White House race narrows as votes are counted in key states (Analysis)

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(CNN) – In the race for the White House, it is still too early to announce a winner, with close contests in Georgia and Pennsylvania, as former Vice President Joe Biden approaches the threshold of the 270 electoral votes needed to win and President Donald Trump’s hopes of obtaining the victory. re-election seemed to vanish.

With Biden’s pivotal victories in Michigan and Wisconsin, delivering on his promise to rebuild the Democrats’ “blue wall” in the Midwest that Trump demolished in 2016, the former vice president was just 17 votes away from winning the presidency.

After a frustrating Tuesday night for the Democrats, in which their hopes of an early victory for Biden have vanished, Republicans watch with alarm and anxiety as the race narrows in Georgia, where Trump’s lead has dwindled to a few. 23,000 votes during the count on Wednesday.

Although it was clear that Biden would fare better in Georgia than previous Democratic presidential candidates due to the large turnout of black voters in Atlanta’s fast-growing suburbs, few expected the presidential race to be so tight in the state that Democrats would not. they have won since 1996.

With hundreds of thousands of mail-order votes counted and pending absence on Pennsylvania’s key battlefield, Trump’s lead has shrunk dramatically. Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said Wednesday evening that the state has made “excellent progress” in counting the ballots. But he estimated it will be “a matter of days before the overwhelming majority of votes are counted.” Many of these outstanding votes are ballot papers sent by post in the highly democratic area of ​​Philadelphia.

While both campaigns insist on being confident in their prospects in Pennsylvania, Biden has even more avenues to the White House: if he keeps in Nevada and Arizona, where the counts have yet to be completed, he will have enough votes for the constituency. President number 46.

Trump’s campaign aides insist they will be able to regain ground in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous county, which released its latest batch of ballots Wednesday night reducing Biden’s lead in Arizona to about 79,000 votes. On Wednesday night, the Arizona secretary of state told CNN’s John King that more than half a million votes remained uncounted and suggested that Maricopa County could take several days to count.

Nevada election officials, who released very little information on Wednesday with an estimated 200,000 ballots pending, said they expect to report their latest batch of results by noon Thursday.

Biden has a 253-213 lead in the constituency. In addition to Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania, races in Alaska and North Carolina remain too close to advertise.

CNN predicts Biden will get at least three of Maine’s four electoral votes, plus Wisconsin, Michigan, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Virginia, California, Oregon, Washington State, Illinois, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, Delaware, District of Columbia, Maryland, Massachusetts, and one of Nebraska’s five electoral votes. Nebraska and Maine assign two electoral votes to their state winners and divide the other electoral votes by Congressional districts.

CNN casts Trump to win Montana, Texas, Iowa, Idaho, Ohio, Mississippi, Wyoming, Missouri, Kansas, Utah, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, North Dakota, South Dakota, Arkansas, Indiana, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Virginia Occidental and Tennessee and four of Nebraska’s five electoral votes.

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A confident Biden asks for patience and unity

Determined to show an aggressive stance and the president’s intention to stay in the game, Trump’s team launched a series of lawsuits in key states on the battlefield that seemed less based on solid legal reasoning and more on slowdown of the former vice president. at the threshold of the electoral vote.

The president did not appear in public on Wednesday, but continued to tweet bogus allegations from the White House suggesting that the Democrats were trying to “steal” the election by uncovering new ballot pools for their opponent, even as Biden’s growing accounts they were simply the result of the counting process.

Biden took a more calibrated path, making a brief appearance to reporters to say he believed he was on track to get 270 electoral votes, but did not declare victory. He rejected Trump’s attempts to undermine the results, claiming that “the people rule. Power cannot be taken or declared.

There will be no blue and red states when we win. Only the United States of America, “Biden said Wednesday afternoon, promising to unite the country. We are not enemies. What unites us as Americans is much stronger than anything that can separate us.”

Trump launches an aggressive legal strategy to challenge the results

As he watched his margins shrink, Trump sent legal teams to critical states and ordered his staff to aggressively seek ways to contest the findings.

