Biden shows strength in key states, Trump cries foul

With the winner of the presidency yet to be declared, attention shifted Thursday to a handful of states that remained too close to call but where, on balance, Joe Biden seemed to have an advantage, and the candidates pressed their cases on the state of the race.

“Democracy is sometimes messy,” Biden told reporters Thursday in Wilmington, Delaware, where he called for every ballot to be counted. “It sometimes requires a little patience as well.”

President Donald Trump called a news conference at the White House, where he made false and baseless claims about “illegal” votes, secret counts and how forces were working to “steal” the election from him.

“It’s amazing how those mail-in ballots are so one-sided,” he said at one point. ABC, CBS and NBC all cut away as his false statements mounted.

In several states, Trump’s campaign pressed ahead with lawsuits challenging the validity of the count, and protests erupted in cities and outside some elections offices.

With Biden leading Trump in the popular vote by more than 3.8 million votes — which, if it holds, will make this the second election where Trump lost the popular vote — the attention of both campaigns was riveted on the handful of undecided states that will decide which candidate gets the electoral votes needed to win.

Biden was 17 electoral votes shy of reaching the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency, while Trump was 56 electoral votes away from the threshold. As results trickled in from the remaining undecided states Biden increased his lead in Nevada by about 4,000 votes and was eroding Trump’s leads in Georgia and Pennsylvania, while holding on to his modest lead in Arizona.

Both campaigns tried to project optimism, and asked for patience.

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Trump’s campaign team said that it would likely be filing additional legal actions. Bill Stepien, the campaign manager, accused people of prematurely writing Trump off at various junctures since the 2016 presidential primaries.

“Donald Trump is alive and well,” he said, hours before the president made his first public appearance since early Wednesday morning.

In most of his public comments since the election, Biden has stopped short of declaring victory, as Trump did prematurely on election night, and has sought to strike a conciliatory note as he addressed the nation. But he also had something of a warning for the Trump team.

“Power can’t be taken or asserted,” he said Wednesday. “It flows from the people. And it’s their will that determines who will be the president of the United States, and their will alone.”

Trump issued a written statement Thursday afternoon through his campaign in which he made baseless claims that there could be fraud in the late votes and then repeated many of them at his news conference. The statement, which was written in all capital letters, resembled one of his tweets — but by issuing it through the campaign, the president avoided getting a warning label from Twitter, which has flagged many of his recent tweets as potentially misleading.

With Trump’s political path growing more precarious, his team increasingly turned to the courts, filing lawsuits in several states and demanding a recount in Wisconsin. But judges in Georgia and Michigan ruled against his campaign, while it notched a modest win in a Pennsylvania case.

The Trump campaign’s bid to stave off defeat stretched to the Supreme Court, where it intervened in a case challenging Pennsylvania’s plan to count ballots received for up to three days after Election Day.

In a fraught moment for supporters of both candidates, the tensions occasionally started to spill into the streets.

Calling on election officials to “count every vote,” protesters marched through the streets of several American cities Wednesday, with protests in Minneapolis, Seattle, Phoenix, Philadelphia, New York City and Portland, Oregon.

At the same time, supporters of Trump descended on vote-counting facilities in several contested states. In Phoenix, about 150 pro-Trump protesters, some of them armed, gathered outside the county recorder’s office where a closely watched count of votes that could help determine the outcome of the election was being conducted.

And in Detroit, another group of pro-Trump poll watchers gathered earlier in the day outside a ballot-counting center, demanding that officials “stop the count” of ballots after the Trump campaign filed suit to halt the count in Michigan.

But inside, the democratic process continued to play out as election workers — socially distanced and wearing masks — went about their job: counting the votes.

The Electoral College Is Close. The Popular Vote Isn’t.

As the presidential race inches agonizingly toward a conclusion, it might be easy to miss the fact that the results are not actually very close.

With many ballots still outstanding in heavily Democratic cities, former Vice President Joe Biden was leading President Donald Trump by more than 4 million votes nationwide as of Thursday evening. His lead will continue to expand, perhaps substantially, as officials finish counting.

This means more Americans have voted for a Democrat for president than for a Republican in each of the past four elections, and seven of the past eight, the exception being 2004, when President George W. Bush beat John Kerry by about 3 million votes. But, depending on the outcome this year, only four or five times in those eight elections have they actually put one in the White House.

It looks likely that Biden will eke out an Electoral College win. But the narrowness of the result, in contrast to the fairly decisive preference of the American public, has intensified some Americans’ anger at a system in which a minority of people can often claim a majority of power.

