Eliana Willis

There are plenty of stories about how Donald Trump’s mind works. Here’s mine. In 1990, the president of a well-known French retailer asked my father to help him open a branch in Manhattan. So my father contacted Trump, and named the retailer. Trump replied, “Great, I love their neckties.”
Acting as translator, my father took the retailer to Trump Tower, gave Trump the man’s business card with his shop’s name on it and explained to Trump that he wanted to lease space in the tower. Trump was delighted. He met the Frenchman’s lawyers, looked over the lease and signed it. Then, my father got a phone call. “What is this junk you’ve put in my building?” Trump raged, using a less newspaper-friendly word than “junk”. Confused, my father said it was the French store, as they’d arranged. “Where’s Hermès?” he shouted. Trump had met the president, seen his business card and signed the contracts. But because he wanted the luxury brand Hermès in his building, he believed he was getting it.

Narcissists see what they want to see. What makes Trump more unusual is that an astonishing number of people see what they want to see when they look at him. Let us take a brief journey back to the early days of what I guess we can describe as Trump’s emergence on to the political scene, like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man emerged on to New York City in Ghostbusters. How eager some people were then to reassure us that all was fine, because they wanted it to be. “It would be a mistake to think that [Trump] is all instinct and impulse. He wants to bring to governing the same calculating business style that he has brought to communicating,” Michael Gove somehow managed to write in the Times, while simultaneously giving Trump a proctology examination with his tongue. “The Donald I know,” another British commentator wrote at the time, “is a smart, streetwise, charming (yes seriously!) guy who runs his businesses by putting good people into top jobs and letting them get on with it.” All those “my friend, Donald” takes: how sweetly they have aged. Like cottage cheese left for four years next to an orange boiler.
It’s strangely apt that such a raging narcissist should function as a distorted mirror to so many, one in which they see their own fantasies reflected back at them. Whether he actually is a billionaire or not has never been important: since the 1980s he has presented himself as the cartoon image of one – Daddy Warbucks crossed with a particularly rubbish Bond villain – and people see what they want to see. His white working-class supporters saw in him their own aggrievement at not being accepted by elites who rigged the game; the elites saw a fellow plutocrat who would protect their fortunes. Before this election I often heard people talk anxiously about how, even if Trump lost, “Trumpism” wouldn’t go away.
But what even is Trumpism? The man has never had any moral code beyond closing the deal, and these days barely seems capable of maintaining a thought to the end of a sentence: the idea that he has the desire let alone the wherewithal to construct an ideology is like assuming that monkey on the typewriter is writing Hamlet. Read any thinkpiece and “Trumpism” is boiled down to nativism, showmanship and lying, all of which can be more accurately summed up as “being a racist grifter”. In Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and his Followers, John W Dean and Bob Altemeyer rightly say that Trumpism is not about Trump at all, but about his followers and their own psychological predispositions. They look at him and see what they want to see: themselves.
The final election result may not be known for days, and yet even before the sun had risen on Wednesday the takes were coming. Joe Biden was too centrist and the Democrats should have embraced a more far-left candidate, was one popular theory advanced by people who a) had apparently never heard of Florida, where some Cuban and Venezuelan-Americans reportedly rejected Biden because of what they perceived as his “socialism” and b) believed Bernie Sanders had been blocked from the nomination by Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic National Committee as opposed to actual Democrat voters, twice, and therefore is possibly not the great unifying candidate some wish.
“Today it is clearer than ever that moving to the political centre is not a winning strategy,” crowed a Momentum press release, with the kind of confidence you might not expect from a group whose far-left UK candidate was trounced in elections, about a US candidate winning by a decisive margin in the popular vote. The left – in the US but also the UK – has always been wilfully resistant to the possibility that a lot of Americans just really, really like Trump, and their vote has nothing to do with the Democrats (or even the Republicans) at all. But as with Trump himself, people look at this election and see what they want to see.
The US-based journalist Andrew Sullivan, who has frequently expressed scepticism about identity politics, declared on Wednesday, “I found the left’s relentless identity politics increasingly repellent. I wasn’t alone.” Others have argued that Biden didn’t use identity politics enough. And yet, given the sheer number of votes Biden got, and that more African-Americans, Latinos and Asians voted for Trump this year than in 2016, and his LGBT vote doubled, the picture is clearly too complicated to bend into anyone’s pet theory. Meanwhile, his Jewish vote shrank, disabusing those who theorised that his pro-Israel policies would woo the Jews, except in Florida where it may have played a part. Isn’t it annoying when people are inconsistent?
Captain Hindsights always insist that whatever just happened in an election was both totally foreseeable and proves their theory. But this election is not proving any theory, other than that the US electoral system is, yet again, not fit for purpose, when a candidate can win millions more votes and still not necessarily win. Biden got the numbers, but not necessarily in the expected demographics, and Trump didn’t win, but he didn’t lose in the way many predicted either. Anyone who sums all this up in one grand principle is attempting to wrench a lot of very disparate groups with wildly differing concerns into a self-serving whole. Trump is a true narcissist, but as his popularity and now his possible final downfall have shown, he is not the only one.
• Hadley Freeman is a Guardian columnist and features writer More

Key events

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6.38am EST06:38
US recorded record 102,831 new coronavirus cases yesterday

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10.21am EST10:21

Donald Trump is again tweeting in all caps, making false claims about the remaining ballots left to be counted.
“ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!” Trump said.

Donald J. Trump
(@realDonaldTrump)
ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!

