Rechercher dans ce blog

Friday, November 6, 2020

US Elections 2020: Live Updates - The New York Times

lonk.indah.link
Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Joseph R. Biden Jr. stood on the cusp of the presidency on Friday, seizing a lead over President Trump in both Pennsylvania and Georgia and drawing ever closer to securing the 270 electoral votes needed to lay claim to the White House.

Mr. Biden, who has 253 electoral votes, pulled ahead of Mr. Trump in Pennsylvania by about 5,600 votes on Friday morning. If his lead holds — and it is expected to — the state’s 20 electoral votes would vault him past the threshold to win the election.

Mr. Biden had already begun to project the image of a man preparing to assume the mantle of office, meeting on Thursday with his economic and health advisers to be briefed on the coronavirus pandemic.

Speaking briefly to reporters in Wilmington, Del., Mr. Biden urged the public to show a “little patience” as the vote counting in battleground states continued.

“Democracy,” he said, “can sometimes be messy.”

Mr. Biden’s appeal to let the process play out contrasted with that of Mr. Trump, who took the lectern in the White House briefing room to falsely claim that the election was riddled with fraud, as part of an elaborate coast-to-coast conspiracy by Democrats, the news media and Silicon Valley to deny him a second term.

As the number of outstanding ballots slowly dwindled, Mr. Trump was left increasingly with only legal challenges to forestall defeat, while Mr. Biden was betting on the steady accumulation of mail-in ballots to keep him on top in Pennsylvania. Georgia, which has not elected a Democrat since Bill Clinton in 1992, was headed for a photo finish that could supply an extra cushion of electoral votes to Mr. Biden.

Inside the candidates’ campaign war rooms, staffers were briefed by their field operations to see where the outstanding votes were and how they would break for the candidates.

In Georgia, Mr. Biden’s total vaulted above Mr. Trump’s around 5 a.m., giving the former vice president a 917-vote lead.

But if the eastern battlegrounds were trending toward Mr. Biden, the Trump campaign drew some comfort from the West.

In Arizona, the continuing count whittled Mr. Biden’s early lead in the state to roughly 47,000 votes. After a delay in counting the remaining ballots from Maricopa County early Thursday, election officials continued to plow through tens of thousands of ballots from Phoenix and its sprawling suburbs. In Nevada, Mr. Biden clung to a lead of more than 11,000, with absentee ballots left to count in vote-rich Clark County, which includes Las Vegas.

Still, Mr. Biden’s victory in the Midwestern battleground states of Michigan and Wisconsin put him in a strong position, with multiple paths to victory, depending on what happens in the states yet to be called. Mr. Trump needed a victory in Pennsylvania.

The process was agonizing for partisans on both sides, though for the most part, fears of widespread unrest did not materialize. Officials reported few instances of problems with the voting-counting process.

The candidates’ differing reactions hinted at how they are likely to handle the coming days and weeks as the counting gives way to legal challenges, calls for recounts and a potentially turbulent transition.

Mr. Biden’s pivot to policy issues seemed intended to create an air of inevitability about his victory. His briefing on the pandemic was a reminder that the United States recorded a record 121,200 new infections on Thursday.

Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

PHILADELPHIA — Joseph R. Biden Jr. took the lead over President Trump in Pennsylvania on Friday morning as Democrats grew increasingly confident that he would win the state and with it the presidency: The state’s 20 electoral votes would put Mr. Biden past the threshold for victory.

With the tallying on Friday morning of more than 30,000 votes from Philadelphia, which voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Biden, he pulled ahead of Mr. Trump by 6,737 votes.

Mr. Biden had steadily erased Mr. Trump’s early lead in the state — at one point, the president led by half a million votes — as ballots, mostly absentee and mail-in votes, were counted over the past few days. Most of the remaining uncounted votes in the state are in Democratic-leaning areas.

The “overwhelming majority” of the state’s remaining votes will be counted by Friday, Kathy Boockvar, the Pennsylvania secretary of state, told CNN, adding that the voter counters were “working incredibly hard.”

