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The state of the 2020 presidential race shifted considerably overnight in Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s favor as absentee ballots were counted in several key states, putting him within reach of an electoral college victory.

APTOPIX Election 2020 Biden

Key Facts

 

Biden ended the night trailing Trump by sizable margins in the critical battleground states of Wisconsin and Michigan, but his fortunes shifted as absentee votes were counted overnight.

In Wisconsin, a potentially pivotal state, Biden has seized a narrow 0.7 point lead – just under the 1% cutoff needed to avoid a recount in the state – leading 49.5% to Trump’s 48.8% with an estimated 97% of the vote in, according to the New York Times.

Michigan, another state both Biden and Trump need in their column to take the White House, has seen Trump’s lead shrink from double digits to just o.5 points – he leads Biden 49.4% to 48.9% with 86% of the votes in, according to the Times.

 

The last of the usual trio, Pennsylvania, still has a double digit lead for Trump as no additional absentee ballots were counted overnight, but the Times’ Nate Cohn estimates that, if current trends with mail-in votes continue, Biden will finish with a 2-point victory in the state.

That’s on top of Arizona, where Biden currently leads by 5 points and which the AP called for him, and Nevada, where he leads by just 0.6% but where the remainder of outstanding ballots are likely to skew heavily Democratic, as in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

In North Carolina and Georgia, Trump leads with far more of the total vote already counted than in the Rust Belt states, but where absentee ballots can still potentially make up the gap.

Trump incorrectly claimed victory on Wednesday morning based on his now-dwindled leads in uncalled races. In a sign of his lack of faith in his chances when all mail-in votes are counted, Trump announced he would attempt to bring a lawsuit before the Supreme Court in an effort to block further mail-in votes from being counted.

“If the president makes good on his threat to go to court to try to prevent the proper tabulation of votes, we have legal teams standing by ready to deploy to resist that effort. And they will prevail,” Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said Wednesday morning.

Big Number:254. That’s the collective number of electoral votes in the states where Biden leads. If he pulls ahead in Michigan, as he is on track to do as of Wednesday morning, it would put him at 270, the number needed to win. A win in Pennsylvania would bring him to 290, and a come-from-behind upset in Georgia would get him to 306, the same number of electoral votes Trump won in 2016.

Surprising Fact

Biden won in Arizona, where a Democrat hasn’t won since Bill Clinton in 1996, and Nebraska’s 2nd district, where Democrats haven’t won since Barack Obama in 2008, giving him an already larger number of electoral votes than Hillary Clinton in 2016.

What To Watch For

Many absentee ballots, which are expected to skew heavily Democratic, remain uncounted in several key states, including Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, as well as Georgia. The counting is slated to continue on Wednesday and could last well into the week.

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