Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.
Biden’s lead in Nevada has doubled since this morning, and he now stands about 22,600 votes ahead of Trump, with an estimated 123,000 ballots remaining to be reported. Trump would need to win 59.2 percent of those remaining votes to win, an already high hurdle made more difficult by a recent batch of 8,700 votes from from Clark County (home of Las Vegas), which went nearly 2 to 1 to Biden. The counties that haven’t reported additional votes today are, in the aggregate, more favorable to Trump, so he could potentially make up some of that difference, but it’s getting harder to see how he closes the gap significantly.
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.