President Trump’s late legal challenges and his baseless claims that Democrats had rigged the presidential election have created confusion and concern among voters, according to a preliminary report by independent election observers.The undecided presidential election entered a new phase on Wednesday as former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was declared the winner of Michigan and Wisconsin, two key swing states that President Trump won four years ago.
The Trump campaign’s string of challenges came as the president found himself with few ways to win the 270 electoral votes needed to be re-elected. By Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Biden was holding slim leads in several key states which, if the trend continues, could propel him to the critical Electoral College threshold and the presidency. The lingering uncertainty of the 2020 campaign was perhaps unsurprising in an election with record-breaking turnout where most ballots were cast before Election Day but many could not be counted until afterward.
Mr. Trump’s chances of winning a second term depended on his ability to hang on to his leads in states like Georgia and Pennsylvania — where Mr. Biden has been narrowing the gap as vote counting progresses — and on overtaking Mr. Biden in one of the states where he is currently ahead.With millions of votes yet to be counted across several key states — there is a reason that news organizations and other usually impatient actors were waiting to declare victors — Mr. Biden had narrow leads in Arizona and Nevada. If he can hold those states, the former vice president could win the election even without Pennsylvania, which has long been viewed as a must-have battleground state.Taken together, the legal actions threatened to slow the counting in states where Mr. Trump was projected to lose or in danger of losing.
One source of Mr. Biden’s resilience lies in the nature of the votes still to be counted. Many are mail-in ballots, which favor him because the Democratic Party spent months promoting the message of submitting votes in advance, while Mr. Trump encouraged his voters to turn out on Election Day. And in Pennsylvania, many of the uncounted votes are from populous urban and suburban areas that tend to vote heavily for Democrats.
Source: The New York Times.