Biden and Trump Are Locked in Tight Race as Uncounted Votes Remain

[Read live updates on Joe Biden’s transition to the presidency.]

Biden conveys confidence and asks for patience as votes are counted in crucial battlegrounds.

Image
Joseph R. Biden Jr. urged supporters gathered in Wilmington, Del., early Wednesday to be patient with the vote-counting process.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Time

President Trump won a series of key battlegrounds early on Wednesday morning, including Florida, Ohio and Iowa, as Joseph R. Biden Jr. expressed confidence he would ultimately prevail across key Northern states and Arizona as the presidential contest turned into a state-by-state slog that could drag deeper into the week.

“We believe we are on track to win this election,” Mr. Biden said in a brief speech after 12:30 a.m. Eastern, saying he was “optimistic” about the outcome once all the votes were counted.

No full states had yet flipped from their 2016 results as of 1 a.m., but several key states had huge portions of ballots still to be counted. Mr. Biden did flip a single Electoral College vote that Mr. Trump had won in 2016, carrying Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, which includes Omaha.

With millions of legitimate votes still waiting to be counted, Mr. Trump prematurely and recklessly declared that he won the election. Appearing at the White House, he pressed for more vote counting in Arizona, where he is behind, and called to stop the count where he is ahead as he baselessly declared the election “a fraud on the American public.”

In an unprecedented move that drew bipartisan condemnation, the president said he intended to go to the Supreme Court to intervene to halt the legitimate counting of the vote.

So far, Mr. Trump was holding off Mr. Biden in two Southern states that the former vice president had hoped to snatch back from the Republican column: Georgia and North Carolina. These were not must-win states for Mr. Biden, but he spent heavily in both states and visited them in the final stretch of the campaign. Mr. Biden lost Texas, a long-shot hope that some Democrats invested in late in hopes of earning a landslide repudiation of Mr. Trump that did not arrive.

Georgia has not gone Democratic since 1992. But while Mr. Trump held a narrow lead, much of the remaining vote to be counted appeared to be in the greater Atlanta area, where Mr. Biden performed strongest.

Shortly after Mr. Biden spoke, Mr. Trump responded on Twitter, misleadingly saying he was “up big” and claiming without evidence that “they are trying to STEAL the election.” Twitter immediately marked it as content that was “disputed and might be misleading.”

The most encouraging sign on the map for Mr. Biden was in Arizona, where he was leading in a state that Mr. Trump won in 2016. He won New Hampshire and Minnesota, two states that Hillary Clinton had only narrowly carried four years ago and that Mr. Trump had once hoped to flip in 2020.

“We’re going to win this,” Mr. Biden said, urging “patience.”

Mr. Biden’s win in Nebraska’s 2nd District was only one of the 270 Electoral College votes that he needs. But it could prove important. It opened a potential pathway to the White House without winning Pennsylvania, if Mr. Biden carried all the states that Mrs. Clinton did and added Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin, plus Nebraska’s lone vote.

In a briefing for donors on Tuesday night, Biden campaign officials acknowledged underperforming among Cuban-Americans in the Miami area, but saw positive signs with their strength in some suburbs in Ohio that they said could be predictive across the Midwest, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Campaign officials signaled that Biden’s team was preparing to wait for votes to be counted in three Northern battlegrounds that Mr. Trump carried in 2016 — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — where it still feels bullish.

North Carolina and Arizona could still be called relatively quickly. But vote-counting in the so-called former “blue wall” that Mr. Trump flipped in 2016 — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — is not expected to be completed until later in the week.

Trump, attacking the democratic process, falsely says he won.

Image
Monitoring election results at a Republican watch party in Richmond, Texas, on Tuesday.Credit...Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

With millions of votes still left to be counted, President Trump early Wednesday falsely declared that he had won his race for re-election, warning that he would go to the Supreme Court to try to prematurely shut the election down.