Mr. Biden currently has 253 electoral votes. Should he win Pennsylvania, he would pass the 270 votes needed to capture the White House.

On Thursday, Pennsylvania Democratic officials had said their analysis of the uncounted votes gave them confidence that Mr. Biden would win the state by a substantial margin.

“We believe when the votes are counted, it’s pretty clear that Joe Biden’s going to be president of the United States, because he’s going to win Pennsylvania,” said State Senator Sharif Street, the vice chair of the state Democratic Party.

Mr. Trump has baselessly insisted that post-Election Day tallies showing Mr. Biden leading in battleground states, including Pennsylvania, were the result of fraud, and has vowed to challenge them in court. His campaign showed no sign of an imminent concession Friday morning.

“The false projection of Joe Biden as the winner is based on results in four states that are far from final,” a lawyer for the Trump campaign said in a statement.

Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Joseph R. Biden Jr. has pulled ahead of President Trump by about 1,100 votes in Georgia, a state with 16 electoral votes where a win would bring the former vice president to 269, or within one electoral vote of the presidency.

If Mr. Biden were to win Georgia and then win Nevada or Arizona — both states in which he is leading — or Pennsylvania, where the continued counting of ballots is cutting into Mr. Trump’s advantage, he would become president-elect.

As the hours ticked by overnight and more ballots from Democratic strongholds in Georgia were counted, Mr. Biden steadily closed the gap with Mr. Trump. On Wednesday morning, about 60,000 votes separated the candidates in Georgia. By 3 a.m. Friday, that margin had narrowed to fewer than 700. Then under 500. And when a tally was released shortly before 5 a.m., Mr. Biden was in the lead.

While it is not clear how many votes are left to be counted, the latest official estimates suggested that it was 5,000 to 10,000.

Flipping Georgia, a state last won by a Democrat in 1992, and where Mr. Trump won by more than 200,000 votes four years ago, would represent a significant political shift this year, but the state has shown signs of trending blue. When Mr. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016, he did so by five percentage points, a far slimmer margin than Republicans had enjoyed in previous presidential elections.

The candidates had been locked in a virtual dead heat for much of Thursday, with each controlling about 49.4 percent of the vote but with Mr. Trump maintaining a slight lead. As absentee ballots were counted early Friday, particularly in the Atlanta suburb of Clayton County, Mr. Biden continued to increase his lead.

Mr. Biden’s late surge in this year’s count, thanks to his dominance in Atlanta, Savannah and the increasingly Democratic-friendly suburbs around both, transformed the competition in a traditionally Republican-leaning state into one of the closest contests in the nation.

As the count narrowed and it appeared that the two candidates would be separated by the slimmest of margins, Democrats urged voters in the state to fix ballots that had been rejected because of invalid or missing signatures before the deadline on Friday evening.

Those who voted absentee — a group that this year has been heavily Democratic — can check online to see whether election officials have accepted or rejected their ballots. Absentee ballots are often rejected when the voter forgets to sign or uses a signature that does not match the one on file with the state, in some cases because the filed signature is many years old. Election officials are supposed to contact voters in such cases but are not always able to do so.

Voters have until 5 p.m. on Friday to submit an affidavit form to “cure” such ballots. With Georgia hanging in the balance as the last votes are counted, national Democrats — including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York — are amplifying the message in hopes of salvaging every vote possible.

Mr. Trump spurred near-record turnout in the rural southwestern parts of the state bordering Alabama and the Florida Panhandle, the white outer suburbs and small cities, and the Appalachian northwest, which touches deep-red Tennessee.

While Mr. Biden was powered by high turnout among Black voters in Atlanta, he also flipped some suburban white voters in the moderate suburban counties that ring the city.

At a drive-in rally in Atlanta last week, Mr. Biden said, “We win Georgia, we win everything.”

Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

WILMINGTON, Del. — Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Thursday urged Americans to be patient as votes were counted and said he and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, had “no doubt” that they would ultimately prevail.

