(CNN) -
The electoral duel between President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden comes down to a tally of hundreds of thousands of legal votes in a handful of key states after a night of shifting fortunes left by America's political fate. deeply divided on the razor's edge.
Biden has a narrow 237-213 lead in the Electoral College.
A candidate must reach the 270 mark to win the presidency.
The races in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Maine, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania are too close.
In many cases, close disputes could hinge on absentee and mail-in vote counts, which tend to disproportionately favor Democrats.
These are the states where CNN has yet to project a winner
But both candidates still have a path to victory.
Biden will win Wisconsin, CNN projects, and could win the presidency if his narrow leads in Nevada, Arizona and Michigan hold up.
Trump hoped to hold on to the old Democratic "blue wall states" in the Midwest and also in Pennsylvania where he won four years ago.
In Wisconsin, the Trump campaign said Wednesday afternoon that it will demand a recount.
Only about 300 votes in Wisconsin from a municipality remain to be counted, according to state officials.
"The president is within the threshold to request a recount and we will do so immediately," Trump's campaign manager Bill Stepien said in a statement.
Stepien said the results show "a very tight race like we always knew it would be" and said there were irregularities in several counties in Wisconsin, but did not specify what the campaign believes those irregularities to be.
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Candidates can request a recount if they are within 1% of the winner's total votes, but the recount cannot be formally requested until the recount is complete, which could be until November 17.
Election screening in the USA: live results
Such requests must include a basis for the count, which may consist of a general assertion that an error or fraud was committed in a specific neighborhood, but may also include other reasons such as defect, irregularity, or illegality in the conduct of the election.
It is very rare that a margin of 20,000 votes is reversed in a recount.
But because Biden's lead margin is less than 1%, the Trump campaign is within its right to request a recount.
The president said without foundation that the elections, which seemed more favorable to him Tuesday night before early voting began to be tabulated, are being stolen from him and is demanding that the counting of votes be stopped.
An early appearance in the East Room of the White House, in which he falsely claimed victory, represented his most blatant threat to date against the democratic principles that underpin the American political system.
"As far as I'm concerned, we've already won it," said Trump, painting a picture that doesn't match the true state of the race.
Earlier, Biden had warned that each side should wait for the votes to be counted, saying that "we will have to be patient until we finish the hard work of counting the votes."
And although the president threatened to challenge the legal elections, the voting itself was largely conducted peacefully, without violence at the polls or intimidation of people who voted, something that had been widely feared, especially considering Trump's attempts to discredit the election ahead of time.
However, the election did not turn into the total repudiation of the president and his term that the Democrats expected.
Trump demonstrated a remarkable link to his primarily white voter base in rural areas and a new connection to Latino voter groups in some states.
He shattered Democratic hopes of seizing Texas' red stronghold and scored an impressive victory in Florida, where Biden underperformed Hispanic voters.
A blue wave that many Democrats were seeking to wipe out Mitch McConnell's Republican majority in the Senate has yet to materialize, although some key races are still undecided.
And despite trying to expand their majority in the House, Democrats lost several seats and some at-risk Republicans held onto theirs.
The United States now seems poised for hours or even days of uncertainty with vote counts possibly giving way to legal battles in various states at a time when the country is already rocked by the worst public health crisis in 100 years.
As the nation's eyes were on Tuesday's elections, another 1,048 citizens died from COVID-19, a disease that the president says has all but disappeared, and from which 232,000 Americans have died.
Biden takes the lead in Michigan
Biden advanced slightly in Michigan after several batches of early voting were posted early Wednesday.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said at noon that about 100,000 ballots are still pending statewide, with many of those ballots coming from heavily Democratic areas.
She said she is "optimistic" that most of those ballots will be tabulated by the end of today.
"I am optimistic that at the end of the day most of our ballots will be tabulated," he said.
Key Wayne County Clerk in the Michigan suburbs, Cathy Garrett, told CNN that election officials are still counting votes and that she would not estimate when officials might conclude.
The county reports that more than 64% of those issued there have been counted.
Wayne County is the largest county in Michigan and includes Detroit and its metropolitan area.
In Pennsylvania, Trump is ahead by less than 500,000 votes, but Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar told reporters Wednesday that there are still "millions of votes" in the state to count.
Pennsylvania's Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf said Wednesday morning that the backlog of votes that have not yet been processed may delay the outcome so much that "we may not know the results even today," he said.
Biden has few leads in Arizona and Nevada.
Trump has won about 86,000 votes in Georgia, but several heavily Democratic counties have yet to finish their counts.
By mid-morning Wednesday, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said about 200,000 votes remain to be counted, including in DeKalb and Fulton counties.
