Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.
Pennsylvania just released 2,292 more votes from Philadelphia County and 1,043 more from Northampton County. Biden did very well in each of them (he got 82 percent of the Philadelphia votes and 71 percent of the Northampton votes), extending his statewide lead even further, as he’s done all day. When we woke up this morning, Trump was leading in Pennsylvania. Now, Biden has a 17,012-vote lead.
How The Election Ended In 2016
The 2016 election came down to fairly narrow margins in a few states, as seems likely the case in 2020. That made me think about how the previous presidential campaign ended up winding down. Here’s how the Associated Press wrote about it the day after Election Day:
“The Associated Press declared that Trump had won the presidency at 2:30 a.m. EST. Within 10 minutes, CNN reported that Clinton had called Trump to concede. Except for the AP, the politicians beat media organizations: CNN called the race for Trump as the Republican took the stage at his Manhattan headquarters, and CBS, ABC and NBC did the same as he spoke.”
As Clinton later described in her book “What Happened,” she was nudged to concede by a powerful figure in her own party (and the nation): Barack Obama. After a call with the then-president, Clinton called Trump to congratulate him on his surprising victory.
This year, if Biden is declared the winner, it will be interesting to see whether any GOP officials urge Trump to concede (or whether they have already). The question is whether Trump will, in fact, do so.
Among other places (Clark County, Nevada, and Maricopa County, Arizona), we’ll be getting more results tonight from Allegheny County, Pennsylvania — home of Pittsburgh. Allegheny has about 35,000 absentee ballots left to sift through (plus an unknown number of provisional ballots). Election workers today remedied 3,000 of those ballots that were damaged, and they are currently processing 3,873 overseas ballots. They hope to report these two batches by 6:30 p.m. After that, they will turn to the remaining 29,000 ballots, which a court ordered set aside until today because they were cast by people who were initially mailed the incorrect ballot, then mailed a replacement. Poll workers must go through each of these ballots to ensure that each voter only casts one ballot. Allegheny County officials say it will probably take a few days to get through this batch, so Pennsylvania counting isn’t ending tonight.