“It is the will of the voters, no one, not anything else, that chooses the president of the United States of America,” he said. “So, each ballot must be counted, and that’s what we’re going to see going through now. And that’s how it should be.”

In brief remarks to reporters in Wilmington, Del., Mr. Biden continued: “Democracy is sometimes messy. It sometimes requires a little patience as well. But that patience has been rewarded now for more than 240 years with a system of governance that’s been the envy of the world.”

Mr. Biden spoke after he and Ms. Harris received briefings on the coronavirus pandemic and the economy at a theater in Wilmington. Earlier in the day, Mr. Biden’s campaign manager, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, expressed confidence that Mr. Biden would win the election, and during his remarks, Mr. Biden also predicted a victory.

“We have no doubt that when the count is finished, Senator Harris and I will be declared the winners,” he said. “So, I ask everyone to stay calm — all the people to stay calm. The process is working. The count is being completed, and we’ll know very soon.”

Credit...Eve Edelheit for The New York Times

As the presidential race inches agonizingly toward a conclusion, it might be easy to miss the fact that the results are not actually very close.

With many ballots still outstanding in heavily Democratic cities, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was leading President Trump by more than four million votes nationwide as of Friday morning. His lead is expected to continue to expand, perhaps substantially, as officials finish counting.

This means more Americans have voted for a Democrat for president than for a Republican in each of the past four elections, and seven of the past eight, the exception being 2004, when President George W. Bush beat John Kerry by about three million votes. But, depending on the outcome this year, only four or five times in those eight elections have Democrats gone on to occupy the White House.

It looks likely that Mr. Biden will secure an Electoral College win. But the comparatively narrow result, in contrast to the fairly decisive preference of the American public, has intensified some Americans’ anger at a system in which a minority of people can often claim a majority of power.

“We look at a map of so-called red and blue states and treat that map as land and not people,” said Carol Anderson, a professor of African-American studies at Emory University who researches voter suppression. “I’ve been thinking about how hard folks have to work to be able to vote, what it takes to overcome all of this that voter suppression has put in place, and that someone could be ahead by three million votes — which is bigger than most cities and probably some states — and still we have what almost amounts to a nail-biter.”

Mr. Biden’s current vote margin is larger than the populations of more than 20 states, and more than the population of Los Angeles.

A similar disparity exists in the Senate, where the current Democratic minority was elected with more votes than the Republican majority and where by 2040, based on population projections, about 70 percent of Americans will be represented by 30 percent of senators.

“It’s not that the states that are represented by the 30 percent are all red, but what we do know is that the states that are going to have 70 senators are in no way representative of the diversity in the country,” said Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

“The more this happens, the more you get the sense that voters don’t have a say in the choice of their leaders,” he said. “And you cannot have a democracy over a period of time that survives if a majority of people believe that their franchise is meaningless.”

Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Trump broke a two-day silence with reporters to deliver a brief statement filled with lies about the election process as workers in a handful of states continue to tabulate vote tallies in the presidential race.

The president painted the election results so far as part of a broad conspiracy to deprive him of winning a second term by Democrats, election officials in various cities and the media.

“If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” Mr. Trump said shortly after he took the podium in the White House briefing room, a false statement that cast aspersion on the rest of the election. He offered no evidence.

He then listed a series of conspiracy theories about why ballots arrived late in places. And at the same time that he insisted Democrats were figuring out how many mail-in ballots they need in order to counteract his performance in various states, the president listed off a series of Republican wins on Tuesday. He appeared not to see the cognitive dissonance in saying that other Republicans won while he lost as he outlined a plot about others harming him, and left the room without taking reporters’ questions.

The three big broadcast networks — ABC, CBS and NBC — all cut away from President Trump’s appearance as the president’s false claims about the integrity of the election mounted.

Mr. Trump’s speech was timed to air during each of the network’s evening newscasts, which draw the biggest collective audience in TV news. But network anchors broke in after a few minutes to correct some of Mr. Trump’s false claims.