CNN projects that Biden will win at least three of the four electoral votes from Maine, Wisconsin, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Virginia, California, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York , Vermont, Delaware, Washington, DC, Maryland, Massachusetts and one of Nebraska's five electoral votes.
Nebraska and Maine award two electoral votes to their state winner and divide their other electoral votes by congressional district.
CNN projects that Trump will also win in Montana, Texas, Iowa, Idaho, Ohio, Mississippi, Wyoming, Missouri, Kansas, Utah, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, North Dakota, South Dakota, Arkansas, Indiana, Oklahoma, Kentucky , West Virginia and Tennessee and four of Nebraska's five electoral votes.
Trump's chilling threat to the vote count
Trump claims, without proof, that he won 8:28
Trump tried to claim victory in the presidential race and called for the legitimate vote counting that is in progress to be stopped.
This is a fraud against the American public.
It is a shame for our country.
We were preparing to win this election.
Frankly, we won this election.
We won this election, "said the president.
He tried to mislead the country by hinting that people were still voting after the polls closed.
But the votes counted were legally cast.
Pennsylvania allows the counting of ballots that were postmarked on Election Day and run through Friday.
“We want all voting to stop.
We don't want them to find ballots at four in the morning and add them to the list, "Trump said, vowing to take the election to the Supreme Court.
Biden came out to speak to the president near his campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware.
While he said he was confident he would win, he did not make a victory claim.
"It doesn't end until all the votes are counted," Biden said.
“It is not my place or Donald Trump's to declare who won this election.
That is the decision of the American people.
Even within Trump's short speech, there was a glaring inconsistency in his position when he advocated for votes to continue to be counted in Arizona, a state he believes is more favorable to him, while also expressing anger that a network had it. called early.
CNN has not projected a winner in Arizona.
He celebrated his victories in Florida and Ohio, and claimed to have won several states that CNN has yet to screen.
Biden's campaign manager, Jen O'Malley Dillon, called Trump's speech "a naked effort to take away democratic rights from American citizens."
"The president's statement tonight about trying to close the count of properly cast votes was outrageous, unprecedented and incorrect," he said.
“It was unprecedented because never before in our history has a president of the United States tried to strip Americans of their voice in a national election.
Having encouraged Republican efforts in several states to prevent the legal counting of these ballots before Election Day, now Donald Trump says that these ballots also cannot be counted after Election Day.
Trump wins two essential states
Trump's victories in Florida and Ohio were crucial in keeping his path open to winning a second term.
Florida Democrats were concerned early in the evening about the populous south of Miami-Dade County, where Biden appeared to underperform Clinton in 2016.
MIRA: More Latino voters support Trump in 2020 than in 2016, but young Americans favor Biden, according to CNN's first exit polls
Biden's initial deficit in Miami-Dade could be a sign of what was apparent in pre-election polls that suggested the president had dabbled in traditional Democratic support with black and Latino men.
Former President Barack Obama made two trips to Miami-Dade in the final days of the race to increase participation.
Miami-Dade, where Biden is still likely to win, has large concentrations of voters of Cuban and Venezuelan descent who tend to be more conservative than other Latino groups and were attacked by the president with claims that the Democrats were sympathetic to the Socialists.
The president also scored an impressive victory in Ohio, a state Democrats once thought they could take from the president.
Biden performs well in Arizona
Joe Biden appears to have made significant progress in Arizona, where demographic shifts have accelerated the state's shift from traditional Republican territory to a possible Democratic rebound.
The unpopularity of the president and the rapid growth of the state, from its growing Latino population to the influx of retirees from the Midwest and other parts of the country, has made his politics more unpredictable, even in just the four years since 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton in state by 49% to 45.5%.
Clinton racked up Democratic margins in populous Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and its suburbs, and most of the state's voters, and Biden appears to continue that trend Tuesday night, with strong turnout in that key county.
Even within the mosaic of early returns, some trends emerged pointing to the fact that it is a very different race from 2016. In states like Ohio and parts of Florida, Biden appears to do better in the suburbs than Clinton four years ago .
At the same time, the president's team appears to have succeeded in engaging their voters as promised, in some cases offsetting what appeared to be an advantage for Democrats in early vote counting in key states.
Results may not be known for days
For weeks, Trump has emphasized the message that voters should know the results on election night - although this is rarely the case in the United States - while suggesting that a later count could be a sign of voting irregularities. Although there is no evidence to back that up and the count has been much more complex this cycle because many people cast their ballots by mail to stay safe during the pandemic.
The state of Pennsylvania, a potential tipping point, may experience some of the longest delays, not only because of its very complex ballot with its inner and outer envelopes, but also because election officials were not allowed to start counting ballots. vote-by-mail until Election Day.
Late Tuesday night, Pennsylvania's secretary of state urged patience, telling result watchers to expect batches of vote totals to pour in throughout the night.