Joe Biden took the lead in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania on Friday, where a victory for the Democratic presidential candidate would push him past the threshold of electoral votes needed to win the White House, official data showed.
Biden currently has at least 253 electoral votes. If he wins Pennsylvania—a state won by President Trump four years ago—and its 20 electoral votes, Biden would cross that magic figure of 270.
Biden would also win the election if he prevails in two of the three other key states where he held narrow leads on Friday—Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. Like Pennsylvania, all three were still processing ballots on Friday.
Biden is also currently in the lead in key states Arizona, Georgia and Nevada. Fox News and the Associated Press have already called Arizona in Biden’s favour, but other US media have said the race is still too close to call.
If sources are to be believes, the Biden campaign believes that it has crossed the Pennsylvania challenge and is “joyous”. Biden leads Trump by nearly 6,000 votes in Pennsylvania and over 1,000 in deep red Georgia.
Millions of votes are still to be counted but even before we have the final tally, Biden has already 73 million votes nationally, the most in American political history. About 130,000 votes remain to be counted in Pennsylvania.
Poll pundits, however, still believe the race is still too close to call.
In the meantime, President Trump’s campaign on Friday said that “this election is not over” yet. The statement came after Biden overcame the president’s lead in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania, putting him in position to win its 20 electoral votes.
“This election is not over,” campaign general counsel Matt Morgan said in the statement, making further allegations of irregularities. “The false projection of Joe Biden as the winner is based on results in four states that are far from final.”
Trump has made a raft of fraud allegations without evidence, including on Thursday night, and Twitter has slapped warning labels on a series of his tweets.
Trump fired off several tweets in the early morning hours on Friday, and repeated some of the complaints he aired earlier at the White House. “I easily WIN the Presidency of the United States with LEGAL VOTES CAST,” he said on Twitter, without offering any evidence that any illegal votes have been cast.
Twitter flagged the post as possibly misleading, something it has done to numerous posts by Trump since Election Day.
Trump’s campaign, meanwhile, has filed lawsuits in several states, though judges in Georgia and Michigan quickly rejected challenges there. Biden campaign senior legal adviser Bob Bauer called them part of a “broader misinformation campaign.”
Election officials in those states, however, have said they are unaware of any irregularities.
In Pennsylvania, Biden moved ahead of Trump by 5,587 votes on Friday morning, while in Georgia, he opened up a 1,097-vote lead. Both margins were expected to grow as additional ballots were tallied. Biden, 77, would be the first Democrat to win Georgia since Bill Clinton in 1992. In Arizona, Biden’s lead had narrowed on Thursday to about 47,000 votes, and in Nevada he was ahead by about 11,500.
Pennsylvania, one of three traditionally Democratic states along with Michigan and Wisconsin that handed Trump his 2016 victory, had long been seen as crucial to the 2020 race, and both candidates lavished enormous sums of money and time on the state.
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