“We look at a map of so-called red and blue states and treat that map as land and not people,” said Carol Anderson, a professor of African American studies at Emory University who researches voter suppression. “I’ve been thinking about how hard folks have to work to be able to vote, what it takes to overcome all of this that voter suppression has put in place, and that someone could be ahead by 3 million votes — which is bigger than most cities and probably some states — and still we have what almost amounts to a nail-biter.”

Biden’s current vote margin is, in fact, larger than the populations of more than 20 states, and more than the population of Los Angeles.

A similar disparity exists in the Senate, where the current Democratic minority was elected with more votes than the Republican majority and where by 2040, based on population projections, about 70% of Americans will be represented by 30% of senators.

“It’s not that the states that are represented by the 30% are all red, but what we do know is that the states that are going to have 70 senators are in no way representative of the diversity in the country,” said Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “The more this happens, the more you get the sense that voters don’t have a say in the choice of their leaders. And you cannot have a democracy over a period of time that survives if a majority of people believe that their franchise is meaningless.”

As Trump’s Lead Shrinks in Pennsylvania, Top Elections Official Says ‘Several Hundred Thousand’ Votes Need Counting

PHILADELPHIA — With the presidential race potentially hinging on the outcome in Pennsylvania, the state’s top elections official said late Thursday that the counties were “still counting” and did not give a direct answer as to how many ballots were still outstanding, estimating that it was “several hundred thousand.” She did not offer any timetable as to when counting in the state would be complete.

“There’s still some to count,” said Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania’s secretary of state. “So they are working incredibly hard. They are going to keep counting into the evening, and stay tuned.”

Earlier Thursday, Boockvar had indicated that she expected an overwhelming majority of the remaining votes to be tallied by Thursday and that a state winner “definitely could” be announced by the end of the day.

But in her evening news conference, Boockvar indicated it would take longer, as the official total on the state website indicated there were roughly 326,000 mail ballots still to be counted.

“What I’ve said all along is that the overwhelming majority of ballots will be counted by Friday,” Boockvar said. “I still think that we’re ahead of schedule and we actually already have counted the overwhelming majority of ballots, but because it’s a close race, it’s not quite clear yet who the winner is.”

President Donald Trump’s lead in the state over Joe Biden has dwindled since Wednesday from more than 10 percentage points to less than 1. If Biden wins the state, he wins the presidency.

On CNN, Boockvar said that most of the outstanding ballots were from denser population centers, including Philadelphia and its suburban counties, and Allegheny County, which is home to Pittsburgh.

Boockvar said that although Philadelphia temporarily paused its counting Thursday because of some legal filings, it was quickly resumed.

The Trump campaign has filed multiple lawsuits in Pennsylvania, including one seeking to allow election observers closer access to election workers in Philadelphia, which a judge granted Thursday morning. The Trump campaign also filed a motion to intervene in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, challenging a rule in the state that allows ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive up to three days later to still be counted.

But Boockvar said that election officials were not seeing a large influx of late-arriving ballots and did not anticipate they would have an impact on the final tally.

“Unless it is super close,” she said, “I don’t see them making this or breaking this one way or another. But in the meantime, we are going to be counting every ballot.”

The Trump Team Loses Court Cases in Georgia and Michigan but Gets a Small Win in Pennsylvania

President Donald Trump, whose campaign has filed lawsuits in several states questioning the integrity of the vote count and seeking to slow down the process, suffered a pair of legal setbacks Thursday when judges in Georgia and Michigan ruled against his campaign.

But the campaign notched a minor victory in Pennsylvania when a state appellate court acceded to its request to force Philadelphia election officials to grant its election observers better access to areas where workers are counting ballots.

Here was how the president’s reelection campaign was faring in the courts:

In Georgia, where Trump’s lead over Joe Biden was shrinking, a superior court judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign and the state Republican Party alleging that at least 53 ballots were potentially accepted after a 7 p.m. Election Day deadline by officials in Chatham County, home to Democratic-leaning Savannah. The judge, James Bass Jr., wrote that there was “no evidence” that the ballots were received late. Georgia’s Republican Party has said it plans to bring up to a dozen lawsuits in the state.

In Michigan, where news organizations projected Biden the winner on Wednesday, a judge denied a request by the Trump campaign to halt the counting of absentee ballots so that Republican challengers could be given what it called “meaningful access” to the absentee counting boards. Challengers were allowed to observe the process throughout the state, but in some locations their numbers were limited to follow social-distancing guidelines. A Court of Claims judge, Cynthia Stephens, noted that the lawsuit had been filed Wednesday afternoon, long after the count had begun, adding that “the essence of the count is completed.”

