By Alex Seitz-Wald - NBC News
WASHINGTON DC — The count continues in the 2020 presidential election, as both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have scored victories in key states to have the White House tenant defined.
Trump won in Florida, Ohio and others, while Biden stayed with Minnesota and New Hampshire and leads in Arizona, according to NBC News projections.
[Both the Biden and Trump campaigns assure that their candidate is on the road to victory, while the votes continue to be counted]
Neither candidate was declared the winner Tuesday night, after Democrats failed to deliver the decisive blow they hoped for and Republicans did not have the flood of voters the president had assured would be seen on Election Day.
Still, Trump beat polls and expectations, while
vote counting is delayed
due to the massive increase in mailed ballots and rules restricting when officials can start processing them.
The count is expected to continue in the next few hours and days.
The outcome of the election now seems to hinge on a group of states
that sound familiar: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
All three historically Democratic states gave Trump the White House four years ago when he won them by a narrow margin.
[The results of the 2020 United States presidential elections]
But in North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada the tally is also too close to declare a winner, and various combinations of any of them could determine the future of the country.
On Wednesday, NBC News projections indicate that Biden would win in Maine and with him three of the four votes in the state Electoral College.
(A vote has yet to be assigned, which depends on which candidate gets the second congressional district in the state.)
Donald Trump wins Florida and its coveted 29 electoral votes
Nov. 4, 202000: 41
Trump had to win Florida to have any real chance of reelection, according to most analysts, while
Biden has multiple paths to victory
that don't include the state.
In the Electoral College, Biden has 227 votes while Trump has 213.
It takes 270 to win the White House.
[Biden achieves majority support from Hispanic voters in key states]
In the national popular vote, with an estimated nearly 25 million ballots yet to be counted, Biden had 67.7 million votes, or 50%, as of Wednesday morning, compared to Trump's 65.5 million, or 48.4%.
Another 2.2 million voted for candidates from other parties.
With 89% of the expected votes counted
in Wisconsin, Biden won 49.3% to Trump's 49%
, and much of the ballots still to be counted come from Democratic-leaning areas like Green Bay and Kenosha.
[Minute by minute: Presidential tally still too tight to declare winner]
Trump won in Florida
with 51.2% against Biden's 47.8%, with 96% of the votes counted.
It also stayed with Ohio with 53.3% to 45.2% with 90% of the ballots counted.
Texas and Iowa also won by similar margins, according to NBC News, the sister network of Noticias Telemundo.
Biden took Minnesota
at 52.7% versus 45.3% with 93% of the votes counted and leads Arizona with 51.8% versus 46.8% when 82% of the expected ballots have been counted.
He also won an electoral vote from a congressional district in Omaha, Nebraska, which could be critical if the final results are close.
The Democrat also won expected victories in Virginia, Colorado and New Mexico.
Joe Biden is optimistic and assures that the counting of the decisive votes will take time
Nov. 4, 202003: 06
Biden spoke to supporters after midnight in Wilmington, Delaware, and said he felt confident even though he didn't deliver the early knockout his campaign expected.
"Keep the faith guys. We're going to win this," Biden told
his fans, in an upbeat tone as the speakers blared the Jackie Wilson classic
Higher And Higher
.
Biden said the results could come as early as Wednesday morning, but could also take longer.
"We think we are on our way to winning this election," he said, "we knew that due to the unprecedented number of early and mail-in votes, the count would take a while. We will have to be patient until the hard work of counting the votes is done. votes".
On video: Trump tries to claim victory and speaks of fraud, with millions of votes yet to be counted
Nov. 4, 202009: 01
Trump, meanwhile, also gave a speech to his followers.
Shortly after 2 a.m. ET on Wednesday and with millions of votes to be counted, Trump falsely claimed that he won the presidential election.
"This is a fraud against the American public," Trump told his supporters and members of the media in a speech at the White House,
"this is an embarrassment to our country. We were preparing to win this election, we frankly won. this choice
.
"
He then promised to take legal action to stop "all voting."
Trump achieved a victory in Ohio by an eight percentage point difference to Biden, with 90% of the expected votes counted.
AP
In Pennsylvania, Trump said Democrats "are not even close" to winning because they currently have a less than 700,000 vote lead with about 75% of the expected votes counted.
Biden's campaign responded by calling Trump's remarks
"scandalous, unprecedented and incorrect
.
"
"It was outrageous because it is an obvious effort to take away democratic rights from American citizens," said Biden's campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon.
"It was unprecedented because never before in our history has a president of the United States attempted to strip Americans of their voice in a national election," he added.
Much of the ballots that remain to be counted in Pennsylvania have been cast early or by mail, a type of vote in which Democrats often have the upper hand.
These ballots also come from areas like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, the two largest sources of Democratic votes in the state.
For example, Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, said it suspended scanning of mail-in ballots until 10 a.m. Wednesday with 146,537 votes still to be counted.
The situation is similar in other states with a close contest, in which major cities usually take longer to count due to the large volume of votes they have to process.
In Wisconsin, Milwaukee city officials have yet to finish counting the ballots, which are expected to massively support Biden.
Both states have Democratic governors who tried to allow election officials to begin processing mail-in ballots before Election Day, given the anticipated voting surge during the pandemic, but were blocked by their legislatures, which are under the control of the Republican Party.
In Florida, Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in 2016 in Miami-Dade County, the state's largest and home to a large Cuban-American community on which Republicans focused their efforts.
But Biden did better than Clinton in other counties.
In the battle for the Senate, Democrat John Hickenlooper defeated incumbent Republican Senator Cory Gardner, while Democrat Doug Jones lost reelection in Alabama.
Republican Iowa Senator Joni Ernst also won reelection in a competitive race.
Democrats need to win four Senate seats (or three if Biden wins the presidency) to take control of the chamber.
The Democratic Party maintains control of the House of Representatives
Nov. 4, 202000: 32
More than 100 million voted earlier this year, doubling the total that did in 2016, but millions more went to the polls on Election Day to vote in person, even amid an increase in cases in the worst pandemic in a century.
Early exit polls from NBC News show
the economy, racial justice, and COVID-19 as top voter concerns
.
The vast majority of voters also said that they made their decision long ago and only 4% said they decided who to vote for last week, which is down compared to 2016, when 13% of voters made a decision to vote. Last moment.
Despite fears of possible massive electoral fraud or hoaxes to intimidate voters, polling places were apparently mostly quiet across the country and there were few reports of long waiting lines.
Still,
many have warned that civil unrest could occur in the post-election period
, and businesses have bricked up their windows in anticipation of the chaos.