Biden inches closer to 270 as he makes gains in Pennsylvania and Georgia
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Democrat Joe Biden is closing in on President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania and Georgia, the two states that the latter can in no way afford to lose if he is to keep alive his hopes of a second term.
According to a report by CNN Biden has managed to make significant gains through the night and all day as a tense counting continues in the two states, racking up huge margins among mail-in ballots favored by Democratic voters.
Seeing his lead slip away, the President's allies launched legal challenges and floated conspiracy theories as Trump tweeted "Stop the Count!" Tight races are also going into overtime in two other states that could influence the final outcome of the race, Nevada and Arizona. Biden so far has 253 electoral votes and Trump 213, according to CNN projections.
Pennsylvania, the state that could take Biden over the 270-vote threshold needed to win the presidency, could complete most of its outstanding counts on Thursday or Friday, officials there said. The former vice president managed to narrow Trump's lead to just 0.4% in the Keystone State after having trailed at one point by more than half a million ballots in the hours after polls closed. Tens of thousands of votes, most of them from strongly Democratic areas, including around Philadelphia are yet to be counted.
In the other important state of Georgia, which has 16 electoral votes, Biden's mail-in ballot advantage has pulled him to within 2,000 votes of the President, as results came in from Fulton County around Atlanta with 98% of the state vote count reported.
Trump cannot find a route to 270 electoral votes without Georgia and Pennsylvania, so his chances of securing reelection will hinge on developments in the two states in the coming hours.
But on Thursday night, Trump effectively sent a signal that he has no intention of leaving power without a fight if he ends up losing the election.
The President's speech from the White House briefing room which experts say could end up being one of the most dangerous presidential statements in American history, wherein Trump falsely claimed that votes that were cast before and during the election, but counted after Election Day, are illegal votes.
Trump claimed that his leads on election night shrunk because Democratic officials keep finding ballots, when in fact the counts have narrowed because election officials in many states counted the vote-by-mail ballots, which favored Democrats, after the Election Day votes, which tended to favor Republicans.
