We started Election Day wondering when Donald Trump would try to distract attention from what would appear to be a losing cause by prematurely claiming victory.
It turned out that it would be Joe Biden, in the wee hours of Day 2, who would first claim a path to victory, in the face of an electoral map that may end up tilting in his favor, but wasn’t at the moment he addressed the nation.
Biden, ahead in the final pre-election national polls in the high single digits, had just a 1.1-point popular-vote lead on Trump at the 2 a.m. hour, with leads in states that had been called for him that would give him 224 electoral votes, to 212 electoral votes that would go to Trump in states in which he had leads and had been called for him.
At this 2 a.m. hour, Trump had leads in Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and Biden had leads in Arizona and Nevada.
Were those trends to hold, Trump would be on the path to a 290-245 Electoral College victory.
The issue for the president, a massive underdog heading into Election Day, is the outstanding votes in Georgia and the Midwest, which were largely concentrated in Democratic-rich cities that had reported high numbers of early votes and mail-in votes that had yet to be counted.
The counting is expected to continue through the night and possibly into the daylight hours Wednesday morning, and current projections do tend to favor Biden in the Midwest, and because of the high number of outstanding votes in the Atlanta metro area, the former vice president is also a slight, slight favorite in Georgia.
Wins in two of those four states would give Biden a narrow Electoral College edge.
Story by Chris Graham
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