Former Vice President, Joe Biden is now a shouting distance away from defeating President Donald Trump as has taken the lead in his birth state of Pennsylvania as the number of outstanding ballots has dwindled.
Biden needs 270 electoral votes to win the White House and is presently leading the president with 253 votes to 213.
Though, the final results are yet to be announced, but for Biden — a son of Scranton — eclipsing Trump in the Keystone State was a symbolic moment in the course of a political career that has spanned nearly five decades.
With the latest batch of tabulated vote counts released Friday morning, Biden now has a lead of 5,587 votes in the state. Biden had earlier taken the lead in Georgia with 1,097 votes. He also leads in other crucial states as Nevade with 11, 438 votes and Arizona with 47, 052 votes.
During the long and hard-fought primary Democratic primary, Biden repeatedly made the case that he alone could sway the blue-collar voters who abandoned his party to support Donald Trump in 2016 and could rebuild the Democrats’ “blue wall” in the Midwest that Trump had demolished.
Biden succeeded in that goal by notching wins in Michigan and Wisconsin, according to CNN projections, and Pennsylvania would be the capstone of that long-held dream for the former vice president.
For several days now, Biden advisers have insisted that they are confident the Democratic nominee can hold Pennsylvania and the momentum has moved unrelentingly in Biden’s favor.
As officials have counted the hundreds of thousands of vote-by-mail ballots, Biden dramatically narrowed Trump’s lead, infuriating the President and his allies, who know the President’s path to relection is over if he cannot hold the commonwealth. If Pennsylvania serves as the key in Biden’s path to the White House, it would be a fitting end to his longstanding effort to cultivate his image as “Middle Class Joe” who understands and empathizes with the frustrations of the working class voters of the industrial Midwest — voters Trump courted by calling them the “forgotten men and women” of America.
To underscore that point on the morning of Election Day, Biden made a final trip to his childhood home where his Scranton supporters surrounded him on the street to wish him good luck. On one of the living room walls in his boyhood home, he wrote: “From this House to the White House with the Grace of God,” signing his name and the date, “11.3.2020.” But Pennsylvania was not the only state that was tightening Thursday night in this cliffhanger election.
The momentum of the race has shifted in Biden’s favor — putting him on the doorstep of the critical threshold of 270 electoral votes needed to become president — as he has racked up huge margins among mail-in ballots favored by Democratic voters.
Biden jumped ahead of Trump in Georgia around 4:30 a.m. ET Friday and leads by just more than 1,000 votes. The former vice president’s surprising strength in Georgia stemmed from huge turnout from Black voters in Fulton County and other suburbs around Atlanta, fatigue with Trump in Georgia’s fast-growing suburbs — which have become increasingly young and diverse in recent years — and assiduous work over more than a decade to boost Democratic registration in the state.
No Democratic presidential nominee has won the state since Bill Clinton in 1992. Clinton narrowly defeated former President George H.W. Bush in that state in part because he and Bush were in a three-way race that included Ross Perot, an independent candidate for the presidency.
As the drama unfolded across the country, the President’s allies launched legal challenges and floated conspiracy theories while Trump tweeted “Stop the Count!”
Tight races are also going into overtime in two other states that could influence the destiny of the race, Nevada and Arizona.
Pennsylvania, the state that could take Biden over the 270-vote threshold, could complete most of its outstanding counts on Friday, officials there said. Tens of thousands of votes remain to be counted. Most of them are from strongly Democratic areas, including about 50,000 from Philadelphia, City Commissioner Al Schmidt told CNN Friday morning.
Trump cannot find a route to 270 electoral votes without Georgia and Pennsylvania, so his chances of securing reelection will hinge on developments in the two states in the coming hours.
But on Thursday night, Trump effectively sent a signal that he has no intention of leaving power without a fight if he ends up losing the election.
The President’s speech from the White House briefing room could end up being one of the most dangerous presidential statements in American history. In it, Trump falsely claimed that votes that were cast before and during the election, but counted after Election Day, are illegal votes.
Trump made ludicrous claims that his leads on election night shrunk because Democratic officials keep finding ballots, when in fact the counts have narrowed because election officials in many states counted the vote-by-mail ballots, which favored Democrats, after the Election Day votes, which tended to favor Republicans.
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This Post: US Election: Biden maintains momentum, leads in Pennsylvania, Georgia was approved and published by Ancity Media Editor and may not be republished elsewhere without prior written permission from the Editor.
