US President-elect Joe Biden narrowly defeated President Donald Trump in Georgia, and Trump won North Carolina, as the two final states were called Friday a week and a half after Election Day.
Biden now has 306 electoral votes, and Trump has 232. Biden became president-elect when he won Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes Saturday, passing the required 270-vote threshold.
The victory for Biden in Georgia — a once reliably Republican state whose politics have been pushed to the left — means he flipped five states that Trump won in 2016. The others were Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump did not flip any states this year.
Biden’s margin in Georgia currently stands at just over 14,000 votes, or 0.28 percentage points, with nearly all of the ballots counted. Trump’s margin in North Carolina is more than 73,000 votes, or 1.3 percentage points.
Biden’s late surge in Georgia, thanks to his dominance in Atlanta, Savannah and the increasingly Democrat-friendly suburbs around both, transformed what had seemed to be a safe Trump state in early tabulations last week into one of the closest contests in the nation.
Trump spurred near-record turnout in the rural southwestern parts of the state bordering Alabama and the Florida Panhandle, the white outer suburbs and small cities, and the Appalachian northwest, which touches deep-red Tennessee. Biden was powered by high turnout among Black voters in Atlanta and flipped some suburban white voters in the moderate suburban counties that ring the city.
In North Carolina, Black voters shattered early-voting records in the weeks leading up to the election. But despite a significant, late get-out-the-vote push by Democrats to motivate Black and Latino voters, Trump — who visited North Carolina a half-dozen times in the weeks leading up to the election — was more effective in motivating his base of white working-class and rural voters.
Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in North Carolina in 2016 by fewer than 4 percentage points, but the state has been reliably red for decades: Since 1976, the only Democrat to prevail has been Barack Obama, who narrowly won in 2008.
Flipping Georgia, a state last won by a Democrat in 1992, was dramatic, but it was years in the making: Trump defeated Clinton in the state in 2016 by 5 percentage points, a far slimmer margin than Republicans enjoyed in previous presidential elections.
Georgia’s vote count is currently the subject of an audit, though state officials have said that the results are unlikely to change.
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