In a post-midnight appearance in the White House, Mr. Trump offered what amounted to a reckless attack on the democratic process at a time of extraordinary angst and division in a nation that had been riveted by a polarizing and unresolved election. He listed states where he falsely claimed he had already won — like Georgia, where Republicans thought Joseph R. Biden Jr. had a solid chance of winning — as he baselessly argued that opponents were trying to steal the election from him.

Mr. Trump’s combative remarks offered a sharp contrast with an appearance an hour earlier by Mr. Biden, who counseled the nation to be patient. Mr. Biden noted that vote counting typically takes days, and sometimes longer, in normal years to count ballots, and would certainly so particularly in the middle of a pandemic that prompted many people to vote by mail.

Mr. Biden’s campaign manager, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, called Mr. Trump’s remarks “outrageous, unprecedented, and incorrect,” saying they were “a naked effort to take away the democratic rights of American citizens.”

Pennsylvania, a state that Mr. Trump falsely claimed he had won, is just beginning to count hundred of thousands of early votes mailed in that are expected to be heavily Democratic. Gov. Tom Wolf said on Twitter that the state had more than one million mail ballots to count.

“It’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who has won this election,” Mr. Biden said. “That’s the decision of the American people.”

It was unclear to what extent Mr. Trump’s remarks were calculated or extemporaneous. There was a teleprompter in front of him, though he appeared to improvise, like when he complained that a news organization — it was Fox News, though he never named it — had awarded Arizona, a state that Mr. Trump won 2016, to Mr. Biden.

“We did win this election,” he said. “So our goal now is to ensure the integrity for the good of this nation. This is a very big moment. This is a major fraud on our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.”

Mr. Trump’s comments appeared sure to escalate a bitter legal battle over how the votes should be counted.

It was unclear what sort of Supreme Court challenge the president had in mind. There is no legal argument to compel states to stop counting ballots that were properly filled out and submitted on time.

Lawyers with both parties had been expecting a possible move by the Trump campaign or allied Republicans to renew a bid to get the Supreme Court to stay a decision by Pennsylvania’s high court to allow election workers to count all ballots postmarked on Nov. 3 or earlier for three days after Election Day. That had not happened as of Tuesday night.

Republicans had also filed suits in state and federal court on Tuesday challenging Pennsylvania election officials’ move to allow counties to contact voters whose mail-in ballots were rejected because of mistakes to give them the opportunity to fix those ballots or cast provisional, replacement ballots. State and federal judges were scheduled to hear arguments on Wednesday, as well as complaints from Mr. Trump’s campaign that its elections observers were not being given enough access to the counting process for potential challenges to Democratic votes.

It was not known as of early Wednesday how many such votes may have been cast, and whether it could be significant enough to affect the outcome in the state.

But Democrats were prepared for other legal maneuvers from Republicans. Mr. Trump’s campaign has planned its legal strategy for months, and it was always devised to address the very scenario that emerged overnight Tuesday — one in which election night returns showed Mr. Trump winning in states in which mail ballots threatened to tip the balance to Mr. Biden.

Mr. Trump’s defiance — his rejection of an election while it was still playing out and his threat of legal action — shocked even some of his top Republican supporters. “It’s a bad strategic decision,” Chris Christie, the Republican former governor of New Jersey and an adviser to the president, said on ABC. “It’s a bad political decision.”

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Ballots have never been fully counted on Election Day.

Image
Large numbers of ballots remain to be counted in Milwaukee.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

The argument President Trump made early Wednesday — that he had won an election in which millions of validly cast ballots remained to be counted — was a blatant misrepresentation of the electoral process.

No state ever reports final results on election night, no state is legally expected to, and if the Supreme Court were to force states to stop counting ballots simply because midnight on Tuesday has passed — as Mr. Trump said he would ask the justices to do — it would be an extraordinary subversion of the democratic process that would disenfranchise millions of voters who cast valid, on-time ballots.

There is nothing new or unusual about prolonged vote counts. In 2008, it took two weeks for Missouri to be called for John McCain. In 2012, it took four days for Florida to be called for Barack Obama. There was no dispute about the legitimacy of these results; it simply took time to finish counting the votes.

