National election too close to call

NEW YORK CITY – The morning after a chaotic, suspenseful Election Day, Americans awoke on Wednesday to the specter of hours or even days of uncertainty ahead, as several states counted millions of ballots in razor-thin contests that could tip the balance to President Trump or former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

After a long election night rife with dramatic twists and victories by both candidates, Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden battled to a near draw in electoral votes, each several dozen votes shy of the 270 needed to capture the presidency.

With the election too close to call, Mr. Biden held narrow leads as of 9:30 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday in Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona. If he retains those leads, and wins those states, they would give him enough Electoral College votes to win.

Mr. Trump prematurely declared victory and said he would petition the Supreme Court to demand a halt to the counting. Mr. Biden urged his supporters — and by implication, Mr. Trump — to show patience and allow the process to play out.

Their dueling, post-midnight appearances captured the raw struggle of a contest that many feared would leap from the campaign trail to the courts, as Mr. Trump’s lawyers readied legal maneuvers.

The president’s statement, delivered in the White House, amounted to a reckless attack on the democratic process during a time of deep anxiety and division in the country. Mr. Biden, speaking from a flag-draped stage in Wilmington, Del., appealed for calm and tried to reassure supporters rattled by a vote that was much closer than the pollsters or political analysts had predicted.

“It’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who has won this election,” Mr. Biden said, to a chorus of honking car horns at a drive-in rally. “That’s the decision of the American people.”

Mr. Trump, however, derided the vote-counting as “a major fraud on our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner,” he said. “We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.”

Vote counting continued into the morning from Pennsylvania to Nevada, as election officials labored to process a flood of mail-in ballots and huge numbers of in-person votes in an election that was sure to shatter records.

So far, Mr. Trump was holding off Mr. Biden in two Southern states that the former vice president had hoped to snatch back from the Republican column: Georgia and North Carolina. These were not must-win states for Mr. Biden, but he spent heavily in both and visited them in the final stretch of the campaign.

Mr. Biden lost Texas, a long-shot hope that some Democrats invested in late in the campaign in hopes of earning a landslide repudiation of Mr. Trump that did not arrive. The former vice president also fell short in Florida after Mr. Trump made inroads with Cuban-American voters in the Miami area.

But Mr. Biden offset those losses by amassing a solid lead in Arizona, a state Mr. Trump won in 2016. That, plus his pickup of a single electoral vote in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, could prove crucial. It opens a potential pathway for Mr. Biden to the presidency without winning Pennsylvania, if he carried all the states that Mrs. Clinton did, and added Michigan and Wisconsin.

Arizona’s strategic importance was clear when Mr. Trump’s campaign expressed fury after Fox News called it for Mr. Biden while many votes were still out. Yet the president appeared determined to cut off counting in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where Mr. Biden expressed hope that he would close the gap.

“They are trying to STEAL the election,” Mr. Trump declared on Twitter shortly after Mr. Biden had spoken. Twitter immediately marked it as content that was “disputed and might be misleading.”

(Courtesy of — Mark Landler– New York Times)

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