Trump claims, without proof, that he won 8:28
Election screening in the USA: live results
(CNN) -
Millions of votes cast legally in electoral offices across the United States continue to be counted as the presidential race between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden shrinks to a handful of battlefield states.
Until the morning of this Wednesday, Biden maintained the leadership in the Electoral College with 224 votes by 213 of Trump;
270 electoral votes are needed to be president.
Experts had warned for months that a result might not be known on election night, or even days later, due to record-breaking vote-by-mail numbers.
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: Minute by minute: United States, in suspense by the results of a close elections
As of early Wednesday, a winner could not yet be projected in Arizona, North Carolina, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Maine, Georgia and the potentially critical state of Pennsylvania.
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Trump won a close race in Florida, which was one of the states Biden hoped to tear off the president's 2016 map and has a narrow lead in North Carolina.
The former vice president has taken the lead in Wisconsin and hopes that Arizona, where he held a 5 percentage point lead with 82% of the vote counted, could be his first win of the night turning a red state into blue.
With 89% of the votes counted in Wisconsin, Biden had a narrow lead of less than 10,000 votes over Trump, with all the votes counted in Milwaukee.
Votes were still pending in Kenosha and Brown counties, including 62,312 absentee ballots that have yet to be reported, according to the websites for those two counties.
In Brown County, there were also some in-person votes that had yet to be counted, according to CNN's Pamela Brown and Kristen Holmes.
The state of Nevada, which Hillary Clinton won by a small margin in 2016, also appeared to be a much closer race than the Democrats expected.
With 85% of the votes counted in that state, Biden led by one percentage point.
It increasingly appears that the outcome of the entire election could hinge on whether Biden can restore the Democratic "blue wall" in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, a scenario that could expand in the coming days as large numbers of votes are counted for mail.
The night was presented as the least orthodox election day in modern memory.
At times, it seemed that one or the other candidate was heading for an early victory in important states.
But the batches of votes mailed and early voting caused the tally to often change dramatically one way or another.
Polls have already closed across the United States and a night of nervousness has followed that will set the course of the nation for the next four years and pass judgment on the most tumultuous presidency of the modern era.
The results flow from the battlefield states and it is too early to project in many key states.
So far, CNN projects that Biden will win Hawaii, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Virginia, California, Oregon, Washington State, Illinois, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Massachusetts and one of Nebraska's five electoral votes.
Nebraska awards two electoral votes to the state winner and distributes another three among its three electoral districts.
CNN projects that Trump will 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 tried to claim his supposed victory in the presidential race and called for the legitimate vote counting that is taking place across the country to be halted, in a chilling threat to American democracy.
But the election is far from over, with millions of votes in circulation in key states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, which are votes cast before Election Day that have yet to be counted.
Yet Trump tried to mislead his loyal supporters by linking legitimate ballot counting to voting, falsely claiming that Democrats were trying to "steal the election."
Faced with the real possibility of losing, Trump, as expected, appeared to seize the opportunity to confuse his supporters about the democratic process and suggest that there was something dire about the fact that many states are still counting votes.
The extensive vote count, which could go on for several days, was widely anticipated because many Americans cast vote-by-mail ballots to protect themselves from exposure to the coronavirus in the midst of a pandemic.
While making the ridiculous suggestion that the counting of legally cast votes should be stopped while he watched his margins shrink in several key states, Trump made a savage threat that his lawyers would take his case to the Supreme Court, although it is unclear which one. would be the legal justification.
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 expressing anger that a network had yielded an early winner. .
CNN has not projected a winner in Arizona.
He celebrated his victories in Florida and Ohio, and claimed to have won several states where CNN has yet to project a winner.
His call to end vote counting was the kind of dangerous speech that political observers long feared he would make, in which he falsely claimed, "This is a great fraud in our nation."
Biden's campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon called Trump's speech "a clear effort to take away the democratic rights of American citizens."
"The president's statement tonight about trying to cancel the counting of properly cast votes was scandalous, unprecedented and incorrect," he said.
He added: “It is unprecedented because never before in our history has a president of the United States attempted to deprive Americans of their voice in a national election.
Having encouraged Republican efforts in various states to prevent the legal counting of these ballots before Election Day, now Donald Trump says these ballots cannot be counted after Election Day either. "
Biden was the first candidate to speak to his supporters early Wednesday, after a night of results did not yield a quick winner, and he said "we believe we are on track to win this election."
Joe Biden is optimistic: We will win Pennsylvania 4:16
The former vice president said it was not up to him or Trump to decide the winner of the election and that the votes would be counted.
"Keep the faith guys, we're going to win this," Biden said.
Trump wins two essential states
Trump's victories in Florida and Ohio are crucial to keeping the path open for him to win a second term.
At night, Florida Democrats were concerned about populous Miami-Dade County, where Biden appeared to underperform Clinton in 2016.
Biden's initial deficit in Miami-Dade could be a sign of what was evident in pre-election polls that suggested the president had been making inroads into 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, which is still likely to be won by Biden, has large concentrations of voters of Cuban and Venezuelan descent who tend to be more conservative than other Latino groups and were bombarded by the president with claims that Democrats were sympathetic to the socialists.
