The race for the White House narrows as votes are counted in key states (Analysis)

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(CNN) -

The race for the White House is still too early to announce a winner, with contests tight in Georgia and Pennsylvania, as former Vice President Joe Biden approaches the 270 electoral vote threshold needed to win and the hopes of President Donald Trump to win re-election seemed to fade.

With Biden's crucial victories in Michigan and Wisconsin, fulfilling his promise to rebuild the Democrats' "blue wall" in the Midwest that Trump demolished in 2016, the former vice president was only 17 electoral votes away from winning the presidency.

After a frustrating Tuesday night for Democrats, in which their hopes of an early victory for Biden evaporated, Republicans watch with alarm and anxiety as the race narrows in Georgia, where Trump's lead was reduced to a few 23,000 votes during Wednesday's count.

While it was clear that Biden would fare better in Georgia than previous Democratic presidential candidates due to the large turnout of black voters in Atlanta's fast-growing suburbs, few had expected the presidential race to be so tight in the state that Democrats haven't won since 1996.

As hundreds of thousands of mail-in votes are counted and in anticipated absence on Pennsylvania's key battlefield, Trump's lead has shrunk dramatically.

Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said Wednesday night that the state has made "excellent progress" in counting the ballots.

But he estimated that it will be "a matter of days before the overwhelming majority of ballots are counted."

Many of those outstanding votes are mail-in ballots that were sent in the heavily Democratic Philadelphia area.

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While both campaigns insist they are confident in their prospects in Pennsylvania, Biden still has multiple paths to the White House: If he keeps his way in Nevada and Arizona, where the counts have not yet been completed, he will have enough Electoral College votes to be. President number 46.

Joe Biden's path to 270 electoral votes 4:43

Trump's campaign aides insist they will be able to regain ground in Maricopa County, Arizona's most populous county, which published its latest tranche of ballots Wednesday night reducing Biden's lead in Arizona to about 79,000 votes.

On Wednesday night, the Arizona secretary of state told CNN's John King that more than half a million votes remained uncounted and suggested that the Maricopa County count could take several days.

Nevada election officials, who released very little information Wednesday with an estimated 200,000 outstanding ballots, said they expected to report their last batch of results by noon Thursday.

Biden has a 253-213 lead in the Electoral College.

In addition to Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania, races in Alaska and North Carolina remain too close to advertise.

CNN projects that Biden will get at least three of Maine's four electoral votes, plus Wisconsin, Michigan, 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 and Maine award two electoral votes to their state winners and divide their other electoral votes by congressional districts.

CNN projects Trump to win Montana, Texas, Iowa, Idaho, Ohio, Mississippi, Wyoming, Missouri, Kansas, Utah, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, North Dakota, South Dakota, Arkansas, Indiana, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Virginia West and Tennessee and four of Nebraska's five electoral votes.

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A confident Biden pleads for patience and unity

Determined to show an aggressive stance and the president's intention to stay in the game, Trump's team initiated a series of lawsuits in key states on the battlefield that seemed less about sound legal reasoning and more about slowing the former vice president's march. on the threshold of the electoral vote.

The president did not appear in public on Wednesday, but continued to tweet false claims from the White House suggesting that Democrats were trying to "steal" the election by discovering new treasure troves of votes for their opponent, even though Biden's growing accounts were simply the result of the counting process.

Biden chose a more carefully calibrated path, making a brief appearance to reporters to say that he believed he was on track to win 270 electoral votes but did not declare victory.

He dismissed Trump's attempts to undermine the results, stating that "the people rule.

Power cannot be taken or declared.

There will be no blue states and red states when we win.

Only the United States of America, ”Biden said Wednesday afternoon as he promised to unite the country.

We are not enemies.

What unites us as Americans is much stronger than anything that can separate us. "

Trump Mounts Aggressive Legal Strategy to Challenge Results

As he watched his margins shrink, Trump dispatched legal teams to critical states and ordered his staff to aggressively seek ways to challenge the results.