In fact, one of Mr. Trump’s own cherished victories, in Michigan in 2016, was confirmed only after two weeks of counting.

Americans are accustomed to knowing who won the presidency on election night because news organizations project winners based on partial counts, not because the entire count is completed that quickly. Because so many people voted by mail this year in response to the coronavirus pandemic, it is taking longer in some states to make accurate projections. But the final, official results will come exactly when they always do: by the certification deadlines each state has set, ranging from two days after the election in Delaware to more than a month after in California.

Mr. Trump sought in his speech from the White House, just as he and his campaign sought in the weeks leading up to Election Day, to conflate two separate things: the casting of ballots after Election Day, and the counting of ballots after Election Day.

“We want all voting to stop,” he said, but it already has; no votes are currently being cast. What Mr. Trump is suggesting is that states not count ballots that were already cast.

The bald political nature of his speech was clear in the contradiction between his comments on Arizona, where Mr. Trump is trailing, and his comments on Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where he has the illusion of large leads because huge numbers of votes from Democratic-leaning areas, like Detroit, Philadelphia and Milwaukee, haven’t been counted yet.

He complained that Fox News had called Arizona for Joseph R. Biden Jr. when many votes were still outstanding. Then, in the next breath, he suggested that he had definitively won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin despite the far larger numbers of votes still outstanding.

Big gains among Latinos in the Miami area power Trump to victory in Florida.

Image
Donald Trump supporters cheer and celebrate after Trump won the state of Florida at the Versailles restaurant in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami, Fla. on Tuesday.Credit...Scott McIntyre for The New York Times

President Trump has been declared the winner in Florida after pulling off a remarkable turnaround from 2016 in the Miami area, wooing conservative Cuban-American voters and other Latino groups in numbers sufficient to overcome Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s middling gains with white Floridians.

This is a big, though not huge, moment for his re-election hopes, mainly because it would have been all but impossible for him to win back the White House without capturing this state’s 29 Electoral College votes again.

Four years ago, Mr. Trump lost the Miami-Dade area by nearly 30 percentage points to Hillary Clinton. As of late Tuesday, that margin had shrunk to about eight percentage points with Mr. Biden at the top of the ticket — with Mr. Trump’s vote totals in that critical area increasing from 334,000 in 2016 to around 500,000 this year.

Mr. Biden spent far more time and resources courting Black voters, and he began to heavily invest in a major Latino outreach operation only late in the campaign. He had hoped he would come close to Mrs. Clinton’s benchmark, while siphoning off votes from Mr. Trump among disenchanted suburban whites and older voters.

If Mr. Biden could take any consolation from the loss, it was the fact that he marginally outperformed Mrs. Clinton in the county that includes Jacksonville, defeating Mr. Trump there, while exceeded her performance in Tampa and its suburbs, again by a small amount.

But while it was too early to draw any definitive conclusions about other states, one thing is clear: Mr. Biden had focused, since securing the nomination, on attracting white voters in the Midwest and elsewhere. He spent less time and resources on outreach to Latino voters.

Florida has been a heartbreak state for Democrats since George W. Bush narrowly defeated Al Gore there in 2000 after a partial recount and an intervention on the part of the Supreme Court that effectively handed the election to Mr. Bush.

Polls had shown the race very tight — with many showing Mr. Biden with a lead — but Democrats were hardly confident going into the night, given the closeness of the polls.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Battle for the Senate

Democrats’ path to Senate control narrows as Republicans hold onto critical seats.

Image
Senator Kelly Loeffler, Republican of Georgia, is headed to a runoff against the Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock, a Democrat, on Jan. 5.Credit...Nicole Craine for The New York Times

Democrats’ path to seizing the Senate continued to narrow Wednesday as Republicans held onto a cluster of seats in critical states and the two parties continued to fight to control the upper chamber of Congress in close contests across the country.

