Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.

Biden’s lead now up to 0.4 percentage points, or 27,000 votes, after a (as expected) very favorable batch of ballot drops for him in Allegheny County. There was some notion that the race might get called if Biden hit a 0.5 percentage point statewide margin, meaning he’d be above the recount threshold. Could we get there tonight? It wasn’t looking like it, but now, well … maybe?

The one thing that stands out to me in those Arizona numbers are the 47,000 provisional ballots. I don’t see any particular reason to think they’d be especially Trump-leaning if, as in Pennsylvania, they mostly reflect people who initially requested mail ballots and then decided to vote in person. (Of course, we’re still debating exactly how Trump-leaning those ballots are in Pennsylvania, too — see posts lower down.) In Arizona, the party registration of people who requested but did not return mail ballots was 29 percent Democratic, 33 percent Republican and 38 percent independent, not necessarily great for Trump in a state where there’s a lot of crossover voting from McCain Republicans. So if, say, Trump roughly broke even on those provisionals, that would raise the hurdle he needed to clear on the other types of ballots.

As goes Maricopa County (Phoenix), so goes Arizona — or at least, that’s how it has usually been in modern times. Might it be the same story again in 2020? Possibly, as Biden leads by 53,500 votes in Maricopa but just 29,861 statewide.