“We have to cut away here because the president has made a number of false allegations,” Lester Holt said on “NBC Nightly News.” On ABC, the anchor David Muir broke in and told viewers, “There’s a lot to unpack here and fact-check.”

Although CNN and Fox News continued carrying Mr. Trump’s remarks live, the decision by the other networks to break away deprived Mr. Trump of a significantly larger audience for his unfiltered — and un-fact-checked — views of the election.

MSNBC declined to air his remarks live at all. On Fox News, the White House correspondent John Roberts told viewers that “we haven’t seen any evidence” to back up Mr. Trump’s claims of electoral fraud. The anchor Bret Baier concurred, adding, “We have not seen the evidence yet, John.”

Credit...Brian Witte/Associated Press

Hours after President Trump’s son took to Twitter to complain that none of the Republicans with aspirations to run for president in 2024 were publicly siding with his father, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina appeared on Fox News to defend Mr. Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.

Mr. Graham, one of the president’s most loyal allies on Capitol Hill, offered no evidence to support the spurious claims, however. While he objected to the ongoing count of votes in Pennsylvania, he said he supported the process in Arizona.

“I trust Arizona, I don’t trust Philadelphia,” he said.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas followed his Republican colleague on the network and accused Democrats of trying to steal the election. He also offered no evidence to back his assertion.

Many prominent Republican lawmakers remained silent, declining to cross Mr. Trump over the results of an election that was slipping away from the incumbent.

Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, did not comment on Mr. Trump’s claims that the election was rigged, instead saying on Twitter on Friday that every legal vote should be counted.

“Any illegally-submitted ballots must not,” he added in the tweet. “All sides must get to observe the process. And the courts are here to apply the laws & resolve disputes. That’s how Americans’ votes decide the result.”

At a news conference on Thursday night in Atlanta with Donald Trump Jr., in which Republican supporters chanted “Stop the Steal,” Representative Doug Collins, a Georgia congressman who ran a failed bid for Senate this year, suggested without evidence that something was awry in the election.

“Transparency only seems to be good when the Democrats like the transparency, and the media are willing to go along with it,” he said.

Tommy Tuberville, a senator-elect from Alabama and a former Auburn University football coach, echoed the president on Twitter.

“The election results are out of control,” Mr. Tuberville wrote. “It’s like the whistle has blown, the game is over, and the players have gone home, but the referees are suddenly adding touchdowns to the other team’s side of the scoreboard.”

Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, at first sidestepped questions on Wednesday about whether he agreed with Mr. Trump that election officials should halt their tabulations.

But by Thursday evening, he grew more vocal, writing in a tweet: “Republicans will not be silenced. We demand transparency. We demand accuracy. And we demand that the legal votes be protected.”

Still, there were some in his party that offered a rebuke of Mr. Trump’s efforts to sow doubt in the democratic process.

Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland issued one of the strongest condemnations of the president by a Republican lawmaker.

“There is no defense for the President’s comments tonight undermining our Democratic process,” Mr. Hogan wrote on Twitter. “America is counting the votes, and we must respect the results as we always have before. No election or person is more important than our Democracy.”

Tom Ridge, the former Pennsylvania governor and secretary of homeland security for President George W. Bush, assailed Mr. Trump over his rhetoric.

“With his remarks from the White House tonight, the President disrespected every single American who figured out a way to safely vote amid a pandemic that has taken 235,000 lives,” Mr. Ridge wrote on Twitter. “Not to mention those who are dutifully counting that vote. Absolutely shameful. Yet so predictable.”

Mr. Ridge was among a group of Republicans who had endorsed Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, a state that Fox News called for Mr. Biden on election night, drawing the president’s ire, urged his constituents to remain patient on Thursday night as the margin there remained tight.

“I encourage media outlets, cable news and national pundits to do the same, and to avoid the temptation to declare a winner until our Arizona election officials have finished their jobs,” he said. “All of this underlines the importance of not jumping to conclusions in the state of Arizona until there is a final outcome in all counties.”

