Joe Biden gained ground in Georgia, drawing to a near tie with the president late Thursday night, while the president picked up votes in Arizona, narrowing the gap with his challenger.
The two states, together with Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina, remain the focus of the contentious 2020 presidential election that remained without a winner as poll workers continued to count hundreds of thousands of completed ballots.
Biden has the clearest path forward, with a projected 253 electoral votes to the president’s 213. And while Biden again urged patience with the process, the president had a decidedly different take in his first address since his early Wednesday morning briefing.
Trump took the podium in an evening White House speech to report on the “integrity” of the election process and challenging its results: “If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us,” he said.
The speech began a flurry of fact-checking by members of the media, noting there is no evidence of illegal votes “stealing” the election and no winner has been declared from the election that produced record turnout of about 150 million people. Vote counting, as opposed to voting itself, often continues for days or weeks after polls officially close and election results are not official until they are certified.
Following Trump’s remarks, members of Utah’s congressional delegation and both Utah Gov. Gary Herbert and Gov.-elect Spencer Cox reiterated their support of the election process.
“I didn’t see the President’s press conference,” Cox said in a tweet. “However, elections are the foundation of our country. Please don’t believe unfounded allegations that destroy trust in the process. We must be patient while every legal vote is counted, accept the results and move forward together.”
It capped another day of wild swings, including in Utah’s Fourth Congressional District, where Republican Burgess Owens now owns a slight lead over incumbent Rep. Ben McAdams in the back-and-forth race. But it is the presidential race that continues to dominate news feeds and social media accounts and has the full attention of a country seeking a result.
“Democracy is sometimes messy,” Biden said from The Queen theater in downtown Wilmington, Delaware. “It sometimes requires a little patience as well. ... I ask people to stay calm.”
Earlier, the Trump campaign sent attorneys to Pennsylvania and other states where Biden is closing the gap, filing lawsuits aimed at stopping the vote count — just as Trump had demanded with his one-line tweet Thursday morning: “Stop the count!” By midday, judges had already rejected some suits. Protests erupted in some cities across America.
In the electoral-vote-rich state of Pennsylvania, Trump’s lead diminished to under 25,000 votes, with hundreds of thousands of ballots — believed to lean heavily Democratic — still left to count.
Biden also has other paths open to him. If his lead holds in Arizona, he need only maintain his narrow lead in Nevada to capture the presidency. The uncounted votes in Nevada are also believed to lean Democratic. Election officials there said the count will extend into the weekend. After Nevada election officials released votes Thursday, Biden’s lead crept up past 12,000.
The outlook in Arizona, though, is muddled. Trump gained ground on Biden there Wednesday night, and there is still room for the president to overtake him. The state, where Biden’s lead dropped to just 68,000 votes, is not essential to a Biden victory if the former vice president wins Pennsylvania.
The race was also coming down to a razor-thin margin in the GOP-dominated state of Georgia. Trump’s lead there dropped to just 3,635 votes. The nearly 50,000 ballots left to count are predominantly from districts that are heavily Democratic. The latest count also appeared to throw Republican Sen. David Perdue, who is leading in his race, into a runoff with rival Jon Ossoff, by reducing Perdue’s share of the vote to just below the 50% threshold set by state law.
Wins in Georgia and Nevada would push Biden over the top even if he ultimately falls short in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Trump’s path is far more narrow. He must win Pennsylvania and most of the other states where the race has not been called to hold onto the White House.
The courts have not yet ruled on a Trump lawsuit in Pennsylvania seeking to bar the counting of ballots received after Tuesday. But by Thursday afternoon, state court judges had rejected Trump’s lawsuits in Georgia and Michigan, and counting proceeded uninterrupted.
In a lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign succeeded in getting a judge to order that observers could stand closer to where ballots are being processed. But Philadelphia officials appealed to the state’s Supreme Court, arguing that additional, freely circulating observers could be disruptive and potentially threatening in a pandemic.
Protesters on both sides, some armed, emerged outside locations where vote-counting was underway across the country. One such protest in Detroit on Wednesday night drew more than 100 Trump supporters, demanding that vote counting be stopped.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson on Wednesday evening said the aim of protests was simply to create a disruption. “If they thought they were going to intimidate or stop anyone from doing their job inside the center, then they don’t know Detroit,” she said.
In the Georgia claim that was dismissed, the campaign alleged that late-arriving ballots are being improperly mixed with ones that arrived on time.
Such lawsuits, when successful, typically only change the count by a few hundred votes. Trump is facing potential deficits of tens of thousands of votes in multiple states.
Herb Scribner and Amy Donaldson of the Deseret News and Evan Halper of the Los Angeles Times contributed to this report.
