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

We don’t expect any major updates overnight, so we’re going to adjourn for the evening and pick things back up tomorrow morning. Here’s where we stand: Biden can clinch the presidency by winning either Pennsylvania or both Arizona and Nevada. And he looks good in all three states:

• Pennsylvania: Biden’s lead here keeps widening and now sits at 28,833 votes. What’s more, the remaining 90,000 or so mail-in ballots and 100,000 or so provisional ballots figure to be Democratic-leaning as well. We expect to get more updates from large, blue counties like Philadelphia and Allegheny tomorrow, which may (or may not) inspire the networks to project the state for Biden.
• Nevada: After today’s updates, Biden now leads here by 22,657 votes. Although about 124,500 ballots have yet to be counted, they are expected to lean Democratic. Clark County (home of Las Vegas), where most of the outstanding ballots are from, will release its next update at noon Eastern on Saturday and should have the bulk of the counting done this weekend.
• Arizona: Biden currently leads here by 29,861 votes, but an estimated 173,000 ballots (including roughly 47,000 provisional ballots) remain to be counted. Trump needs to win about 59 percent of those (or more) to pull into the lead, but he’s been falling short of that so far. Most of the remaining ballots are in Maricopa County, which will announce its next batch of results Saturday at 11 a.m. Eastern.

Finally, there are two states that are not going to be resolved any time soon.

• Georgia: Biden is up here by a little over 4,000 votes — hardly a safe margin with up to nearly 4,200 regular absentee ballots, 8,400 overseas ballots and 14,200 provisional ballots left to count. The secretary of state has already said that the race will go to a recount.
• North Carolina: North Carolina has counted every ballot it had in its possession as of Tuesday, and Trump currently leads by 76,515 votes. However, the state has announced that about 130,900 mail-in ballots and 40,766 provisional ballots are potentially outstanding, although not all of them will count. Mail-in ballots can arrive until Nov. 12 and still be counted, and at that point more results will be released.

Biden’s message is certainly one of unity and working together to solve the nation’s problems. In this polarized environment, that kind of cooperation might seem difficult to imagine, but Biden has drawn a contrast with the president’s rhetoric throughout the campaign and since the vote-counting began on Nov. 3. Of course, he may be pretty limited in terms of what he can accomplish if Democrats can’t somehow manage to win both Georgia Senate runoffs to take control of the Senate. A GOP-controlled Senate isn’t going to be very interested in cooperating with Biden, although maybe they can work something out on COVID-19, given the continued challenge.

As Perry mentioned, you might have noticed Biden claiming a “mandate for action.” That’s no coincidence. As Julia Azari noted for us, presidents (or soon-to-be presidents) have much more incentive to explicitly claim a mandate when the outcome of an election is contentious or contested.

Expect to hear a lot more from Biden about mandates in the weeks and months to come.