On a Fourth Day of Counting, an Anxious Nation Keeps Waiting
Joseph R. Biden Jr. pulled ahead by more than 28,000 votes in the state, putting him in a strong position to win the presidency. “We’re going to win this race,” he said.
In the six states where the presidential race has yet to be called by The New York Times, all eyes, and headlines, are on the election.
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As of Saturday morning, only 56 percent of Alaska voters’ ballots had been counted, less than in any other state.
There is little question about who will take the state’s three electoral votes — President Trump is leading, and the state has voted for a Republican in every presidential election since 1964 — but its slow count has put Alaska in league with the five states where close races have kept most news outlets from projecting a winner (Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina).
Two factors seem to be responsible for the slow count: the state’s late deadline for mailed absentee ballots and a process of ensuring that voters do not vote twice.
Alaska allows absentee ballots to arrive up to 10 days after Election Day for most voters, as long as they are postmarked by Election Day.
Election officials also must wait for paper voter history records to be mailed from precincts to make sure no one votes twice. Only then can the ballots from a precinct be opened and counted, Tiffany Montemayor, a spokeswoman for the state’s election division, said in an email.
“Given the geographic expanse of Alaska, this does take some time,” she said.
There was one subset of the political world that felt vindicated by the nail-biter presidential race: Democrats who worked for Hillary Clinton. The closeness of the Biden-Trump race suggests that the 2016 election outcome may have been less about Mrs. Clinton’s political weaknesses than it was about Mr. Trump’s political strengths.
In some of the states that Mr. Biden managed to flip, like Wisconsin, his victory was by a slim margin of about 20,000 votes. Four years ago, Mrs. Clinton lost the state by about 22,000. A potential victory with more than 300 electoral votes would look like a blowout for Mr. Biden, but it would also mask the fact that in some of the most critical states, the race was still only won by a hair.
Mr. Biden has not received the wide margins nationwide that many liberals had been hoping for. The silver lining for some former members of Clintonworld, as one put it: The 2016 Democratic nominee might not go down in history as the political version of Bill Buckner, who blew the World Series for the Red Sox in 1986 by letting a ground ball go through his legs.
“His electoral strength in 2016 had less to do with any shortcomings of Hillary Clinton as a candidate or of her campaign than with Trump’s own appeal to a broad segment of the population,” Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and a member of the D.N.C.’s executive committee, said of Mr. Trump. “We need as Democrats to understand that and confront it more effectively going forward.”
Philippe Reines, a former top adviser to Mrs. Clinton both in the Senate and at the State Department, was even more blunt. “Hillary’s owed more than a few apologies for how her campaign was assessed,” Mr. Reines said. Jennifer Palmieri, who served as communications director for the 2016 Clinton campaign, said that the current election gives a new perspective to the race four years ago.
“There’s only so much you can do to ameliorate larger forces,” Ms. Palmieri said. “When I see young Latino and African-American men siding with Trump in a way they didn’t in 2016, I don’t fault the Biden campaign’s African-American radio program. It is a symptom of a larger change that’s happening.”
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By Saturday morning on the east coast, Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s lead in Georgia had surpassed 7,000 votes, but the race there and in some other key states that could decide the next president remained uncalled. In a brief speech late on Friday night, Mr. Biden expressed confidence that he would prevail.
With some, but not all, of the pivotal counties planning to report the count of additional ballots on Saturday, there was an expectation that a winner could be declared soon. But when that might happen is still unclear.
Here’s where things stand in the four key states where additional results could come on Saturday.
Arizona: Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, is expected to post its next report on Saturday at 11 a.m. Eastern. Officials there said nearly all of their early ballots would be counted by that point, and only a smaller number of provisional and other ballots would remain. Mr. Biden led President Trump in the state by 29,861 votes early Saturday.
Georgia: The secretary of state said on Friday that because of the small margin between the presidential candidates, a recount would be inevitable. Mr. Biden widened his lead slightly overnight, to over 7,000, but a recount remains no less likely.
Nevada: Numbers continue to favor Mr. Biden, who leads by 22,657 votes. Officials in Clark County, where tens of thousands of ballots are left to count, plan to release results twice a day going forward.
Pennsylvania: Mr. Biden leads President Trump. The remaining mail ballots are expected to favor Democrats, and some counties could report updated results on Saturday. Philadelphia officials said the count there could take a few more days to complete.
