After two sleepless nights following one of their country’s closest elections ever, exhausted Americans are unlikely to get respite for a while. As South Africa woke up this morning, the US presidential election result is undecided – but with the incumbent requiring a clean sweep of the last four states to prevent Joe Biden taking up residence in the White House. Donald Trump leads in three of them, but by a thin and falling margin. To prevail, though, he must also turn around a deficit in Nevada, which was carried by his opponent in 2016. Trump’s team, however, remain confident of victory arguing they have legal grounds for challenging some of the results. Here’s the latest on the election from our partners at the Wall Street Journal. – Alec Hogg
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Biden wins Michigan, Wisconsin as Presidential election Comes down to a few statesÂ
By John McCormick, Rebecca Ballhaus and Ken Thomas of the Wall Street Journal
Former vice president is six electoral votes shy of victory with Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania and North Carolina still undetermined.
Joe Biden racked up Electoral College votes that put him within striking distance of the presidency Wednesday evening, while President Trump’s team pursued legal actions to try to blunt the Democrat’s advance and disputed a key call in Arizona.
As Tuesday’s voting turned into a fierce battle over a handful of battleground states, Mr. Biden notched important victories in Wisconsin and Michigan, according to the Associated Press, states Mr. Trump narrowly won in 2016. That put Mr. Biden six electoral votes shy of the 270 needed to win, AP tally showed.
A victory in Nevada, where the race remained close, would deliver that. Officials there said no new results would be reported until Thursday. Mr. Trump’s campaign, however, was contesting the process in other states. It filed lawsuits over vote counting in Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania. The president was ahead in the latter two. The campaign also called for a recount in Wisconsin.
The Trump campaign is also disputing the decision by the AP and Fox News to call Arizona for Mr. Biden, arguing that mail-in ballots yet to be counted there would ultimately deliver the state’s 11 electoral votes to the president.
Both sides exuded confidence about their victory prospects and began raising money for the possibility of an extended legal fight to cap a bitter campaign and a race that has been closer in some key states than polls suggested.
The battle for control of the Senate also continued, and GOP prospects of maintaining a slight majority in the chamber were boosted when the AP declared Republican Susan Collins of Maine the winner on Wednesday afternoon. Republicans also were on track to shrink the Democrats’ House majority.
‘Now, after a long night of counting, it’s clear that we’re winning enough states to reach 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency,’ Mr. Biden said in Delaware. ‘I’m not here to declare that we’ve won, but I am here to report, when the count is finished, we believe we will be the winners.’
He added that he was confident about winning Pennsylvania: ‘Virtually all of the remaining ballots to be counted were cast by mail, and we’ve been winning 78% of the votes by mail in Pennsylvania.’
The Trump campaign also projected confidence in Pennsylvania, declaring victory there even as it asked the Supreme Court for permission to intervene in a pending GOP appeal that asks the justices to pull back the state’s three-day extended deadline for accepting ballots mailed by Election Day.
Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said Wednesday the campaign is confident in the president’s path to victory. ‘If we count all legal ballots, the president wins,’ he said.
Mr. Trump on Twitter Wednesday evening said he was claiming victory in Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina, though none of the states has been called for either candidate by the AP, which is widely seen as a definitive source of election results. He also made an unsupported allegation that some ballots have been discarded in Michigan, and said he would claim victory there too.
AP called Wisconsin after election officials there said all outstanding ballots had been counted, except for a few hundred in one township and an expected small number of provisional ballots. The news organization said Mr. Biden led by 0.6 percentage points out of nearly 3.3 million ballots counted.
As of Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Biden had won 70.7 million votes across the nation, according to the AP tally, breaking the previous record held by former President Barack Obama in the 2008 election. Mr. Trump has so far won 67.7 million votes.
Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to Mr. Biden, said Wednesday that it looked likely that the Democrat would win a majority of the vote.
‘At the end of the day he will have won roughly 52 percent of the popular vote, more votes than any presidential candidate in the history of this country, she said.
The results in much of the nation were decided Tuesday night. The president won Ohio, Iowa, Texas and the key prize of Florida, while Mr. Biden flipped an electoral vote in a Nebraska congressional district and was declared the winner by AP in Arizona, the first time the state has gone to a Democratic presidential candidate since 1996.
Mr. Stepien said Wednesday afternoon the campaign would request a recount in Wisconsin, calling it a ‘razor-thin race.’ The margin to request a recount in the state is 1% or less and Mr. Trump is currently within that margin, but the state hasn’t finished counting. The campaign can’t request a recount until the results have been certified.
Mr. Stepien said the campaign had also filed a lawsuit seeking to stop votes from being counted in Michigan on the grounds that the Trump campaign ‘has not been provided with meaningful access to numerous counting locations to observe the opening of ballots and the counting process, as guaranteed by Michigan law.’
Mr. Trump won Maine’s competitive second congressional district, AP said Wednesday afternoon, picking up a single elector in a district he also won in 2016. Maine and Nebraska use a district allocation system unlike the winner-take-all methods elsewhere.
The counting was slowed by an unprecedented shift to mail-in voting as a result of the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 232,000 Americans.
Hours after the polls closed on Tuesday, Mr. Trump began raising the prospect of foul play.
‘Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key States, in almost all instances Democrat run & controlled,’ Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter Wednesday morning. ‘Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted.’ It is not unusual for the balance of a race to shift substantially as the vote count progresses.
Trump allies began working to raise money to fund legal challenges in closely contested states. Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and the RNC’s finance chairman, Todd Ricketts, held a conference call with donors on Wednesday, asking them to help pay for expected legal costs. The Trump campaign sent supporters a similar fundraising plea urging them to ‘step up and DEFEND the results.’
Mr. Biden’s campaign on Wednesday afternoon launched its own grass-roots appeal, asking for donations as low as $15 for a ‘Biden Fight Fund.’
‘To make sure every vote is counted, we’re setting up the largest election protection effort ever assembled,’ Mr. Biden tweeted. ‘Because Donald Trump doesn’t get to decide the outcome of this election—the American people do.’
Biden senior legal adviser Bob Bauer said Wednesday, ‘We’re winning the election. We’ve won the election. We’re going to defend that election.’
In a speech at the White House past 2 a.m., Mr. Trump threatened to take a case to the Supreme Court to halt the counting of ballots. It isn’t clear what legal argument he would rely on to make that case.
The president for months has telegraphed that he intended to accuse Democrats of fraud if the election didn’t go his way. Asked repeatedly if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he lost, he has declined to do so.
In a tweet, Mr. Trump accused Democrats of trying to steal the election, which Twitter flagged as potentially misleading. The Republican incumbent addressed supporters in the middle of the night at the White House, saying he won states where the counting was still under way. ‘Frankly,’ Mr. Trump said, ‘we did win this election.’
‘So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court—we want all voting to stop,’ Mr. Trump said. ‘We don’t want them to find any ballots at four o’clock in the morning and add them to the list.’
The Supreme Court previously declined to disturb extended ballot deadlines in the battleground states of North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
—Sabrina Siddiqui, Michael C. Bender, Eliza Collins, Alexa Corse, Catherine Lucey and Julie Bykowicz contributed to this article.
Write to John McCormick at [email protected], Rebecca Ballhaus at [email protected] and Ken Thomas at [email protected]
Appeared in the November 5, 2020, print edition as ‘Biden Stretches Lead Over Trump.’
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