Credit...Olivier Touron/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

PHOENIX — Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has maintained a steady but slightly narrowing lead in Arizona vote tallies after Election Day, with Latino voters lining up behind the former vice president in a state that President Trump won by three and a half percentage points in 2016.

As of early Friday morning, Mr. Biden led Mr. Trump in Arizona by about 46,000 votes.

Even Mr. Biden’s narrow edge underscored a profound political shift in Arizona, a longtime Republican bastion that has lurched left in recent years, fueled by rapidly evolving demographics and a growing contingent of young Latino voters who favor liberal policies.

The count was delayed in the early hours of Thursday, as dozens of Trump supporters demonstrated outside the Maricopa County election office where the votes were being counted.

In one of the brightest spots for Democrats so far, the former astronaut Mark Kelly defeated the state’s Republican senator, Martha McSally, in a special election, making Mr. Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema the first pair of Democrats to represent Arizona in the Senate since the 1950s.

Credit...Bridget Bennett for The New York Times

Joseph R. Biden Jr. widened his slender lead over President Trump in Nevada early Friday from about 8,000 votes to about 11,000 votes as another tranche of ballots were counted, according to election officials. Mr. Biden now leads Mr. Trump by about one percentage point.

Nevada has six electoral votes and its entire Election Day vote has been counted; the late mail and provisional ballots that remain lean Democratic. About 11 percent of the state’s votes have yet to be tabulated.

But the final results might not be made public until Saturday or Sunday, said Joe Gloria, elections registrar in Clark County, home to Las Vegas, during a news conference at his headquarters. His staff will begin to tabulate 63,262 drop-off, mail-in and provisional ballots on Friday, and likely will not release the results for a day or two, Mr. Gloria told reporters.

“Our goal is not to act fast,” but to accurately count the votes, he said to audible groaning in the room.

Mr. Gloria said he had beefed up security amid threats to his staff, adding, “We will not allow anyone to stop us from doing what our duty is.”

Statewide, Nevada has about 190,000 ballots still to be counted, the secretary of state said in a statement on Thursday afternoon. Ninety percent of them are from Clark County, where Mr. Biden currently leads by eight percentage points.

A key question is whether Mr. Trump can close Mr. Biden’s current lead in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas and most of Nevada’s population. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried that county by 10.7 percentage points.

The Trump campaign has already identified Nevada, which allows any losing candidate to request a recount, as one of the battleground states where it hopes to use the courts and procedural maneuvers to stave off defeat in the Electoral College. Less than 24 hours before Election Day, a Nevada judge rejected a lawsuit filed by Republicans who had tried to stop early vote counting in Clark County.

Nevada’s attorney general, Aaron Ford, a Democrat, told CNN that the state was prepared to rebuff the Trump campaign’s offensive.

“We think it’s pretty impenetrable when it comes to legal challenge against us,” Mr. Ford said.

Since Mrs. Clinton beat Mr. Trump in Nevada by 2.4 percentage points in 2016, the state has turned a deeper shade of blue, with Democrats controlling the governor’s office and legislature, both Senate seats and all but one House seat. It was not widely expected to be a battleground state this year.

But while recent polls consistently showed Mr. Biden ahead of Mr. Trump in Nevada, Democrats worried that the pandemic would make it difficult to create a robust election turnout operation. The state has reported more than 104,000 coronavirus cases.

Let's block ads! (Why?)



"time" - Google News
November 06, 2020 at 09:32PM
https://ift.tt/3p6bdjw

US Elections 2020: Live Updates - The New York Times
"time" - Google News
https://ift.tt/3f5iuuC

No comments:

Post a Comment

Featured Post

Highland Park Shooting: Latest Updates on Victims, Suspect | Time - TIME

lonk.indah.link T he gunman who opened fire on a Fourth of July parade in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Ill., seriously considered ...

Popular Posts