As Day 4 of the United States election turned into Day 5 on Saturday, the race for president appeared to slow to a crawl.
The news anchor Don Lemon read text messages from his friends about the Georgia count aloud on CNN. Foreign newspapers wrote about the unchanged overnight tally with a hint of exasperation. On a livestream of Philadelphia’s vote-counting site, boxes sat behind fences and not a single person stirred.
“New results out of Georgia,” Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported early Saturday, “and — they just basically say the same thing.”
Saturday morning could yet bring decisive news: Pennsylvania could move out of recount territory if the margin widens, and Arizona and Nevada were expected to declare new votes. But whereas 24 hours earlier, all-night ballot counting had given Joseph R. Biden Jr. the lead in Georgia, the early hours of Saturday seemed comparatively sedate. Nothing was changing, and nobody was quite sure when it would.
“It feels like just one long day,” Mr. Lemon said.
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Maggie Haberman in New York
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Dave Philipps in Las Vegas
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTCrowds continued to grow in Philadelphia, where the recent vote count gave Joseph R. Biden a lead over President Trump in Pennsylvania. One one side of the street in front of the Pennsylvania Convention Center, Biden supporters danced in celebration. On the other, Trump supporters protested the ballot-counting process.
Sometime this afternoon, another batch of votes are expected to be reported from Gwinnett County, a Democratic-leaning Atlanta suburb.
Philadelphia officials have said they will release another update of votes from the city sometime today. They expect to announce the results of between 2,000 and 3,000 votes. The remaining 40,000 votes could take a few more days to count and report, officials said.
By 7 p.m. Eastern, officials in Clark County, Nevada, say they will provide an update on the 63,000 ballots still left to be counted there. Joseph R. Biden Jr. currently leads President Trump in the state by more than more than 20,000 votes, and many of its outstanding ballots are from Clark County, which includes Las Vegas.
Friday night during prime time, Mr. Biden plans to address the nation, according to a campaign official.
By 9 p.m. Eastern, officials in Maricopa County, Ariz., expect to release the results of roughly 100,000 votes. The county is the state’s largest, and the results there will be key in determining the outcome of its Electoral College votes.
Mr. Trump released a statement Friday afternoon in which he said that he and his team would continue to fight to ensure that “all legal ballots must be counted and all illegal ballots should not be counted.” It was not clear whether the president would address the nation on Friday as he did the night before.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTJon Ossoff, a Democrat challenging Senator David Perdue in a Senate race in Georgia, spoke about the election results Friday morning at Grant Park in Atlanta. Currently neither candidate is carrying at least 50 percent of the vote. If the race ends that way, the candidates would head to a runoff in January, as required by state law.
“Georgia is the most competitive state in the country,” Mr. Ossoff said. “And there were some who doubted that. But the work that’s been done over the last 10 years, the work that’s being led by people like Stacey Abrams, we’re now seeing that change has come to Georgia, and Georgia is the heart of the change that’s coming to America.”
Democrats have lost nearly every statewide runoff in Georgia for the past 30 years, including Mr. Ossoff, who lost in a runoff for a House seat in 2017. Mr. Perdue’s campaign manager referenced that loss in a statement Thursday. “There’s only one candidate in this race who has ever lost a runoff, and it isn’t David Perdue,” said the manager, Ben Fry.
Despite that history, Mr. Ossoff projected confidence for the likely runoff.
“Georgia voters stood up in record-shattering numbers to demand change for our state and change in this country,” Mr. Ossoff said. Adding, “Change is coming to America, and retirement is coming for Senator David Perdue.”
“We’re going to mobilize people like never before. We’re going to get this done thanks to the hard work that we put in since 2012,” said Cecilia Houston-Torrence, a supporter of Mr. Ossoff’s who was at Grant Park.
“We’re going to get them to the polls in January,” she added. “I promise you.”
Carolyn Bourdeaux, a two-time Democratic candidate and college professor, flipped an open House seat in Georgia on Friday that had become a top priority for Democrats seeking to expand their majority in the House.
Dr. Bourdeaux, 50, who lost her previous bid to represent the Seventh Congressional District in 2018 by fewer than 500 votes, defeated the Republican candidate Rich McCormick in the suburban district northeast of Atlanta, according to The Associated Press.