Democrats won a crucial seat in Arizona early Wednesday, with Mark Kelly, a former astronaut, defeating Senator Martha McSally, after former Gov. John Hickenlooper defeated Senator Cory Gardner Tuesday night in the high-profile fight for Colorado’s Senate seat. Those victories were essential to Democrats’ push to take the Senate majority.

In Georgia, the Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock, a Democrat, advanced to a runoff election against Senator Kelly Loeffler, the Republican incumbent. The other race in the state, between Jon Ossoff, the Democratic challenger, and Senator David Perdue, a Republican, was too close to call.

But Republicans across the country were successful in holding off well-funded challengers in a number of key races, casting a pall over the night for Democrats. In Montana, Senator Steve Daines defeated Gov. Steve Bullock and in Iowa, Senator Joni Ernst defeated Theresa Greenfield, a businesswoman who had styled herself as a “scrappy farm kid.” Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, hung onto his seat in South Carolina, fending off the toughest challenge of his political career from Jaime Harrison, a Black Democrat whose upstart campaign electrified progressives across the country and inspired a record-setting onslaught of campaign cash.

Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, defeated a challenge from M.J. Hegar, a former Air Force pilot who Democrats hoped could have an outside chance of winning in the rapidly changing state. In Kentucky, Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, easily won re-election, defeating Amy McGrath, a Democrat who struggled to gain ground despite an outpouring of financial support from her party’s supporters around the nation. And Republicans succeeded in ousting Senator Doug Jones, Democrat of Alabama, who came to power in a 2017 special election against Roy S. Moore, who was accused of sexually assaulting and pursuing teenage girls.

And early returns showed Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, with a lead over his Democratic challenger, Cal Cunningham, in a seat that strategists in both parties identified as a possible tipping point.

There were still several crucial Senate races that were not yet called that Democrats hope to win, including Maine, and Democrats remained bullish on their chances in Georgia.

Twitter and Facebook labeled posts from Trump, but only one moved to limit their spread.

Twitter and Facebook both attached labels to posts from President Trump early Wednesday after he falsely claimed that the election was being stolen.

Twitter hid Mr. Trump’s tweet, in which he said “they are trying to STEAL the Election,” behind a label that cautioned people that the claim was “disputed” and “might be misleading about an election or other civic process.” Twitter also restricted users’ ability to like and share the post.

Facebook separately added a label to Mr. Trump’s identical post on the social network saying that the votes had not all been counted and that “no winner of the presidential election had been projected.”

Facebook did not restrict users from sharing or commenting on the post. It was the first time Facebook had used such a label, part of the company’s plan to add context to posts about the election.

A White House spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a tweet sent about 10 minutes after Mr. Trump’s post, Joseph R. Biden Jr. said: “It’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare the winner of this election. It’s the voters’ place.”

Twitter began fact-checking and labeling Mr. Trump’s misleading tweets in May. Mr. Trump responded with an executive order designed to strip legal protections from Twitter and other social media companies. Facebook has also increased its initiatives around protecting the election.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Voters are leaning left on ballot initiatives, including on abortion and drugs.

Image
Ballots before they are counted by a machine in Riviera Beach, Florida.Credit...Saul Martinez for The New York Times

While the presidential race remains close, voters across the country appear to have leaned left on ballot initiatives, including several related to drug legalization.

In Colorado, voters decisively rejected Proposition 115, which would have banned abortion after 22 weeks’ gestation. Uncounted ballots remain, but with about 85 percent of votes reported, the results on the initiative were roughly 60 percent no to 40 percent in favor.

Abortion-related ballot measures are common, but this one was particularly significant because Colorado is one of few states that allows abortion late in pregnancy. Women travel there from all across the country to obtain third-trimester abortions, often in situations where their health or life is in danger or their fetus has a fatal abnormality. So if Proposition 115 had passed, it would have had implications for women well beyond Colorado.

Elsewhere, Oregon became the first state to decriminalize small amounts of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and other drugs. Voters in New Jersey and Arizona legalized recreational marijuana.

And in Florida, voters approved a constitutional amendment that will raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour over the next six years.

