Biden inches closer to 270, while Trump sings a familiar song. It’s Friday, and this is your politics tip sheet. |
- Just hours ago, Joe Biden took the lead in Georgia, where President Trump's advantage dissolved steadily as votes were counted late into the night. The race remains extremely tight, with Biden ahead by 1,096 ballots as of early Friday morning.
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- Perhaps more immediately ominous to Trump's electoral math, Biden is also quickly catching up to him in Pennsylvania, now trailing by only 18,229 votes. The state, whose 20 electoral votes would hand Biden the presidency if he won it alone, has far more uncounted ballots than Georgia, and they are expected to favor Biden.
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- It's unclear when each race might be called. More votes are expected to be counted today.
- Georgia carries 16 electoral votes, and if Biden were to win it before Pennsylvania, it would put him at 269, just one away from the presidency. And Trump, of course, could still well win Georgia.
- Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and Alaska also remain up for grabs. Newly counted ballots in Maricopa County, Ariz., last night cut into Biden’s narrow lead there; more than 200,000 ballots remain to be counted in Maricopa, and just over one percentage point divides Biden and Trump in the state.
- Things look more favorable to Trump in North Carolina, which is close, and Alaska, which isn’t particularly. But those states would not be enough to put him anywhere near the necessary 270 electoral votes.
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- Trump’s legal team has been in courtrooms across the country, challenging vote counts and demanding the right to send supporters into ballot-counting locations. Judicial decisions came down on those cases in a range of states throughout the day, most of them bearing bad news for Trump’s team.
- A judge in Pennsylvania shot down his campaign’s attempt to halt the counting of ballots there, but ruled that poll watchers could move to within six feet of officials as they counted ballots, allowing the observers a better vantage to look for absentee ballots lacking the required signatures.
- In an address to reporters last night, Trump continued to falsely argue that ballots that haven’t yet been counted are illegal. Speaking from the White House briefing room, he marshaled the optics of the presidency to his advantage even as he unleashed a string of falsehoods intended to undermine a legitimate election.
- “If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” he said, offering no evidence.
- While the president’s claims were echoed by a number of allies, including Lindsey Graham and Kevin McCarthy, he appeared to be increasingly isolated.
- After his briefing room appearance, wrote Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman, “several advisers conceded that the clock on the Trump presidency was almost certainly winding down.”
- Biden, by contrast, gave a terse, two-minute update from Wilmington, Del., reassuring the country that it could have faith in the election. “The process is working,” he said.
- Standing beside his running mate, Kamala Harris, Biden stated in the strongest terms yet that he was confident of reaching 270 electoral votes. “We have no doubt that when the count is finished, Senator Harris and I will be declared the winners,” he said, while clarifying that he was not yet declaring victory.
- Biden, too, sought to convey a presidential mien. He started his speech by saying that he and Harris had just received briefings on the coronavirus pandemic and the economic crisis; it was both a power move (in another, Biden’s team has already unveiled a transition website) and an acknowledgment of what exit polls had indicated: that economic concerns dominated many voters’ attention, particularly those who hadn’t voted for him.
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 | | Nicole Craine for The New York Times |
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Amanda McGee, 38, and her son Gabriel, 8, with pro-Trump protesters outside State Farm Arena in Atlanta, where ballots continued to be counted yesterday. |
An update from our Georgia correspondent. |
For all the pre-election talk about Florida and Pennsylvania, it’s Georgia that will dominate America’s political attention over the coming weeks. |
With votes still being counted across the state, and especially in heavily Black areas around Atlanta and Savannah, Biden appears to have a solid chance to become the first Democratic presidential candidate this millennium to win Georgia. And not one but two Senate races currently hang in the balance there; one is already set to go to a runoff in January, and the other is looking likely to do the same. |
Those three races alone are enough to tip the scales in the Senate, which Republicans will control unless Democrats win at least two more seats as well as the White House. And either way, it’s safe to say that Georgia is entering a new phase of political life, in a moment when a once solidly red Sun Belt has turned decidedly purple. |
We checked in by phone with Richard Fausset, our correspondent in Atlanta, to get his take on the political situation there as ballots continue to be counted. |
Hey Richard. I can only imagine how busy you’ve been the past few days. Where do things stand down there? |
We’ve had a large number of outstanding absentee ballots, and it takes time to process those. Those include ballots that come in by mail, or that go in a drop box — and Georgia has 159 counties, which is a lot of counties, each one with drop boxes where people could deposit their absentee ballots up until 7 p.m. on Tuesday. |
So you had all of these votes that had to be taken out of envelopes by hand and then they had to be scanned and in some cases looked over by a human being to determine whether they were valid. It’s just taking time. Many of the absentee ballots that are still being counted right now have come from heavily Democratic places: Fulton County and DeKalb County, in the Atlanta area, and Chatham County, where Savannah is. |
By when do we think we’ll have all the ballots counted? |
Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, said that he hoped the counting of the absentee ballots would be finished by lunchtime on Thursday. But that has not proved to be the case, and since then, Georgia election officials have basically not been making any promises. |
Even though the deadline for voting was 7 p.m. on Tuesday, by a combination of federal and state law there are numerous reasons that the story doesn’t end there. You have ballots that have been sent in by mail from overseas — and by federal law, if they’re postmarked by Tuesday, those can be received by county boards of elections by Friday. The same goes for ballots sent in by military personnel abroad. |
You also have ballots that had some kind of problem — maybe if the voter didn’t bring their ID or they went to the wrong polling place and they had to file a provisional ballot. In Georgia, you file that ballot and then you usually have to take some kind of supporting document to a county office and cure the ballot. We don’t know how many of those ballots will end up being cured, but we should find out by Friday. |
Let’s talk about the two closely fought Senate races that are currently undecided. |
There are two very important Senate races in Georgia. In the first one, for the seat vacated last year by the Republican Johnny Isakson, it’s been determined that it will go to a runoff between the Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, and Senator Kelly Loeffler, a Republican. In the second Senate race — with Senator David Perdue, the Republican, running against a 33-year-old challenger, the Democrat Jon Ossoff — it’s looking like it could go to a runoff as well. Perdue is leading, but he has started dipping beneath 50 percent as ballots come in, and under Georgia state law that would trigger a runoff. |
In early January, when those runoffs are set to take place, Georgia could have one of the last big political stories of this election going. It’s a state that has had tremendous demographic change, and a tremendous shifting of the political reality: It’s not hard to imagine millions and millions of dollars and all sorts of political reporters stuffing themselves into the state in January. |
Yes, the story of Georgia is front and center right now. But would it be going too far to say that Democrats have ascended there, or is the political situation still much more mixed? |
What all this shows is not a new Democratic dominance of politics in Georgia; what it shows is that the Democratic Party is suddenly seriously competitive in the state, which is a big difference from the last few years. There are no statewide elected Democrats in Georgia right now. The governor is a Republican, the State Legislature is controlled by Republicans. And in fact, there have been some big Democratic disappointments this year: They were hoping to pick up a lot of seats in the Legislature, and they got only a few. |
You’re going to have a very tough fight for Ossoff and for Warnock if they both go to runoffs. The Republican Party has a big base in the state; the difference now is that Democrats are going to make races difficult and competitive and costly for Republicans in ways that they just haven’t in the last few years. |
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