election to the Supreme Court to stop the counting. It was unclear exactly what legal action he could try to pursue.