As electoral results continue to trend in Joe Biden’s favor, President Trump’s possible path to victory is now extremely narrow. As of Thursday morning, Biden has 253 electoral votes following wins in the critical states of Wisconsin and Michigan, and needs only 17 electoral votes to reach the magic number of 270, according to projections from the Associated Press (AP).
Trump, would need to win 57. Of the remaining states, only Alaska, which has not voted for a Democrat since 1964 and where Trump holds a commanding lead, appears out of reach for Biden. If Trump wins Alaska, it would bring his total to 217, but would not affect Biden’s map.
Delegate-rich Pennsylvania would be a major prize for either candidate, and may not be called until later this week as counting of absentee ballots continues. Biden does not absolutely need its 20 votes to win. Trump, however, does.
With Michigan in his column, Biden can now secure the presidency with a victory in any remaining state, including Nevada, which has six electoral votes and where Biden holds a narrow lead with an estimated 83% of the vote counted.
In Georgia, the race is too close to call, according to the AP, because about 4% of the vote still needs to be counted — around 200,000 ballots — most of that mail-in votes from two counties where Biden has done extremely well: DeKalb County in the Atlanta area, and Chatham County, home to Savannah. With Trump holding a steadily-shrinking lead that now stands at less than 20,000 votes, the final margin is expected to be razor-thin. On Wednesday evening the Trump campaign filed yet another lawsuit to stop the counting of the votes, the AP reports.
In North Carolina, all ballots that arrive by Nov. 12 will be counted, as long as they were postmarked by Election Day, which makes any estimate little more than guesswork. While Trump currently holds a 77,000-vote lead over Biden, according to the Times, that race is also not over: Election officials in the Tar Heel State report nearly 290,000 ballots outstanding, a large slice of them from the Triad metroplex, which, given historical trends, appear likely to favor Biden.
In Nevada, where Biden leads by fewer than 8,000 votes, about 194,000 votes have not been accounted for, the AP says. However, a large majority of those, about 150,000, are from Clark County, which is home to Las Vegas and votes heavily Democratic. Many Nevada ballots that were submitted or postmarked by Election Day have yet to be tallied, the AP reports.
To win re-election, Trump has to carry every state that hasn’t been called — where vote-counting continues and the final results are likely to be extremely close with Biden gaining ground.
In a desperate move, Trump, who baselessly and falsely said he had won the election early on Wednesday morning, has resorted to do what many people feared — try to get the Supreme Court to shut down the counting process.
Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien tried to claim victory in Pennsylvania on Wednesday, in a virtually unprecedented maneuver seemingly intended to placate his boss. A campaign has no authority to declare victory on its own, and more than a million votes remain to be counted in Pennsylvania, according to The New York Times. That declaration came after the campaign filed two lawsuits. One suit would temporarily stop vote counting in the state until Republican observers are given increased visibility over the process.
The campaign is also seeking to intervene in a Supreme Court case that would block a decision to count mail-in ballots that are received by Friday but were postmarked by Election Day.
On Wednesday evening, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar held a press conference to discuss the vote count, and said they would fight to ensure that every legal vote is counted. They also said that the late-arriving mail-in ballots potentially involved in the Supreme Court case amounted to a relatively small number, unlikely to change the overall results.
The Supreme Court rejected a Trump motion to expedite his request, but may still take it up.