As part of that strategy, the Trump campaign plans to ask the court to intervene in a case challenging a Supreme Court decision that allowed Pennsylvania ballots to be counted after Election Day.

The magistrates had refused to expedite the appeal before the elections and are considering taking the case.

Trump and his campaign team also sought to raise questions about how Biden achieved a late victory in the vital state of Wisconsin, where the Democrat rose thanks to mail-in votes and the first to be counted after most ballots cast in person. on election day.

The Trump campaign said Wednesday that it will demand a recount in Wisconsin while legal challenges are raised in Michigan and Georgia.

"The president is within the threshold to request a recount (in Wisconsin) and we will do so immediately," Trump's campaign manager Bill Stepien said in a statement.

Stepien noted that the results show "a very fine race as we always knew it would be" and said there were irregularities in several Wisconsin counties, but did not specify what the campaign believes those irregularities to be.

The campaign's state-by-state approach revealed the glaring inconsistencies in its strategy: It appears to be trying to stop the counting of votes in states where Trump is behind, such as Pennsylvania and Michigan, while demanding that all votes be counted in the states. where he thinks the president has a chance to catch up with Biden, like Arizona and Nevada.

Candidates can request a recount in Wisconsin if they are within 1% of the winner's total votes, but the recount cannot be formally requested until the count is complete, which could be until November 17.

It seems highly unlikely that a margin the size of Biden's lead in Wisconsin, some 20,000 votes, could be reversed in a recount.

But because the margin is less than 1%, the Trump campaign has the right to request a recount.

With CNN's Kevin Liptak reporting that even Trump himself appears skeptical of the thin base of some of the challenges his campaign presents, the campaign said it plans to file a lawsuit in Georgia alleging that a Republican poll watcher in that state witnessed 53 ballots. absentee ballots "illegally added to a pile of absentee ballots in Chatham County."

Trump offered lukewarm endorsement of his team's legal strategy in phone calls with some of his allies on Wednesday, sounding resigned that the plan fell short and questioning why his team had not successfully challenged voting rules before elections, even though he was still willing to hold it, CNN reported.

The Trump campaign also said it is filing a lawsuit in Michigan asking the state to stop counting because "it has not been given meaningful access to numerous counting locations to observe the opening of ballots and the counting process, as guaranteed. Michigan law.

Ryan Jarvi, spokesperson for Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, responded to the threat from the lawsuit by saying in a statement that “Michigan elections have been conducted in a transparent manner, with access provided to both political parties and members of the public. the public".

Trump campaign officials said Wednesday afternoon that they believe the president can maintain his leadership in Pennsylvania, but are also suing the commonwealth, alleging that Democratic election officials are "concealing the counting and processing of ballots" from Republican election watchers.

Trump's deputy campaign manager, Justin Clark, said the goal of the lawsuit is "to temporarily halt the recount until there is meaningful transparency and Republicans can ensure that all recount is done frankly and in accordance with the law."

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Trump's unsubstantiated claims

The president is making unsubstantiated claims that the election, which seemed more favorable to him Tuesday night before early voting began tabulating, is being stolen from him and is demanding that vote counting be stopped in some areas.

An appearance in the East Room of the White House early Wednesday morning in which he falsely claimed victory represented his most blatant threat to the democratic principles that underpin the American political system.

"As far as I'm concerned, we already won it," Trump said, 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, "We will have to be patient until we finish the hard work of counting the votes."

And while the president has long threatened to contest the election, the voting itself was largely conducted peacefully, without violence at polling places or intimidation of people casting their votes as feared, especially given. Trump's attempts to discredit voting procedures ahead of time.

But the election did not turn into the total and devastating repudiation of the president and his presidency that Democrats had hoped for.

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.

A blue wave that many Democrats hoped 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 widen their majority in the House, Democrats lost several seats and some threatened Republicans clung to theirs.

Elections 2020 United States