Biden wins Michigan, Wisconsin, now on brink of White House
WASHINGTON (AP) — Joe Biden won the battleground prizes of Michigan and Wisconsin on Wednesday, reclaiming a key part of the “blue wall” that slipped away from Democrats four years ago and dramatically narrowing President Donald Trump’s pathway to reelection.
A full day after Election Day, neither candidate had cleared the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House. But Biden’s victories in the Great Lakes states left him at 264, meaning he was one battleground state away from crossing the threshold and becoming president-elect.
Biden, who has received more than 71 million votes, the most in history, was joined by his running mate Kamala Harris at an afternoon news conference and said he now expected to win the presidency, though he stopped short of outright declaring victory.
“I will govern as an American president,” Biden said. ”There will be no red states and blue states when we win. Just the United States of America.”
It was a stark
contrast to Trump, who on Wednesday falsely proclaimed that he had won
the election, even though millions of votes remained uncounted and the
race was far from over.
The Associated Press called Wisconsin for
Biden after election officials in the state said all outstanding ballots
had been counted, save for a few hundred in one township and an
expected small number of provisional votes.
Trump’s campaign
requested a recount, thought statewide recounts in Wisconsin have
historically changed the vote tally by only a few hundred votes. Biden
led by 0.624 percentage point out of nearly 3.3 million ballots counted.
Since 2016, Democrats had been haunted by the crumbling of the
blue wall, the trio of Great Lakes states — Pennsylvania is the third —
that their candidates had been able to count on every four years. But
Trump’s populist appeal struck a chord with white working-class voters
and he captured all three in 2016 by a total margin of just 77,000
votes.
Both candidates this year fiercely fought for the states,
with Biden’s everyman political persona resonating in blue-collar towns
while his campaign also pushed to increase turnout among Black voters in
cities like Detroit and Milwaukee.
Pennsylvania remained too early to call Wednesday night.
It
was unclear when or how quickly a national winner could be determined
after a long, bitter campaign dominated by the coronavirus and its
effects on Americans and the national economy. But Biden’s possible
pathways to the White House were expanding rapidly.
After the
victories in Wisconsin and Michigan, he was just six Electoral College
votes away from the presidency. A win in any undecided state except for
Alaska — but including Nevada, with its six votes — would be enough to
end Trump’s tenure in the White House.
Trump spent much of
Wednesday in the White House residence, huddling with advisers and
fuming at media coverage showing his Democratic rival picking up key
battlegrounds. Trump falsely claimed victory in several key states and
amplified unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about Democratic gains as
absentee and early votes were tabulated.
Trump campaign manager
Bill Stepien said the president would formally request a Wisconsin
recount, citing “irregularities” in several counties. And the campaign
said it was filing suit in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia to demand
better access for campaign observers to locations where ballots are
being processed and counted, and to raise absentee ballot concerns.
At
the same time, hundreds of thousands of votes were still to be counted
in Pennsylvania, and Trump’s campaign said it was moving to intervene in
the existing Supreme Court litigation over counting mail-in ballots
there. Yet, the campaign also argued that it was the outstanding votes
in Arizona that could reverse the outcome there, showcasing an inherent
inconsistency with their arguments.
In other closely watched
races, Trump picked up Florida, the largest of the swing states, and
held onto Texas and Ohio while Biden kept New Hampshire and Minnesota
and flipped Arizona, a state that had reliably voted Republican in
recent elections.
The unsettled nature of the presidential race
was reflective of a somewhat disappointing night for Democrats, who had
hoped to deliver a thorough repudiation of Trump’s four years in office
while also reclaiming the Senate to have a firm grasp on all of
Washington. But the GOP held onto several Senate seats that had been
considered vulnerable, including in Iowa, Texas, Maine and Kansas.
Democrats lost House seats but were expected to retain control there.
The
high-stakes election was held against the backdrop of a historic
pandemic that has killed more than 232,000 Americans and wiped away
millions of jobs. The U.S. on Wednesday set another record for daily
confirmed coronavirus cases as several states posted all-time highs.
The
candidates spent months pressing dramatically different visions for the
nation’s future, including on racial justice, and voters responded in
huge numbers, with more than 100 million people casting votes ahead of
Election Day.
Trump, in an extraordinary move from the White
House, issued premature claims of victory — which he continued on
Twitter Wednesday — and said he would take the election to the Supreme
Court to stop the counting. It was unclear exactly what legal action he
could try to pursue.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
discounted the president’s quick claim of victory, saying it would take a
while for states to conduct their vote counts. The Kentucky Republican
said Wednesday that “claiming you’ve won the election is different from
finishing the counting.”
Vote tabulations routinely continue beyond Election Day,
and states largely set the rules for when the count has to end. In
presidential elections, a key point is the date in December when
presidential electors met. That’s set by federal law.
Dozens of Trump supporters chanting “Stop the count!” descended on a ballot-tallying center in Detroit, while thousands of anti-Trump protesters demanding a complete vote count took to the streets in cities across the U.S.
Protests — sometimes about the election, sometimes about racial inequality — took place Wednesday in at least a half-dozen cities, including Los Angeles, Seattle, Houston, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis and San Diego.
Several states allow mailed-in votes to
be accepted as long as they were postmarked by Tuesday. That includes
Pennsylvania, where ballots postmarked by Nov. 3 can be accepted if they
arrive up to three days later.
Trump appeared to suggest those
ballots should not be counted, and that he would fight for that outcome
at the high court. But legal experts were dubious of Trump’s
declaration. Trump has appointed three of the high court’s nine justices
— including, most recently, Amy Coney Barrett.
The Trump campaign
on Wednesday pushed Republican donors to dig deeper into their pockets
to help finance legal challenges. Republican National Committee
Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, during a donor call, spoke plainly: “The
fight’s not over. We’re in it.”
The momentum from early voting
carried into Election Day, as an energized electorate produced long
lines at polling sites throughout the country. Turnout was higher than
in 2016 in numerous counties, including all of Florida, nearly every
county in North Carolina and more than 100 counties in both Georgia and
Texas. That tally seemed sure to increase as more counties reported
their turnout figures.
Voters braved worries of the coronavirus, threats of polling place intimidation and expectations of long lines caused by changes to voting systems, but appeared undeterred as turnout appeared it would easily surpass the 139 million ballots cast four years ago.
Jaffe reported from Wilmington, Delaware. Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani and Andrew Taylor in Washington, Kathleen Ronayne in Sacramento, Calif., and Sophia Tulp in Atlanta contributed reporting.