One exception to the general leftward tilt on ballot initiatives was Louisiana’s Amendment 1, a measure stating that the state constitution does not protect abortion rights. Louisiana voters approved it by a comfortable margin, and it could become significant if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade.

How long will vote counting take? Here are the estimates and deadlines.

Image

Although many winners may quickly be evident on election night, the increase in mail voting because of the pandemic is expected to push back the release of full results in many key states.

The New York Times asked officials in every state and the District of Columbia about their reporting processes and what share of votes they expect to be counted by noon on Wednesday, Nov. 4. There is a fair amount of uncertainty surrounding results in any election, but here’s what they said to expect:

Many states will not have complete results tonight.

Even once the early and in-person ballots are counted, a significant number of votes could still be outstanding. Only nine states expect to have at least 98 percent of unofficial results reported by noon the day after the election. Officials in Michigan and Pennsylvania, two key battleground states, have said full official counts could take several days.

The increase in mail voting could also lead to more provisional votes cast, increasing the number of ballots counted later.

Results are never official until final certification, which occurs in each state in the weeks following the election.

The results at the beginning and at the end of the night will be skewed in some places.

The order in which different types of votes are reported could also make one party look stronger at various points in the night. Democrats are more likely to vote by mail this year, so in states where those will be the first type of ballots released, like Arizona, Florida and North Carolina, initial results could skew in favor of Joseph R. Biden Jr. Places that report in-person Election Day votes first, like most parts of Virginia, will probably look better for President Trump.

But the initial skew in a state’s results may last only a short while, and it will be influenced by which counties or precincts in the state are the fastest to report.

After election night, there could also be misleadingly positive results for Mr. Trump in certain states, with mail ballots trickling in over the following days favoring Mr. Biden.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Wondering how each candidate can get to 270? Try out our interactive diagram.

Image

The presidential race will be decided by voters in more than a dozen competitive states, where Joseph R. Biden Jr. and President Trump will focus their efforts to win the 270 electoral votes needed to reach the White House. In the interactive diagram linked below, try building your own coalition of states, which are organized according to Cook Political Report ratings, to see potential outcomes.

Control of the House

Democrats are on track to hold their House majority as Republicans see early victories.

Image
Voters in line to cast their ballots on election day in Texas, a state where Democrats hope to add house members to solidify their majority.Credit...Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

House Democrats are poised to maintain their majority but faced a series of early blows Tuesday night as Democrats in rural districts faced headwinds and Republican incumbents in suburban districts held their own.

House Democrats appeared to be running strong in most competitive districts they snatched up in 2018, and had begun the night confidently predicting that they would expand their majority, citing polling that showed a dismal national environment for Republicans and a revolt of affluent, suburban voters in traditional conservative strongholds thronging the country from the Midwest to Texas. In the final days of the race, Republican strategists had privately predicted losing anywhere from a handful of seats to 20 and focused their efforts on offsetting their losses in largely rural, white working-class districts.

But early returns did not appear to reflect the scale of losses that strategists in both parties had anticipated in the closing days of the race, as a number of Republican incumbents in suburban districts — that Democrats had hoped to take — held onto their seats, and as some Democratic incumbents who won in 2018 in districts where President Trump is popular faced defeat.

In the Midwest, Representatives Ann Wagner of Missouri, Don Bacon of Nebraska, and Rodney Davis of Illinois all retained their seats in districts where Democrats were confident they could win.

In Iowa, Representative Abby Finkenauer, a Democrat representing the northeastern swathe of the state, lost to Ashley Hinson, a former state legislator and television reporter. Representative Joe Cunningham, Democrat of South Carolina, also lost in a race against Nancy Mace, the first woman to graduate from Citadel.

With Mr. Trump making significant inroads with Cuban-Americans in the Miami area, Democrats were dealt twin surprise blows, with Representatives Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Donna Shalala, a former Health and Human Services secretary, both conceding their races early in the night in their adjoining districts.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Some candidates have already broken barriers.