The district, which includes parts of Gwinnett and Forsyth Counties, had once been fertile ground for Republicans. But as with suburbs across the nation, it has become increasingly diverse and has been shifting toward Democrats, particularly since President Trump took office.
Representative Rob Woodall, who announced in February that he would not seek re-election, had held the seat for five terms. Mr. Woodall is one of nearly three dozen Republicans who are leaving the House, an exodus that has been accelerated by the president’s unpopularity in the suburbs.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTOne of President Trump’s most lopsided margins of victory came in northern Michigan’s rural Missaukee County, where he got more than 75 percent of the vote, according to unofficial tallies. On Friday, the prospect of his loss left some of his supporters feeling stunned and angry.
“People are upset,” said Jodi DeHate, 48, who works at an organization that promotes environmental agriculture practices. “They don’t understand. It’s a lot of confusion.”
Ms. DeHate, whose five-acre family farm raises melons and vegetables for farmers’ markets, voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and again this year. She said she had been watching anxiously since Election Day as mail ballots in Detroit and the suburbs slowly tilted Michigan to Joseph R. Biden Jr.
She was leery of the lopsided margins that swung in Mr. Biden’s favor, but at the same time, was not ready to embrace Mr. Trump’s false tirades about the vote being stolen. “It’s heavily Democratic anyways,” Ms. DeHate said of the parts of Michigan that gave Mr. Biden his victory there.
Aid from the Trump administration has helped to keep farmers afloat throughout the pandemic, Ms. DeHate said, and she worried that a Biden administration would tighten regulations on farming.
“I don’t think he has a good grasp of what agriculture really does,” she said of Mr. Biden.
But others who have relied on agriculture to make a living were glad to see a change. In Albany, Wis., on what was once a family farm, Rachael Lindemann felt vindicated.
Ms. Lindemann voted Democratic in 2016, but her husband, a struggling dairy farmer, supported Mr. Trump. Their financial struggles deepened as Mr. Trump waged a trade war with China, and the couple eventually sold their farm and cows. Mr. Lindemann took a construction job. This year, he voted for Mr. Biden.
“He changed his mind,” Ms. Lindemann said.
As the count dragged on this week, the Lindemanns were checking the news once in the morning and once at night; she reads, and he watches videos on his phone. With the margins incredibly thin and recounts and legal challenges looming, Ms. Lindemann said she was not celebrating.
“I’m not going to count my chickens before they’re hatched,” she said. “I know he’s going to throw a 5-year-old tantrum, and he’s going to turn over every table he can. We don’t have a president yet.”
Adam Nagourney in Los Angeles
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President Trump’s campaign is installing an adviser, David Bossie, to lead its efforts to challenge election outcomes in several states, a campaign official said on Friday.
Mr. Bossie was tapped by the Trump campaign manager, Bill Stepien, and the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to take on the role, as the president’s advisers have signaled that they plan to continue legal fights over the tabulation of votes in a string of states, officials said.
Mr. Bossie, Trump’s deputy campaign manager in 2016 and the head of the conservative advocacy group Citizens United, has survived partisan battles in Washington over the last 30 years. His combative approach appeals to Mr. Trump.
In the three days since the election, the Trump campaign has raised concerns and objections over voting issues in several states. Trump family members and loyalists have held news conferences claiming irregularities.
But there has been no single person in charge of the legal effort to contest results in a number of states. Putting Mr. Bossie there is an attempt to rectify that.
“From the beginning we have said that all legal ballots must be counted and all illegal ballots should not be counted,” Mr. Trump said Friday in a statement in which he promised a vigorous legal challenge. “We will pursue this process through every aspect of the law to guarantee that the American people have confidence in our government,” he said.
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Republican reaction to President Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud ranged widely, from vigorous backing to sharp condemnations to carefully constructed support for the idea of fair elections without any endorsement of the president’s fabricated assertions of an election conspiracy.
Republican Senators Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney and Pat Toomey, and Ivanka Trump, Mr. Trump’s daughter, all declined to echo Mr. Trump’s fraud claims in statements on the election. While Mr. McConnell and Ms. Trump’s tweets were superficially supportive of the president, Mr. Romney and Mr. Toomey directly criticized him.
In a stinging statement, Mr. Romney said that Mr. Trump, while free to request recounts and present valid evidence of fraud, “is wrong to say that the election was rigged, corrupt and stolen — doing so weakens the cause of freedom here and around the world, weakens the institutions that lie at the foundations of the Republic, and recklessly inflames destructive and dangerous passions.”
