Here’s Where Things Stand in the 6 States That Will Pick the President
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You’re awake. Great. Welcome to Day Two of vote-counting in the 2020 presidential race.
You want to know where the race stands, what states are still up for grabs, and how this nail-biter of an election might play out. Right now, it looks like the race will come down to six states, five of which — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, and Nevada — are still up for grabs. The Associated Press called Wisconsin for Biden on Wednesday afternoon.
Let’s start with the so-called “blue wall” in the upper Midwest.
Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin
In an only-in-2020 twist, the trio of states that have always represented former Vice President Joe Biden’s clearest path to 270 electoral votes also happen to be the three states we’ve always known would take the longest to report their full election results. There are two reasons for this: the volume of ballots and the vagaries of local election law. All three states expected to process millions of mail-in ballots this year, and the counting continued all night and into Wednesday morning.
Biden’s pathway to victory brightened in pre-dawn Wisconsin. The Democrat erased a roughly 100,000 vote deficit during a vote-count update at about 4:30 a.m. ET, as absentee ballots from the city of Milwaukee were added to state tallies. By Wednesday afternoon, with nearly every vote counted, Biden held a 20,510-vote lead in Wisconsin. Because Biden’s and Trump’s share of the voter is less than 1 percent, the Trump campaign is able to request a recount. Not long after the Trump campaign released a statement indicating that it planned to do so, the AP called the state for Biden.
In Michigan, a similar sequence unfolded. As mail-in votes were counted overnight, Trump’s lead narrowed and by 9 a.m. ET on Wednesday, Biden had opened up a small lead with an estimated 88 percent of all votes counted. Biden’s lead had grew to nearly 45,000 votes by the early afternoon, and we should know the final result late Wednesday or early Thursday, according to Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.
And finally, Pennsylvania: Joe Biden’s home state, the state most likely to make or break his White House dreams. By 8 a.m. ET on Wednesday, President Trump led there by nearly 700,000 votes. Six hours later, as more than a million mail-in ballots continued to be tallied, Trump’s advantage had shrunk to 463,710 votes with 80 percent of the vote in. The reason for the delay was that local election officials were legally forbidden from beginning vote-by-mail counting before election day, unlike numerous other states like Texas and Florida that process mail-in ballots as they arrive.
Can Biden erase Trump’s lead with the final 20 percent of the total vote? Mail-in ballots have leaned heavily toward Biden so far, 78 percent to Trump’s 21 percent, according to the Pennsylvania secretary of state’s office. The New York Times‘ Nate Cohn projects that, if that margin holds firm, Biden would eke out a 1.5 percentage point victory.
Nevada
Nevada is a swing state that has performed reliably blue for Democrats in recent elections. But even with nearby Arizona likely to flip into Biden’s win column, the Silver State is not yet a safe bet. Returns tightened overnight, leaving the Democrat with a roughly 9,000-vote advantage.
A bad sign for Trump? There is a large trove of uncounted mail-in ballots from Clark County, a blue stronghold.
Nevada is small but its six electoral votes matter. Losing Nevada could considerably complicate Biden’s path to 270.
Georgia and North Carolina
These Sunbelt states were never pivotal to former Vice President Joe Biden’s path to 270 electoral votes. But going into election night, there were hopes that Biden might take one or both of these contests on his way to a massive, Trumpism-repudiating landslide. Public polls had shown him and down-ballot Democratic candidates tied or ahead in North Carolina, while progressive activists hoped that Biden and a pair of competitive U.S. Senate races in Georgia could build on the massive voter turnout seen in the 2018 gubernatorial race between Republican Brian Kemp and Democrat Stacey Abrams.
By Wednesday morning, the Associated Press had not called either state. In Georgia, Trump has opened up a lead of 81,000 votes as of 2 p.m. ET on Wednesday. But here’s the catch: Most of the ballots yet to be counted were expected to come out of the densely populated counties in and around Atlanta, the state’s largest city. (Part of the reason for the delay was a burst pipe in Atlanta’s State Farm arena that had disrupted the ballot processing. According to reporting in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, no ballots were damaged but it did mean that Fulton County, where Atlanta is located, wouldn’t report a near-complete vote tally until sometime later on Wednesday.)
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Wednesday morning that the state has only around 250,000 ballots left to count, and that he expects them to be counted by the end of the day.
Does Biden stand a chance in Georgia? He does when you consider most of the remaining ballots are coming from those heavily Democratic Atlanta-area counties. Still, with an estimated 92 percent of the vote already in, Biden needs to dominate the remaining ballots left to be counted in Georgia to eke out a victory in a state no Democratic presidential nominee has won since Bill Clinton in 1992. Winning Georgia’s 16 electoral votes would shake up the map and dramatically boost Biden’s chances of winning the presidency.
In North Carolina, as of 2 p.m. ET Wednesday, President Trump held a slim lead of just 76,737 votes with an estimated 95 percent of all ballots counted. Can Biden make up the difference? It doesn’t look likely but isn’t impossible. While the few counties still to report more votes lean Democratic, Biden would have to win huge percentages of those ballots to surpass Trump’s statewide total and claim North Carolina’s 15 electoral votes.
When will we have a final result?
We wait until these six states have finished their full vote counts. Based on what election officials have said in each of these states, we should have a clear picture of who the next president might be by Thursday or Friday.
The wildcard here, of course, is whether lawyers on the Democratic or Republican sides decide to challenge the final vote counts in court. Over the weekend, Trump said that as soon as the election is over, “we’re going in with our lawyers.”
Pennsylvania, for instance, has seen a torrent of litigation filed by Democratic and Republican lawyers over everything from the use of ballot drop boxes to poll watcher eligibility requirements to, most crucially of all, to whether election clerks can accept mail-in ballots received after the polls close on Election Day. (After a drawn-out court battle, a judge ruled that they can accept ballots until Friday that are properly postmarked.)
If the lawsuits start flying, it could delay the final result of the presidential race for days and possibly weeks. By then, American democracy could be in uncharted territory.
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via https://www.DMT.NEWS/
Andy Kroll, Khareem Sudlow, DMTDaily