As part of this strategy, Trump’s campaign plans to ask the court to intervene in a case challenging a Supreme Court decision that allowed ballots to be counted in Pennsylvania after election day. The magistrates had refused to expedite the appeal before the elections and are considering whether to accept the case.

Trump and his election team also tried to raise questions about how Biden got a belated victory in the vital state of Wisconsin, where the Democrat grew on mail-order votes and the first to be counted after most of the ballots cast. in person. on election day.

Trump’s campaign said Wednesday it will require a recount in Wisconsin as legal challenges are raised in Michigan and Georgia.

“The president is on the threshold to request a recount (in Wisconsin) and we will do it immediately,” Trump’s campaign leader Bill Stepien said in a statement.

Stepien noted that the results show “a very good race as we always knew it would be” and said there were irregularities in several Wisconsin counties, but did not specify what the campaign believes those irregularities are.

The campaign’s state-by-state approach has revealed glaring inconsistencies in its strategy – it appears to be trying to stop the vote count in states where Trump is lagging behind, such as Pennsylvania and Michigan, while demanding that all votes be counted. in the states. where he thinks the president has a chance to reach Biden, like Arizona and Nevada.

Candidates can request a recount in Wisconsin if they fall within 1% of the winner’s total votes, but a recount cannot be formally requested until the count is complete, which could be until November 17. It seems highly unlikely that a margin the size of Biden’s lead in Wisconsin, some 20,000 votes, could be nullified in a recount. But since the margin is less than 1%, the Trump campaign has the right to request a recount.

With CNN’s Kevin Liptak reporting that even Trump himself seems skeptical on the subtle basis of some of the challenges his campaign presents, the campaign said it plans to file a lawsuit in Georgia claiming that a Republican observer of polls in that state attended 53 ballots. absentee ballots “illegally added to a bunch of absentee ballots in Chatham County in time.”

Trump offered tepid endorsement of his team’s legal strategy in phone calls with some of his allies on Wednesday, sounding resigned that the plan wasn’t up to par and wondering why his team hadn’t successfully defied the voting rules earlier. election, although he was still willing to hold it, CNN reported.

The Trump campaign also said it is filing a lawsuit in Michigan asking the state to stop counting because “it has not been given significant access to numerous toll points to observe the opening of ballots and the counting process, such as Guaranteed Michigan Law.

Ryan Jarvi, spokesman for Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, responded to the threat of the lawsuit by stating in a statement that “the elections in Michigan were conducted in a transparent manner, with access provided to both political parties and members of the public. the public”.

Trump campaign officials said Wednesday afternoon that they believe the president can maintain his leadership in Pennsylvania, but are also suing the commonwealth, claiming that Democratic election officials “hide the counting and processing of ballots” from Republican election observers.

Trump’s Deputy Campaign Director Justin Clark said the goal of the lawsuit is “to temporarily stop the recount until there is significant transparency and Republicans can ensure that all recount is done frankly and in accordance with the law. “.

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Trump’s baseless claims

The president makes unfounded claims that the elections, which seemed more favorable to him on Tuesday night before he began tabulating early voting, would be stolen from him and calls for the counting of votes to be stopped in some areas. An appearance in the East Room of the White House early Wednesday morning in which he falsely claimed that victory was his most blatant threat to the democratic principles that underlie the American political system.

“As for me, we’ve already won it,” said Trump, painting a picture that doesn’t match the true state of the race. Earlier, Biden warned that each side would have to wait for the votes to be counted, saying, “We’ll have to be patient until we finish the hard work of counting the votes.”

And while the president has long threatened to challenge the elections, the vote itself was largely conducted peacefully, with no violence in polling stations or intimidation of people who cast their votes as feared, especially given. Trump’s attempts to discredit early voting procedures.

But the elections did not turn into the total and devastating repudiation of the president and his presidency that the Democrats had hoped for. Trump has demonstrated an extraordinary connection with his predominantly white voter base in rural areas and a new connection with Latino voter groups in some states.

A blue wave that many Democrats hoped to wipe out Mitch McConnell’s Republican majority in the Senate has not yet materialized, though some key races are still undecided. And despite trying to widen the majority in the House, Democrats have lost several seats and some threatened Republicans have kept theirs.