By
Jonathan Lemire, Washington USA
Democrat Joe 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.”
It was a stark contrast to the
approach of Trump, who early Wednesday morning falsely claimed that he had won
the election.
Trump’s campaign engaged in a
flurry of legal activity to try to improve the 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.
For four years, Democrats have
been haunted by the crumbling of the blue wall, the trio of Great Lakes states
— Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — that their candidates had been able to
count on every four years. But Trump’s populist appeal struck a chord with
white working-class voters and he captured all three in 2016 by a combined
total of just 77,000 votes.
The candidates waged a fierce
fight for the states this year, 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.
It was unclear when a national
winner would be determined after a long, bitter campaign dominated by the
coronavirus and its effects on Americans and the national economy. But even as
Biden’s prospects improved, the U.S. on Wednesday set another record for daily
confirmed coronavirus cases as several states posted all-time highs. The
pandemic has killed more than 232,000 Americans.
Trump spent much of Wednesday in
the White House residence, huddling with advisers and fuming at media coverage
showing his Democratic rival picking up battlegrounds. Trump used his Twitter
feed to falsely claim victory in several key states and amplify 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 and Pennsylvania to halt ballot counting on grounds that it wasn’t
given proper access to observe. Still more legal action was launched in
Georgia.
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 existing Supreme Court litigation
over counting mail-in ballots there. The campaign also argued that outstanding votes
still could flip the outcome in Arizona, which went for Biden, showcasing an
inconsistency in its arguments over prolonged tabulation.
In other closely watched races,
Trump picked up Florida, the largest of the swing states, and held onto Texas
and Ohio while Biden kept New Hampshire and Minnesota.
Beyond the presidency, Democrats
had hoped the election would allow the party to reclaim the Senate and pad its
majority in the House. But while the voting scrambled seats in the House and
Senate, it ultimately left Congress much like it began — deeply divided.
The 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.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell discounted the president’s quick claim of victory, saying it would
take a while for states to conduct their vote counts. The Kentucky Republican
said that “claiming you’ve won the election is different from finishing the
counting.”
Vote tabulations routinely
continue beyond Election Day, and states largely set the rules for when the
count has to end. In presidential elections, a key point is the date in
December when presidential electors meet. That’s set by federal law.
Dozens of Trump supporters
chanting “Stop the count!” descended on a ballot-tallying center in Detroit,
while thousands of anti-Trump protesters demanding a complete vote count took
to the streets in cities across the U.S.
Protests — sometimes about the
election, sometimes about racial inequality — took place Wednesday in at least
a half-dozen cities, including Los Angeles, Seattle, Houston, Pittsburgh,
Minneapolis and San Diego.
Several states allow mailed-in
votes to be accepted after Election Day as long as they were postmarked by
Tuesday. That includes Pennsylvania, where ballots postmarked by Nov. 3 can be
accepted if they arrive up to three days later.
Trump appeared to suggest those
ballots should not be counted, and that he would fight for that outcome at the
high court. But legal experts were dubious of Trump’s declaration. Trump has
appointed three of the high court’s nine justices including, most recently, Amy
Coney Barrett.
The Trump
campaign on Wednesday pushed Republican donors to dig deeper into their pockets
to help finance legal challenges. Republican National Committee Chairwoman
Ronna McDaniel, during a donor call, spoke plainly: “The fight’s not over.
We’re in it.” - AP
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