In Pennsylvania, where Biden was eroding Trump’s early lead as more votes were counted, a judge handed the Trump campaign a victory, forcing Philadelphia elections officials to allow Republican observers to watch the count from six feet away. They had previously been kept roughly 20 feet away from workers at the main Philadelphia canvassing area. “We don’t care if your observers are 18 feet away or 15 feet away or 6 feet away," a Biden spokesman, Bill Russo, wrote on Twitter. “As long as election officials can do their job.” Still, Democrats appealed the decision, indicating that they believed the Trump campaign was trying to use closer access to slow the count in Philadelphia — a Democratic stronghold pivotal to Biden bid to capture the state, and with it the presidency — with protests in the counting room and more lawsuits.

Late Thursday, a federal judge denied the Trump campaign’s request for a stop in vote-counting in Philadelphia over its allegation that its observers were not getting sufficient access to the process; instead, he ordered city elections officials to expand the number of people each side could have in the room.

Georgia: Biden Closes In on Trump

ATLANTA — President Donald Trump’s lead in Georgia over Joe Biden shrank to less than 2,000 votes Thursday afternoon, as election workers scrambled to tally the remaining absentee ballots.

“I am prayerful that we can get to a resolution by the end of the day,” Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s statewide voting system implementation manager, said at a news conference at the state Capitol.

Many of the uncounted votes were in counties that lean Democratic, including the suburbs of Atlanta and the county that includes Savannah.

Sterling said that a recount, which could be requested if the margin was less than half a percentage point, was likely. He took exception at Trump’s baseless claims that his lead had eroded because of voter fraud.

“The effort here is to make sure that everybody’s legal vote is counted properly,” Sterling said.

He said the state would also have to process an unknown number of overseas, military and provisional ballots. About 9,000 ballots that had been requested by members of the military and voters overseas had yet to be returned to the state, which has a deadline of 5 p.m. Friday for counting those ballots. “The election is not over just on the absentee ballots,” Sterling said.

A lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign and the state Republican Party challenging the Georgia returns was dismissed Thursday by a Superior Court judge. The lawsuit had alleged that absentee ballots that arrived after the election night deadline were wrongly counted in Savannah. State GOP officials said they planned to file up to a dozen suits.

Jon Ossoff’s Campaign Is ‘Confident’ Georgia Senate Race Is Headed for a Runoff as Perdue Hovers Near 50%

Democrats’ sputtering hopes of reclaiming the Senate are on the edge of getting a boost, as Sen. David Perdue, the Republican incumbent in Georgia, could be forced into a runoff with his Democratic challenger if his vote share falls any lower as the state’s final votes are counted.

As of Thursday afternoon, with an estimated 97% of the votes counted, Perdue had 49.9% of the vote against Jon Ossoff, who had 47.7%. Under Georgia law, if Perdue finishes below 50%, he’ll face Ossoff in a one-on-one vote in January.

The Ossoff campaign said Thursday that the race was on track to require a runoff. “We are confident that Jon Ossoff’s historic performance in Georgia has forced Sen. David Perdue to continue defending his indefensible record of unemployment, disease, and corruption,” Ossoff’s campaign manager, Ellen Foster, said in a statement.

Perdue’s campaign manager, Ben Fry, said in a statement that if “overtime is required when all of the votes have been counted, we’re ready, and we will win.”

There will already be one runoff election in Georgia: Sen. Kelly Loeffler, a Republican, will face the Rev. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat.

If Democrats were able to win both seats, and if Joe Biden wins the presidency, they would have the 50 senators needed to usher through judicial and Cabinet appointments, and enact a Democratic agenda. If Republicans maintain control, they could exert their power to block the priorities of a Biden administration.

If President Donald Trump prevails, the Democrats would need to achieve the enormously difficult feat of winning both Georgia seats and the North Carolina seat held by Sen. Thom Tillis, who is nearly 2 percentage points ahead of his Democratic challenger, Cal Cunningham, with 94% of the votes tallied. The extra seat would be required because the vice president casts the tie-breaking vote in the Senate. Tillis has already declared victory.

Although Democrats flipped Republican-held seats in Colorado and Arizona, they lost one in Alabama and failed to capture seats in several other states in which they invested enormous sums of money. But a second Georgia runoff would extend their hopes through January, and focus the nation’s attention squarely on the Peach State.

Nevada: Biden Widens His Advantage in a Surprising Battleground

Joe Biden widened his slender lead over President Donald Trump in Nevada on Thursday from about 8,000 votes to about 11,000 votes as another tranche of ballots were counted, according to election officials. Biden now leads Trump by about 1 percentage point.

