For the first time in almost 30 years, the US is facing the possibility of electing a new president after the previous one served only a single term, after Democratic Joe Biden moved closer to the golden 270 electoral votes when the count ended in a few key states where the election still hasn't been decided.
Although officially, everything is still open because while Donald Trump's campaign will be asking for a recount and trying to verify claims of mass fraud, and possibly even involved the courts, which would drag the final decision out until December, practically speaking, it looks like the big US networks like CNN and Fox News will be declaring a winner of the race, and chances are that Joe Biden will reach the necessary 270 electoral votes and be declared the next president of the United States.
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As of Wednesday evening, when vote counting ended in the Midwestern states of Michigan and Wisconsin, the networks were announcing that these two states would be awarding their electoral votes to Joe Biden, which means he stands at 264 votes. On Thursday, counting was due to resume in Nevada, which gives six electoral votes to its winner. If Biden wins in the Silver State, as most pundits think he will given the state's years-long trend toward blue, he will make it to exactly the number of votes he needs to become president – 270 out of the 538 electors.
Other than Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia, and Pennsylvania were left without a declared winner (as did Alaska, although not because of a close race, but because there isn't enough data, and it will certainly go to Trump). In other words, even if Biden doesn't win Nevada because of some delay in the counting process or because of legal appeals or other delays, he could get to 270 by winning any of the three other states – Pennsylvania, Georgia, or North Carolina. Right now, people think that he will come out on top when all the votes are counted in Georgia and Pennsylvania, once all the mail-in ballots arrive and are counted.
In theory, Trump could still get to 270 (right now he has 214), but to do that, he must win all the states where the race is still close: Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and North Carolina. It's hard to see a scenario in which he wins without intervention from the courts or a recount that would reveal massive fraud or widespread problems.
In political terms, it looks as if both sides are preparing for a war for public opinion. While Biden intends to market himself as the elected president starting in the next few days, to create momentum, and possibly even announce policy moves and appointments when he is sworn in in January, Trump's approach will be to use all the weight he has as president to create a narrative of the election having been "stolen" through widespread mail-in voting by Democrats, which he says is a method full of flaws because voting cannot be supervised from a distance.
Legally speaking, it seems that Trump is already taking steps to secure a recount, and also wants the courts to step in to prevent many ballots that are still in the mail from being counted, under the claim that there is no way of knowing when they were actually filled out. America is entering a "post-election" campaign that will be no less base and difficult than the actual campaign, but no matter the results, states will decide by the start of December to whom they will award their electoral votes, and on Dec. 14 they will vote in the new president. On Jan. 6, 2021, after Congress counts the electors, the president-elect will be formally declared, and he will swear allegiance to the US Constitution two weeks after that.
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