The president also extended a solid lead in Ohio after early results showed Biden in the lead.
The state was another battlefield that the Trump campaign thought it had to conquer in order to win another four years in Washington.
Biden spent time in the state on Monday and it was another place the Democrat hoped would turn in his favor.
This is how Donald Trump can win 4:59
Biden didn't need to win Florida and Ohio to win the presidency, but his campaign hoped to change those states after several encouraging polls in the final weeks of the campaign.
Biden performs well in Arizona
Biden appears to have made significant strides in Arizona, where demographic shifts have accelerated the state's shift from traditionally Republican territory to potential Democratic rise.
The president's unpopularity and the state's rapid growth - with its growing Latino population to an 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 with 49% versus 45.5%.
Clinton built Democratic margins in populous Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and its suburbs, and most of the state's voters, and Biden appeared to continue that trend Tuesday night, with strong turnout from that key county.
Even within the mosaic of early results, 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 appeared to be doing better in the suburbs than Clinton four years ago.
At the same time, the president's team appeared 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
Millions of ballots were still pending in three critical states: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Many of those vote-by-mail ballots were cast early and were expected to favor Democrats.
Even Georgia was paralyzed when officials in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta and its populous suburbs, said they had stopped counting mail-in ballots around 10:30 p.m. ET and counting would resume at around 10:30 p.m. ET. 8 am on Wednesday.
The Fulton County tabulation was initially delayed by a water leak near the ballot counting room, but no ballots were damaged.
Election officials in the so-called "Blue Wall" states of the Midwest tried to prepare the public Tuesday night for the likelihood that the full count would continue into the night, and it could extend into Wednesday and later this week.
Which means the United States may not know the winner of the presidential race for quite some time.
The slow count in those Midwestern states is creating growing anxiety for Democrats, who hoped that Biden could score some early wins on the board in swing states to prevent President Trump from declaring a premature victory before even crossing the threshold. of 270 electoral votes you need to win.
For weeks, Trump has been bombarded with the message that voters should know the results on election night, though that rarely happens in the United States, while also suggesting that a later count could be a sign of voting irregularities.
However, there is no evidence to support that and the count has been much more complex in this cycle because many people cast their votes by mail to stay safe during the pandemic.
Michigan officials predict a record turnout and hope that the ballots counted overnight can give an idea of at least the unofficial result within 24 hours of the polls close, rather than several days as some initially expected. but that seemed uncertain.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told reporters Tuesday night that the state could "potentially see a complete result from every Michigan tabulation in the next 24 hours," which would be an improvement on the original prediction of the state that it would not finish tabulating the results until Friday.
The state is on track to break turnout records with more than 3 million votes cast in absentia.
"I'm here tonight to ask you to be patient," Benson said.
"No matter how long it takes, no matter what the candidates say, we will work methodically and meticulously to count each valid ballot and that, and that alone, will determine who wins each race on the ballot in the state of Michigan."
The state of Pennsylvania, a tipping point, could experience some of the longest delays, not only due to the complexity of its ballot, but also because election officials were not allowed to start counting vote-by-mail ballots until on election day.
Late Tuesday night, Pennsylvania's secretary of state urged patience and told election watchers that they expected batches of vote totals to stumble through the night.
In Wisconsin, some results in the key Milwaukee area might not be reported until after 5 a.m. Wednesday, meaning that vote counts in some of the areas most critical to Biden would not be known until then.
Historical number of early votes
Across the country, officials counted the more than 100 million votes cast before Election Day, according to a poll of election officials by CNN, Edison Research and Catalist.
In an unprecedented move, which could indicate that some mail-in ballots are in danger of not reaching their destination in time to be counted, a federal judge in Washington ordered the United States Postal Service to begin lifting all processing facilities. at 3 p.m., including in parts of the battlefield states Pennsylvania, Michigan, Texas, New Hampshire, and Florida.
Democrats had previously criticized the U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a Trump donor, for introducing reforms at the agency that they said could delay the delivery of ballots by mail.
Democrats were nervous about the widespread slowdown within the Postal Service system after budget cuts and staffing shortages, which has led to intense scrutiny of DeJoy's motivations.
The polls began closing at 6 p.m. ET Tuesday, but there are wide variations in ballot counting rules across the country.
The economy was the top issue on the minds of voters Tuesday, according to preliminary results of a national exit poll by CNN.
Those results are incomplete because Americans were still voting, but in those early counts, about a third said the economy is the most critical issue.
About 1 in 5 said that racial inequality is the main problem and 1 in 6 said that the coronavirus pandemic was the most important for their vote.
However, a majority said the nation should prioritize containing COVID-19 over rebuilding the economy.
Republicans have gone to great lengths to invalidate ballots and limit voter turnout through legal challenges and questionable control tactics that bordered on voter intimidation in some states.
Trump spent his final days trying to smear the vote count, insisting that a winner be declared Tuesday night, even though the United States has long counted the ballots well into the days and weeks after. to the day of the elections.
Elections 2020 United States