Image
Sarah McBride won a seat in the Delaware State Senate on Tuesday.Credit...Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

All eyes are on the battles for the presidency and control of the Senate, but several down-ballot races have been decided in favor of barrier-breaking candidates.

One of them is Sarah McBride, national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, a Democrat who won a seat in the Delaware Senate and will be the first transgender state senator in the country.

“Sarah’s overwhelming victory is a powerful testament to the growing influence of transgender leaders in our politics and gives hope to countless trans people looking toward a brighter future,” Annise Parker, the president and chief executive of the L.G.B.T.Q. Victory Fund, said in a statement.

It was a big night for L.G.B.T.Q. candidates over all.

In New York, Ritchie Torres, a Democrat, became the first gay Black man elected to Congress and will take the seat held by Representative José Serrano in New York’s 15th Congressional District. (Mondaire Jones could become the second, but his race in New York’s 17th Congressional District has not been called yet.) Kansas elected Stephanie Byers, who will be the first transgender person of color to serve in a state legislature. Tennessee elected its first two openly gay state legislators, the Democrat Torrey Harris and the Republican Eddie Mannis, and could elect a third, Brandon Thomas.

Before Tuesday, Tennessee had been one of only five states never to have elected an L.G.B.T.Q. state legislator.

At the federal level, Cynthia Lummis, a Republican former congresswoman, will become the first woman in Wyoming history to serve in the Senate after cruising to victory in the race to succeed Senator Michael B. Enzi, who is retiring.

New Mexico, meanwhile, will become the first state ever to elect a House delegation consisting entirely of women of color.

Representative Deb Haaland, a Democrat who is a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe and one of the first Native American women elected to Congress, won re-election in the First Congressional District, and Teresa Leger Fernandez, also a Democrat, won an open seat in the Third Congressional District. The Second Congressional District has not been called yet, but both candidates are women of color: Representative Xochitl Torres Small, a Democrat, is Latina, and her Republican challenger, Yvette Herrell, is a member of the Cherokee Nation.

U.S. intelligence officials watch for foreign influence operations in any prolonged vote count.

Image
Gen. Paul Nakasone, commander of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency.Credit...T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

American intelligence officials are watching for stepped-up foreign election interference if the results of the presidential race take days to emerge, including whether adversarial countries try to foment violence inside the United States, the head of the National Security Agency said on Tuesday.

Foreign powers considering whether to try to influence the outcome of the race will change their calculations if “there is a clearly defined winner” by Wednesday, the official, Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, told reporters. But vote-counting that takes days or weeks to determine a winner could probably prompt more foreign interference efforts, he said.

“There is a period of time where we are watching this carefully to see if our adversaries are going to try to take advantage if there is a close vote,” he said.

In the past several days and weeks, foreign countries interfered less than they had leading up to the 2018 midterm elections, General Nakasone also said. But, he added, more nations overall were trying to interfere than in past elections.

Foreign powers including Russia, Iran or China could try to sow doubt about the integrity of the vote count or security of the election through influence operations or hacking attempts, current and former officials have said.

American officials retaliated in recent days against an operation last month by Iranian hackers who sent spoofed emails to voters in Florida and other states, according to two officials briefed on the response. The Washington Post earlier reported the operation.

American officials had learned of the playbook Iran had mapped out to conduct further interference efforts, but the retaliatory operation appeared to succeed, hampering the Iranian group’s ability to conduct further such operations ahead of Election Day, the officials said. General Nakasone declined to discuss specific operations.

He did raise the prospect that foreign powers could try to stoke violence with extreme domestic groups if the results are close and tensions are high. Russia and other foreign governments have repeatedly tried to amplify unrest in the United States, including after far-right rallies and counterprotests in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, that killed a woman and injured dozens, intelligence officials have said.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Can Biden Still Win? Yes. Here Are the Remaining Paths.

Video
bars
0:00/1:20
-0:00

transcript

‘We Believe We’re on Track to Win,’ Biden Says Amid Tight Election

Biden, speaking on Tuesday to a crowd of his supporters in Wilmington, Delaware, said he felt confident about the election results and projections thus far and stressed the importance of counting every vote.