Ms. Trump, echoing what Vice President Mike Pence said Thursday night, did not include talk of conspiracy or fraud. “Every legally cast vote should be counted. Every illegally cast vote should not. This should not be controversial,” Ms. Trump wrote. “This is not a partisan statement — free and fair elections are the foundation of our democracy.”
Her words were a contrast to those of her brothers, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, who have both made sweeping accusations of widespread fraud. Earlier in the morning, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted the baseless claim that there is “infinitely more evidence of voter fraud than there ever was of ‘Russia Collusion’ but strangely no one in the media wants to look into it.”
And some Republicans seem prepared to defend Mr. Trump’s position without reservation.
“President Trump won this election,” Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, told the Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Thursday night. “So everyone who’s listening: Do not be quiet. Do not be silent about this. We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTJoseph R. Biden Jr. has increased his lead in Nevada to 1.6 percentage points on Friday after winning a new round of ballots in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, by about a two-to-one margin. So far, no news organization has projected the state for Mr. Biden, but the president’s path to victory there has become exceedingly narrow.
Virtually all of the remaining ballots are from Clark County, according to the Nevada secretary of state. Most of the ballots are mail absentee ballots, which broke for Mr. Biden by a wide margin in Clark County and statewide.
The other ballots are provisional ballots or from same-day registrants. Those ballots might be more competitive but are highly unlikely to significantly favor Mr. Trump in a Democratic county. The state also accepts postmarked ballots by Nov. 10, which would be expected to back Mr. Biden as well.
At a news conference, the Clark County registrar, Joe Gloria, said the county still had 63,000 ballots left to be counted. He said that the county would provide updated results by 7 p.m. Eastern.
Representative Jeff Van Drew, a onetime Democrat who switched parties in December and declared allegiance to President Trump, held onto his New Jersey seat in a race against Amy Kennedy, a former teacher who married into the American political dynasty.
The race was the last New Jersey congressional contest to be decided, and one of only two in the state won by a Republican. Mr. Van Drew’s victory appeared to vindicate his politically fraught decision to cross party lines and align himself with Mr. Trump during last year’s impeachment proceedings.
The Associated Press declared Mr. Van Drew the winner on Friday. Its tally showed that he had received 51.5 percent of the votes, compared with 46.9 percent for Ms. Kennedy.
First elected to the House two years ago as a Democrat, Mr. Van Drew overcame his opponent’s lead in most polls, as well as a considerable fund-raising disadvantage and the familiarity of the Kennedy name. Ms. Kennedy’s husband, Patrick Kennedy, a former congressman from Rhode Island, is a nephew of President John F. Kennedy.
Mr. Van Drew was a vocal opponent of Mr. Trump’s impeachment and joined the Republicans in December when it became clear that he could not count on re-election support from Democratic leaders in his South Jersey district, setting up a marquee House race infused with national angst.
Mr. Van Drew was able to overcome the stigma of switching parties, buoyed by Mr. Trump’s warm embrace in a district that the president won by about five points in 2016. Comparable results for Mr. Trump in the district this year were not available.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTDETROIT — The demonstrations outside Detroit’s convention center, where absentee ballots were counted this week, grew considerably larger on Friday, with about 200 Trump supporters chanting “Stop the steal!” and repeating baseless claims of fraud in the presidential election.
Speakers stood on a wall overlooking supporters clustered on Washington Boulevard in the city’s downtown. Some were armed with handguns. One woman wore a sweatshirt with the words “Gays for Trump” on the back, and another held a “Hispanics for Trump” sign.
Brandon Straka, a gay conservative who rose to prominence in 2018 when he announced that he was leaving the Democratic Party, becoming the founder of the #WalkAway movement, addressed the crowd throughout the morning with a loudspeaker.
“Should the worst possible thing happen,” he said, referring to President Trump possibly losing the election, “we are still going to prevail in the end.”
At one point, a counterprotester showed up behind the crowd, wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt and raising his fist. The protester, who was white, was ridiculed, as some Trump supporters rushed up to him, yelling and pointing.
Police officers escorted the demonstrator away from the pro-Trump crowd, and speakers began bashing news reporters for paying attention to him, with one supporter calling media members “agents of the devil.”