Updated 11:30 a.m. Friday: Democrat Joe Biden is now leading President Donald Trump in the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Georgia.
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By Friday morning, Biden overtook Trump in the number of ballots counted in the states, which Trump must win to have a shot at reelection. Biden now holds a nearly 6,000-vote advantage in Pennsylvania, which has 20 electoral votes.
The contest is still too early for The Associated Press to call, but if Biden wins Pennsylvania, he wins the presidency, pending any litigation or recounts.
In Georgia, which has long been a Republican stronghold and another must-win for Trump, Biden leads by about 1,000 votes. That contest is still also too early for The Associated Press to call.
While the Associated Press and Fox News have both projected Biden as the winner in Arizona and awarded the state’s 11 electoral votes in their projected count, other media outlets like ABC have said Arizona is still too close to call. The AP said Friday morning they are monitoring the continued vote counting there and will update as the facts determine.
ABC has not yet projected Biden as the winner in Arizona, which is why their projections right now show Biden with 253 electoral votes compared to AP’s 264. Donald Trump stands at 214 electoral votes.
As of Friday morning, there’s no definitive winner in:
- Georgia - 16 electoral votes
- Pennsylvania - 20 electoral votes
- Arizona - 11 electoral votes
- Nevada - 6 electoral votes
- North Carolina - 15 electoral votes
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Context
Trump narrowly lost Nevada in 2016 as the state has trended toward the Democrats in the past decade. The last Republican presidential contender to win the state was George W. Bush in 2004.
Biden was pushing closer to the 270 Electoral College votes needed to carry the White House, securing victories in the “blue wall” battlegrounds of Wisconsin and Michigan and narrowing President Donald Trump’s path.
With just a handful of states still up for grabs, Trump tried to press his case in court in some key swing states. It was unclear if any of his campaign’s legal maneuvering over balloting would succeed in shifting the race in his favor.
Two days after Election Day, neither candidate had amassed the votes needed to win the White House. But Biden’s victories in the Great Lakes states left him at 264, meaning he was one battleground state away — any would do — from becoming president-elect.
Trump, with 214 electoral votes, faced a much higher hurdle. To reach 270, he needed to claim all four remaining battlegrounds: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia and Nevada.
With millions of votes yet to be tabulated, Biden already had received more than 71 million votes, the most in history. At an afternoon news conference Wednesday, the former vice president said he expected to win the presidency but 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.”
Trump, in contrast, was escalating his efforts to sow doubt about the outcome of the race. A day after falsely claimed that he had won the election, he voiced support Thursday for ceasing the tallying of legally-cast votes in a tweet, saying, “STOP THE COUNT!” He later falsely asserted that ballots received after Election Day “will not be counted,” a move that if implemented would affect military ballots, as his campaign propagated baseless allegations of fraud.
Elections are run by individual state, county and local governments and Trump’s public comments have no impact on the tallying of votes across the country.
Trump’s campaign engaged in a flurry of legal activity to try to improve the Republican president’s chances and cast doubt on the election results, requesting a recount in Wisconsin and filing lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia. Statewide recounts in Wisconsin have historically changed the vote tally by only a few hundred votes; Biden led by more than 20,000 ballots out of nearly 3.3 million counted.
Biden has an edge over Trump after victories in Wisconsin and Michigan, two key Midwestern battleground states. Contests in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina were tight with votes still being tabulated.
The Trump campaign said it was confident the president would ultimately pull out a victory in Arizona, where votes were also still being counted, including in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous area. The AP has declared Biden the winner in Arizona and said Thursday that it was monitoring the vote count as it proceeds.
“The Associated Press continues to watch and analyze vote count results from Arizona as they come in,” said Sally Buzbee, AP’s executive editor. “We will follow the facts in all cases.”
Democrat Joe Biden has carried Michigan and its 16 electoral votes, further dismantling Donald Trump’s Rust Belt wall of support that helped deliver him the presidency four years ago.
The flip from red back to blue was a huge blow to Trump, whose victories in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in 2016 sent him to the White House. Biden also carried Wisconsin, though Pennsylvania hasn’t been called yet.
Biden’s victory in Michigan pushes him to 264 Electoral College votes, six short of the 270 needed to win the White House. Trump is at 214 electoral votes. Nevada, which has six electoral votes, is among the states Democrat Hillary Clinton won in 2016 that hasn’t yet been called.
Joe Biden has defeated President Donald Trump in battleground Wisconsin, securing the state’s 10 electoral votes and reclaiming a key part of the blue wall that slipped away from Democrats four years ago.
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 ballots.
Trump’s campaign has requested a recount. Statewide recounts in Wisconsin have historically changed the vote tally by only a few hundred votes; Biden leads by .624 percentage points out of nearly 3.3 million ballots counted.
The victory for Biden bumps him up to 248 electoral votes, while Trump has 214. It takes 270 to win the presidency.
In 2016, Trump won Wisconsin by fewer than 23,000 votes, a breakthrough that along with wins in Michigan and Pennsylvania helped hand him his first term in the White House. Democrats were determined to reclaim Wisconsin, a state that before Trump hadn’t gone for a Republican since Ronald Reagan in 1984.
Still, the fate of the United States presidency hung in the balance Wednesday as President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden battled for battleground states that could prove crucial in determining who wins the White House. It was unclear when or how quickly a winner could be determined.
Hundreds of thousands of votes were still to be counted in Pennsylvania.
Neither candidate cleared the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House, and the margins were tight in several other battleground states. Top advisers for both Biden and Trump on Wednesday morning expressed confidence that they respectively had the likelier path to victory in the outstanding states.
The margins were exceedingly tight in states across the country, with the candidates trading wins in battlegrounds. Trump picked up Florida, the largest of the swing states, while Biden flipped Arizona, a state that has reliably voted Republican in recent elections.
The high-stakes election was held against the backdrop of a historic pandemic that has killed more than 232,000 Americans and wiped away millions of jobs. Both candidates spent months pressing dramatically different visions for the nation’s future, including on racial justice, and voters responded in huge numbers, with more than 100 million people casting votes ahead of Election Day.
Trump, in an extraordinary move from the White House, issued premature claims of victory 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.
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