Your patience is commendable. We knew this was going to go long, but who knew we’re going to go into maybe tomorrow morning, maybe even longer? But look, we feel good about where we are. [cheering] We really do. [cheering and cars honking] I’m here to tell you tonight we believe we’re on track to win this election. [cheering and cars honking] We knew because of the unprecedented early vote and the mail-in vote that it’s going to take a while. We’re going to have to be patient until the hard work of tallying the votes is finished. And it ain’t over till every vote is counted, every ballot is counted. [cheering and cars honking] But we’re feeling good. We’re feeling good about where we are. Look, you know, we could know the results as early as tomorrow morning. But it may take a little longer. As I’ve said all along, it’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who’s won this election. That’s the decision of the American people. But I’m optimistic about this outcome, and I want to thank every one of you who came out and voted in this election.

Video player loading
Biden, speaking on Tuesday to a crowd of his supporters in Wilmington, Delaware, said he felt confident about the election results and projections thus far and stressed the importance of counting every vote.CreditCredit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

[Joe Biden has won the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Read our story.]

[Can President Trump still win? No. He’s already lost.]

This article was published before the election was called for Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Joseph R. Biden Jr. has moved much closer to the 270 electoral votes needed to capture the White House with victories in Wisconsin and Michigan on Wednesday, leaving President Trump largely playing defense on a shrinking, if still viable, battleground map.

Mr. Trump’s path, as of late Wednesday, centered on his winning Pennsylvania’s 20 Electoral College votes — in conjunction with other scenarios that involve holding Georgia, erasing Mr. Biden’s lead in Arizona and flipping Nevada, the shakiest state in Mr. Biden’s map.

On Tuesday night, Mr. Biden’s team watched nervously as the campaign’s what-if states — Florida, Ohio, Texas and North Carolina — quickly broke for the president. But by early Wednesday, it was the former vice president, and not the current president, who went on offense, gathering momentum in his effort to recapture Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, once reliable “blue wall” states.

By Wednesday afternoon, The Associated Press had declared Mr. Biden the winner in both Wisconsin and Michigan as Democratic areas of those states began reporting more results.

With those victories, Mr. Biden now has two clear and plausible paths to victory:

  • He could win Pennsylvania, a state that seemed to be swinging to his advantage as the count of early and mail-in balloting began.

  • Or, if he holds on in Nevada, he could take Arizona — which has already been declared a Biden victory by some news organizations even though hundreds of thousands of votes remain to be counted.

Mr. Biden even has a third path, less likely than the other two, but still viable: Winning both Nevada and Georgia, where an influx of mail-in ballots from Atlanta and its suburbs cut into what seemed like an insurmountable Trump lead late Wednesday.

If he were to pick up either Arizona or Georgia along with Nevada, winning Pennsylvania would be unnecessary.

In a call with reporters early Wednesday, Mr. Biden’s team expressed confidence that the former vice president would win by taking the “easy” path, along the old “blue wall” in the Midwest and Appalachia.

That had seemed less plausible late Tuesday, when Mr. Trump jumped out to a 700,000-vote lead in Pennsylvania. But many ballots remained to be counted, and absentee voting in particular was expected to favor Mr. Biden because many Democratic voters made use of mail balloting during the coronavirus pandemic.

Republicans are expressing confidence Mr. Trump will ultimately prevail in Arizona, but Mr. Biden retained a slim edge there, and the president’s aides privately conceded that a Biden win there would deal a devastating blow to their chances of winning nationwide.

A Biden victory in Arizona, coupled with a win in Nevada, would put him at precisely 270 electoral votes — sans Pennsylvania.

“Joe Biden’s path is largely unchanged since he entered this race,” Guy Cecil, the chairman of Priorities USA, a leading Democratic super PAC, said early Wednesday. “There are still at least five competitive states giving him multiple paths to 270. It may take a couple of days to count the votes, and we may need to fight the Trump campaign in court, but Joe Biden remains the favorite.”

