With swing states yet to complete their count of votes, the winner of this year's presidential election remains anyone and everyone's guess. Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and Nevada remain uncalled, and only Fox News and the AP feel confident enough to project a win for Joe Biden in Arizona.
The map appears to favor Biden, whose electoral vote total is closest to the 270 total needed to win. But president Donald Trump made a joke of the pollsters in sweeping Florida, Ohio and Texas by wide margins—and racking up big leads in on-the-day voting tallies in the midwest. Biden's hopes for victory now hinge on the large number of uncounted mail-in ballots, presumed to favor Democrats.
The unfolding drama turned to chaos when Trump, in a meandering and angry 2 a.m. speech, claimed that the election was a fraud even as he falsely declared victory. He also suggested that he would go to the Supreme Court and ask it to stop further votes being counted.
Biden urged his supporters to be patient and said he believed he would prevail once the count was complete.
As of 7 a.m. eastern time, Trump had an 8 percent lead in Pennsylvania, with third of the votes uncounted and expected to break overwhelmingly for Biden.
In Michigan, Trump leads by a single percentage point with 86% of the vote counted. In Wisconsin, the candidates were tied only a few thousand votes apart, with 91% of precincts reporting in. Pollwatchers generally expect the remaining votes to lean blue.
Biden has a seemingly wide lead in Arizona, which Fox News called for him early in the night, and a slimmer one in Nevada, where it isn't clear who the outstanding 14% of ballots will favor.
Meanwhile, Trump holds a slim lead in North Carolina and Georgia, both of which had seemed a lock for him earlier in the night but turned purple as the evening wore on and large cities reported in. The New York Times' reviled but notoriously addictive election needles favor Biden for Georgia and Trump for N.C.
Trump needs to win at least four of these seven states to prevail; Biden can squeak it with three.
