Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden appears to be on the verge of an Electoral College win as votes are counted in several key battleground states on Wednesday.
Biden has surged to leads in Wisconsin and Michigan, and is gaining ground in Pennsylvania as officials there sort through hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots in the Democratic-vote-rich Philadelphia area.
The races in two southern states, North Carolina and Georgia, are too close to call, as President Trump has a 77,000-vote lead in North Carolina and an 83,000-vote lead in Georgia with significant chunks of votes remaining to be counted in those two states.
The leads in Wisconsin and Michigan alone would appear to put Biden, who has a 2.9 million-vote lead in the national popular vote, over the top in the Electoral College.
At this stage, Trump would almost need to run the table in the states with votes outstanding, a prospect that doesn’t appear to be in the offing.
Biden had been a heavy favorite in the final weeks of the 2020 cycle, and it had seemed that Democrats would also build on their majority in the House and build a majority in the Senate, with candidates down ticket running on his coattails.
Instead, Republicans down ticket ran surprisingly strong, to the point that it appears the GOP will hold onto its Senate majority, and make significant inroads in the House, perhaps cutting the Democratic majority there to the single digits when all is said and done.
If those trends were to hold, Biden would be the first newly elected first-term president since Ronald Reagan in 1980 to begin a term with split control of Congress.
Story by Chris Graham
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