2020 election a case of delaying the inevitable — really long

As Election Day ground on into “election week,” it became increasingly clear that Democrat Joe Biden would oust President Donald Trump from the White House.

Late-counted ballots in Nevada, Pennsylvania and Georgia continued to keep Biden in the lead and offered him multiple paths to victory.

The questions, rather, were these: where he would win, when it would happen and by how much.

On Saturday, Biden captured the presidency when The Associated Press declared him the victor in his native Pennsylvania at 8:25 a.m. PST. That got him the state’s 20 electoral votes, which pushed him over the 270 electoral vote threshold needed to prevail.

It was the final piece to fall into place after the former vice president carved a path to the White House by recapturing Democrats’ “blue wall,” a trio of Great Lakes states — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan — that Trump narrowly won in 2016.

But he also made historic gains in the Sun Belt, becoming the first Democrat to win Arizona since 1996. He also held a narrow lead Saturday of more than 7,000 votes in Georgia, where a Democrat hasn’t won since 1992.

Democrats entered Election Day confident that Biden would win. But their hopes for a landslide that would quickly repudiate Trumpism, something that polls helped amplify, did not materialize.

Florida, the president’s adopted state and one of the largest electoral prizes, went for Trump on Tuesday.

And a promising early Biden lead in North Carolina eroded. Trump continues to hold a narrow lead there, though the race is still too early to call, and mail-in ballots postmarked by Nov. 3 can still be counted until Thursday.

Biden’s win in Pennsylvania was a dramatic turn after Trump jumped out to an early Election Day lead of 675,000 votes.

Over coming days, as local elections officials tabulated more ballots, Trump’s lead dropped sharply, with Biden winning roughly 75 percent of the mail-in vote between Wednesday and Friday, according to an analysis by the AP.

Another reason the late-breaking mail vote broke Biden’s way: Under state law, elections officials are not allowed to process mail-in ballots until Election Day.

By Saturday afternoon, Biden’s lead in the state had climbed to over 34,000 votes, an edge over Trump of 0.51 percentage points, which falls outside the margin for a mandatory recount.