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

Biden noting that he will likely be the first Democrat in more than 20 years to win in Arizona and Georgia. In listing his wins in various states, Biden is suggesting that this will be a broad victory — he even used the word “mandate.” He twice mentioned winning more than 70 million votes. Biden also emphasized that he is already in meetings about how to deal with COVID-19 as president. “We may be opponents, but we’re not enemies,” Biden says of people who didn’t vote for him. “It’s time for us to come together as a nation and heal.” The speech included a long riff on bringing the country together. Nothing really new from Biden, but he is now saying it as the likely president-elect.

A new batch of votes from Allegheny County (the last of the evening) goes for Biden 2,436-733. His statewide lead in Pennsylvania is now up to 28,833 votes, or 0.43 percentage points. However, that’s still shy of the 0.5-point margin he needs to avoid a recount.

Why isn’t Nevada being called? I honestly don’t know, but in theory, one reason might be that there are still some in-person votes left to be counted and in some cases in-person votes can be strongly Republican.

The thing is, though, that the in-person votes that remain are: (i) from mostly blue Clark County, i.e., Las Vegas and (ii) are all same-day registration (SDR) votes, i.e., voters who register for the first time or change their registration information at the polling place.

And we have data on those same-day registrants — data provided, of course, by friend of FiveThirtyEight and editor of the Nevada Independent Jon Ralston. It shows that SDRs are split almost evenly by party, so there’s no particular reason to expect Trump to have an advantage here. In fact, in Clark County, Democrats have a slight, 4-point advantage among SDRs.

Apart from the SDRs, there are also 58,000 more mail votes left to count — also overwhelmingly in Clark County. Biden’s going to do well with those, adding to his 23,000-vote lead statewide. There’s no reason to think Trump can gain back enough with what’s left out there (the SDRs or a few other miscellaneous categories of provisional votes, most of which usually don’t wind up getting counted) to have a shot at winning the Silver State.

To use a poker metaphor (apropos in this rare instance), I don’t know whether you’d say Trump is drawing dead, but he’s gotta be pretty close to it.