Nevada has six electoral votes and its entire Election Day vote has been counted; the late mail and provisional ballots that remain lean Democratic. About 11% of the state’s votes have yet to be tabulated.

But the final results might not be made public until Saturday or Sunday, said Joe Gloria, elections registrar in Clark County, home to Las Vegas, during a news conference at his headquarters. His staff will begin to tabulate 63,262 drop-off, mail-in and provisional ballots Friday, and likely will not release the results for a day or two, Gloria told reporters.

“Our goal is not to act fast” but to accurately count the votes, he said to audible groaning in the room.

Gloria said he had beefed up security amid threats to his staff, adding, “We will not allow anyone to stop us from doing what our duty is.”

Statewide, Nevada has about 190,000 ballots still to be counted, the secretary of state said in a statement Thursday afternoon, and 90% of them are from Clark County, where Biden currently leads by 8 percentage points.

A key question is whether Trump can close Biden’s current lead in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas and most of Nevada’s population. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried that county by 10.7 percentage points.

The Trump campaign has already identified Nevada, which allows any losing candidate to request a recount, as one of the battleground states where it hopes to use the courts and procedural maneuvers to stave off defeat in the Electoral College. Less than 24 hours before Election Day, a Nevada judge rejected a lawsuit filed by Republicans who had tried to stop early vote-counting in Clark County.

Nevada’s attorney general, Aaron Ford, a Democrat, told CNN that the state was prepared to rebuff the Trump campaign’s offensive. “We think it’s pretty impenetrable when it comes to legal challenge against us,” Ford said.

Arizona: Biden’s Lead Narrows in Last Release of Totals Thursday

PHOENIX — Joe Biden has maintained a steady but slightly narrowing lead in Arizona vote tallies after Election Day, with Latino voters lining up behind the former vice president in a state that President Donald Trump won by 3.5 percentage points in 2016.

As of Thursday evening, Biden led Trump in Arizona by about 46,000 votes.

Even Biden’s narrow edge underscored a profound political shift in Arizona, a longtime Republican bastion that has lurched left in recent years, fueled by rapidly evolving demographics and a growing contingent of young Latino voters who favor liberal policies.

Most Republicans Stay Out of Tabulation Fray

Republicans on Capitol Hill, including the party’s top leaders, remained largely silent Thursday as President Donald Trump and his campaign continued to baselessly claim that Democrats were trying to “steal” the election, and urged officials around the country to stop counting legally cast ballots.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, sought Wednesday to sidestep questions about whether he agreed with Trump that election officials should halt their tabulations.

“What the president wants to make sure is that every legal vote is counted,” McCarthy told reporters. “That people vote up until Election Day — not the days after as others would have. That’s what the president refers to.”

With former Vice President Joe Biden apparently on the cusp of winning the election as he gained ground in Georgia and Pennsylvania, Trump has escalated his protestations. He seethed on Twitter to “STOP THE FRAUD” as workers in key states continued to process ballots in accordance with the law, and detailed a litany of conspiracy theories at an evening news conference in the White House briefing room Thursday evening.

One Republican offered a rare rebuke of the president for his statements. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., took exception early Wednesday morning to a false assertion by Trump that Democrats were attempting to steal the election.

“Stop. Full stop,” Kinzinger wrote on Twitter. “The votes will be counted and you will either win or lose. And America will accept that. Patience is a virtue.”

In a mildly worded statement congratulating Trump on winning his home state, Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, also called for the vote-counting process to be allowed to proceed, saying: “We should respect that process and ensure that all ballots cast in accordance with state laws are counted. It’s that simple.”

But most of their Republican colleagues in Congress, who have stood by Trump through four years of norm-shattering behavior and statements, ignored the president’s comments. Even some of his most vocal critics, who broke sharply with the president in the days before the balloting, with rare exceptions stayed mum as the president publicly sought to undermine the nation’s democratic process. Mitt Romney, who lost the presidential race in 2012, posted a statement on social media in which he acknowledged that “the process is often long and, for those running, frustrating.” But, he added, “The votes will be counted.”

In a statement provided by a spokesman to reporters who inquired, Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, who recently had harsh criticism for Trump, said: “It’s pretty simple: Millions of Americans voted in a peaceful election and there’s not a winner until all the legally cast votes are counted.”

The muted responses apparently did not go unnoticed by Trump or his family. Donald Trump Jr. took to Twitter to complain that none of the Republicans with aspirations to run for president in 2024 were publicly siding with his father.

“The total lack of action from virtually all of the ‘2024 GOP hopefuls’ is pretty amazing,” he wrote. “They have a perfect platform to show that they’re willing & able to fight but they will cower to the media mob instead.”