Image
Workers counting votes in Milwaukee on Tuesday. Mr. Biden is running well ahead of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 margins in the Wisconsin counties of Waukesha and Dane.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Mr. Trump’s victories in Florida, Ohio and Texas did not create a new path for him so much as close off new shortcuts by which Mr. Biden could have claimed victory on Election Day. His last chance for a flip is Nevada, another tight race, but one in which most of the uncounted votes are generally expected to favor Mr. Biden.

Otherwise, Mr. Trump’s path to winning a second term probably depends on holding onto Pennsylvania, which he narrowly won in 2016; retaining Georgia and North Carolina; and winning either Arizona or Nevada.

“Trump’s path is exactly the same as it was in 2016,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist who is a veteran of Senator Marco Rubio’s campaigns. “He needs to overperform in some traditionally blue states. Trump wins when the voters Democrats take for granted no longer reliably vote for Democrats.”

In Nebraska — one of two states, along with Maine, that split their electoral votes by congressional district — Mr. Biden won the state’s Second Congressional District, which includes Omaha. The Nebraska Democratic Party chairwoman, Jane Kleeb, declared victory early Wednesday.

“Omaha is now Joe-maha,” she said.

Because Mr. Biden won that lone Nebraska electoral vote, it kept open the path that allows him to win Arizona and Nevada and reach exactly 270 electoral votes.

Voting and vote-counting have been mostly smooth, but reports of voter intimidation are up.

Image
A line of voters in Norcross, Ga., on Tuesday. Results will be delayed in the state because of a burst pipe at a site where election workers were counting absentee ballots in Atlanta.Credit...Audra Melton for The New York Times

A major national voter protection hotline has received more reports of voter intimidation than it did in 2016, and results will be delayed in Georgia because of — what else would you expect in 2020? — a burst pipe at a site where election workers were counting absentee ballots.

But no ballots at the site in Atlanta were damaged by the water, election officials said. And despite the disconcerting increase in intimidation reports, with polls closed in more than half the country, voting and vote-counting continued to go more smoothly than many voting rights advocates had feared.

The night was shaping up to be, in other words, a mixed bag.

“I think it’s fairly safe to say that the extraordinary voter protection effort that we have seen this year, which proved strong and robust — combined with litigation that focused with laser precision on tearing down the restrictions and burdens faced by voters during the pandemic — has made today a relatively smooth Election Day across the country,” Kristen Clarke, the president and executive director of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told reporters around 7 p.m. Eastern. “There indeed have been issues and may be issues as we move into the final hours of Election Day, but no doubt we were bracing for the worst and have been pleasantly surprised.”

The reports of intimidation include armed Trump supporters standing outside some polling places — including at least one in Charlotte, N.C., where the man was ultimately arrested, and one in Baker, La., where voters called the Lawyers’ Committee’s hotline to report a man waving a Trump flag and holding a large gun.

“The isolated incidents of voter intimidation have been problems that we cannot ignore,” Ms. Clarke said. “They have not been widespread and systematic, but they have been far greater in number than we have seen in recent elections and are a reflection of the dark times we are in as a nation.”

Republicans were also, as expected, trying to challenge ballots in some states — particularly Pennsylvania, where they were attempting to stop election officials from contacting voters whose mail ballots were rejected on technicalities to offer them provisional ballots. Some machines in Philadelphia malfunctioned early in the day. Voting hours were extended at some polling sites, including in Georgia and North Carolina, because of delays.

And yet, for all the anxiety and abnormality of this election — the masks, the six-foot divides, more than 100 million people casting ballots before the day even started — the voting machines worked, for the most part. The lines were at times long, but they moved quickly, for the most part.

Turnout appeared to be very high. Many states have already surpassed their vote totals from 2016, and Michael P. McDonald, a University of Florida professor who compiles data from across the nation, said earlier Tuesday that the country appeared to be on track for roughly 160 million total votes cast.

That would mean a turnout rate of about 67 percent of the eligible voting population — higher than the United States has seen in more than a century.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT