As vote-counting continues, the presidency hangs in the balance

$_Hu5tL3R_$ · #1 04-11-2020

Quote:

As vote-counting continued in an election with record-breaking turnout where most ballots were cast before Election Day but many could not be counted until afterward, the presidency continued to hang in the balance late Wednesday morning, with the hopes of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and President Trump resting in a handful of key states.

By late Wednesday morning, Mr. Biden’s prospects had brightened a bit amid signs that he held narrow leads in several states that could propel him to the critical threshold of 270 electoral votes. Mr. Trump’s path to winning a second term appeared narrower, and depended on his ability to carry more of the undecided states, including several battleground Great Lakes states that he won in 2016 where Mr. Biden was showing signs of strength.

With over 3 million votes yet to be counted across seven key states — there is a reason that news organizations and other usually impatient actors were waiting to declare victors — Mr. Biden was clinging to narrow leads in Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin.

If he is able to hold all those states, the former vice president could win the election even without Pennsylvania, which has long been viewed as a must-have battleground state.

“We feel good about where we are,” Mr. Biden told rattled supporters early Wednesday morning. “I’m here to tell you tonight we believe we’re on track to win this election. I’m optimistic about this outcome.”

The source of Mr. Biden’s resilience lies in the nature of the votes still to be counted. Many are mail-in ballots, which favor him because the Democratic Party spent months promoting the message of submitting votes in advance, while Mr. Trump encouraged his voters to turn out on Election Day.

In some states, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, many of the uncounted votes are from populous urban and suburban areas like Wayne County, home of Detroit, or Allegheny County, home of Pittsburgh. These areas also tend to vote heavily for Democrats.

Even in Pennsylvania, where Mr. Trump had run up a daunting lead of roughly 10 percentage points as of Wednesday morning, Mr. Biden had a plausible shot of catching up. Pennsylvania’s secretary of state said there were more than 1.4 million mail-in ballots still to be counted, and those votes are expected to heavily favor Mr. Biden.
But Mr. Trump was showing signs of strength with leads in states including North Carolina and Georgia, and his campaign expressed hopes that his early Pennsylvania lead could withstand an influx of mail-in ballots for Mr. Biden. Then, if Mr. Trump was able to retake the lead in Arizona or flip Nevada, which has gone Democratic in recent elections, he would have a path to a second term.

And Mr. Trump has threatened to use the courts to try to invalidate ballots received after Nov. 3, which would upend the vote count.

It is impossible to know until all the votes are counted if the arithmetic works for Mr. Biden. Mr. Biden’s position looked less secure in North Carolina, where Mr. Trump seemed on track to prevail.

For Mr. Biden to be clinging to a cliff edge is, by itself, a reversal of fortune. On the eve of the election, pollsters predicted that he would easily recapture the “blue wall” of northern industrial states that Hillary Clinton lost to Mr. Trump in 2016 and pick off traditional Republican strongholds like Texas and Arizona. Only Arizona fell into his column, and his lead there is not bulletproof.

After a long election night rife with dramatic twists, Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden battled to a near draw in electoral votes, each shy of the 270 needed to capture the presidency.

Mr. Trump prematurely declared victory and said he would petition the Supreme Court to demand a halt to the counting. Mr. Biden urged his supporters — and by implication, Mr. Trump — to show patience and allow the process to play out.

Their dueling, post-midnight appearances captured the raw struggle of a contest that many feared would leap from the campaign trail to the courts.

The president’s statement, delivered in the White House, amounted to a reckless attack on the democratic process during a time of deep anxiety and division in the country. Mr. Biden, speaking from a flag-draped stage in Wilmington, Del., appealed for calm and tried to reassure supporters.

“It’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who has won this election,” Mr. Biden said, to a chorus of honking car horns at a drive-in rally. “That’s the decision of the American people.”

Mr. Trump, however, derided the vote-counting as “a major fraud on our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner,” he said. “We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.”

— Mark Landler and Michael Cooper

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/11...biden-election