Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.
It could be a slow night — and we may not get the network projection we’ve been waiting for. Apart from the regular updates from Pennsylvania we’ve all come to know and love (including the Allegheny County absentees I posted about earlier), the big thing we’re expecting is a batch of 60,000-70,000 votes from Maricopa County, Arizona, at 9 p.m. Eastern. Trump’s path in Arizona is narrowing, so those results could be crucial.
Biden Taps Adviser on Economic Regulation
Biden will name Gary Gensler as an adviser on issues involving Wall Street and regulation of markets, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday. It’s not clear exactly what this means in terms of Gensler’s role, namely whether he will be advising Biden on which policies to propose as president, working during the transition to help Biden choose his presidential economic team or being positioned to take a key role on that team himself.
This news is interesting for two reasons. It suggests Biden is moving forward in trying to start planning his administration even though he has not yet been declared the winner of the election by most outlets. Also, Gensler is allied with Sen. Elizabeth Warren and favors a tougher regulation of Wall Street, so this choice is getting plaudits from more liberal Democrats who have worried Biden might pick figures more resistant to regulations of Wall Street firms.
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.