Former Vice President Joe Biden has taken the lead in his birth state of Pennsylvania as the number of outstanding ballots has dwindled, putting the Democrat within striking distance of the 270 electoral votes that he needs to win the White House.
Tight races are also going into overtime in two other states that could influence the destiny of the race, Nevada and Arizona, where Biden’s lead tightened late Friday morning to just more than 43,000 votes
During the long and hard-fought primary Democratic primary, Biden repeatedly made the case that he alone could sway the blue-collar voters who abandoned his party to support Donald Trump in 2016 and could rebuild the Democrats’ “blue wall” in the Midwest that Trump had demolished.
Biden succeeded in that goal by notching wins in Michigan and Wisconsin, according to CNN projections, and Pennsylvania would be the capstone of that long-held dream for the former vice president.
For several days now, Biden advisers have insisted that they are confident the Democratic nominee can hold Pennsylvania and the momentum has moved unrelentingly in Biden’s favor.
As officials have counted the hundreds of thousands of vote-by-mail ballots, Biden dramatically narrowed Trump’s lead, infuriating the President and his allies, who know the President’s path to reelection is over if he cannot hold the commonwealth. If Pennsylvania serves as the key in Biden’s path to the White House, it would be a fitting end to his longstanding effort to cultivate his image as “Middle Class Joe” who understands and empathises with the frustrations of the working-class voters of the industrial Midwest — voters Trump courted by calling them the “forgotten men and women” of America.
To underscore that point on the morning of Election Day, Biden made a final trip to his childhood home where his Scranton supporters surrounded him on the street to wish him good luck. On one of the living room walls in his boyhood home, he wrote: “From this House to the White House with the Grace of God,” signing his name and the date, “11.3.2020.” But Pennsylvania was not the only state that was tightening Friday morning in this cliffhanger election.
The momentum of the race has shifted in Biden’s favor — putting him on the doorstep of the critical threshold of 270 electoral votes needed to become president — as he has racked up huge margins among mail-in ballots favored by Democratic voters.
Biden jumped ahead of Trump in Georgia around 4:30 a.m. on Friday and leads by just more than 1,000 votes. The former vice president’s surprising strength in Georgia stemmed from huge turnout from Black voters in Fulton County and other suburbs around Atlanta, fatigue with Trump in Georgia’s fast-growing suburbs — which have become increasingly young and diverse in recent years — and assiduous work over more than a decade to boost Democratic registration in the state.
No Democratic presidential nominee has won the state since Bill Clinton in 1992. Clinton narrowly defeated former President George H.W. Bush in that state in part because he and Bush were in a three-way race that included Ross Perot, an independent candidate for the presidency.
In response to reports Trump has no plans to concede, Biden’s campaign said, “The American people will decide this election.”
“And the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House,” campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement.
Pennsylvania, the state that could take Biden over the 270-vote threshold, could complete most of its outstanding counts on Friday, officials there said.
Tens of thousands of votes remain to be counted. The remaining pool of Philadelphia votes to be counted is about 25,000, according to a city official and an official familiar with the counting. These will take longer to count because they are provisional ballots as well as ones that require review because of issues like dates or signatures. The sources said city election officials are starting this batch from scratch. “It’s going to be a while,” one of the sources said.
But on Thursday night, Trump effectively sent a signal that he has no intention of leaving power without a fight if he ends up losing the election.
Trump made ludicrous claims that his leads on election night shrunk because Democratic officials keep finding ballots, when in fact the counts have narrowed because election officials in many states counted the vote-by-mail ballots, which favored Democrats, after the Election Day votes, which tended to favor Republicans.
Biden urges calm
Even as the votes are still being counted in Pennsylvania, Biden’s advisers have mounted an aggressive behind-the-scenes push to get his supporters — and, even more importantly, Republicans — to help validate the sanctity of the election.
The Biden campaign took note of Trump’s dire tone in the White House Thursday night and began a plan that is underway Friday to get Biden’s old allies in the Senate — and others from a lifetime in public life — to speak to the legitimacy of the election.
Biden emerged in Wilmington, Delaware, for a short speech Thursday meant to project optimism, urge patience in the vote counting and to apparently create a picture of a presidency in waiting.
“In America, the vote is sacred. It is how the people of this nation express their will,” he said, calling for calm and patience as the vote counting process unfolds.
The President’s team, in contrast, had earlier bullishly insisted that the President would win Pennsylvania with some room to spare. “Donald Trump is alive and well,” Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien said.
CNN