November 5, 2020

In reality, a number of states, including Pennsylvania, allow ballots to arrive for days after election day as long as the ballots are postmarked by election day.
It’s also worth noting that it often takes longer for ballots to arrive from service members who are deployed overseas. It’s unclear whether the president thinks those Americans’ ballots should be thrown out.

10.05am EST10:05

If both of Georgia’s Senate races advance to runoffs, Democrats could take the Senate majority by winning both races and the White House.
It would be a heavy lift for Democrats to win both Senate races in the traditionally conservative state, as the extremely close presidential race in Georgia demonstrates, and Republicans are still very likely to maintain control of the Senate.
But Republicans’ chances of success in Georgia may be tied to whether Donald Trump would still campaign for their candidates if he becomes a lame-duck president, as an Atlantic writer noted.

Edward-Isaac Dovere
(@IsaacDovere)
If Biden wins and control of the Senate comes down to those two Georgia seats, GOP hopes of winning them/the majority will likely hinge on whether a defeated Trump would invest himself into turning out his voters in races where he’s not on the ballot and wins won’t benefit him

November 5, 2020

9.56am EST09:56

Democratic Senate candidate Raphael Warnock has released his first ad for the January runoff election in Georgia.
The ad features Warnock subjecting himself to the potential attacks that might come from his Republican opponent, Senator Kelly Loeffler.
“Raphael Warnock eats pizza with a fork and knife,” the narrator’s ad says in a menacing voice. “Raphael Warnock once stepped on a crack in the sidewalk.”

Reverend Raphael Warnock
(@ReverendWarnock)
Get ready Georgia. The negative ads against us are coming.But that won’t stop us from fighting for a better future for Georgians and focusing on the issues that matter. pic.twitter.com/VN0YIA02MG

November 5, 2020

The ad then pivots to Warnock saying, “Get ready, Georgia. The negative ads against us are coming. Kelly Loeffler doesn’t want to talk about why she’s for getting rid of healthcare in the middle of a pandemic, so she’s going to try and scare you with lies about me.”
Warnock and Loeffler advanced to the January runoff after no candidate in the special Senate election managed to attract 50% of the vote.
The other Senate race in Georgia, between Republican incumbent David Perdue and Democrat Jon Ossoff, is likely headed to a runoff as well, as it looks like Perdue’s numbers could slip below 50% with the final batch of Georgia ballots.

9.42am EST09:42

There are about 61,000 outstanding votes in Georgia, most of them from Democratic-leaning counties, according to the Washington Post.

Amy Gardner
(@AmyEGardner)
UPDATE: 61k votes are outstanding in Georgia. 17,157 from Chatham; 11,200 from Fulton; 7,338 from Gwinnett; 4,713 from Forsyth; 3,641 from Harris; 1,797 from Laurens; 1,552 from Putnam; 1,202 from Sumter; 700 from Cobb. FEAST

November 5, 2020

Donald Trump currently leads by about 18,000 votes in the state, and the mail-in ballots that are being counted have favored Joe Biden. It’s expected to be an extremely close final result.

9.28am EST09:28

This is Joan Greve in Washington, taking over for Martin Belam, and we still don’t have a winner in the US presidential election.
Donald Trump is reacting to the state of play in his now-standard manner: by demanding election officials stop counting valid ballots.
“STOP THE COUNT!” the president said in a new tweet.

Donald J. Trump
(@realDonaldTrump)
STOP THE COUNT!

November 5, 2020

Election officials have pledged to count every valid vote cast by election day, and many of them have defended the integrity of the counts in their states.
It’s also worth noting that, if counting were stopped now, Biden would win the presidency because he is ahead in Nevada, which would get him to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House.

8.58am EST08:58

Look, you know and I know that as soon as enough races have been called that Biden has 270 Electoral College votes, it is still not going to be the end of this.
Wisconsin, provided Trump is within 1% of Biden, will get recounted for sure. And there are the legal challenges. Reuters have just put together this handy outline of a few of the key ones:
Michigan ballot-counting fightTrump’s campaign said on Wednesday it had filed a lawsuit in Michigan to stop state officials from counting ballots. The campaign said the case in the Michigan Court of Claims seeks to halt counting until it has an election inspector at each absentee-voter counting board. The campaign also wanted to review ballots that were opened and counted before an inspector from its campaign was present.
Pennsylvania court battlesRepublican officials on Tuesday sued election officials in Montgomery County, which borders Philadelphia, accusing them of illegally counting mail-in ballots early and giving voters who submitted defective ballots a chance to re-vote. At a hearing on Wednesday, US District Judge Timothy Savage in Philadelphia appeared skeptical of their allegations and how the integrity of the election might be affected.
In a separate lawsuit, the Trump campaign asked a judge to halt ballot counting in Pennsylvania, claiming that Republicans had been unlawfully denied access to observe the process.
Meanwhile, Republicans in Pennsylvania have asked the US Supreme Court to review a decision from the state’s highest court that allowed election officials to count mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day that arrived through until Friday 6 November. On Wednesday, Trump’s campaign filed a motion to intervene in the case.
Supreme court justices said last week there was not enough time to decide the merits of the case before Election Day but indicated they might revisit it afterwards. As a result, Pennsylvania election officials said they will segregate properly postmarked ballots that arrived after Election Day, which opens the possibility the court could subsequently strike them out.
US Postal Service litigationA judge on Wednesday said Postmaster General Louis DeJoy must answer questions about why the USPS failed to complete a court-ordered sweep for undelivered ballots in about a dozen states before a Tuesday afternoon deadline. US District Judge Emmet Sullivan is overseeing a lawsuit by Vote Forward, the NAACP, and Latino community advocates who have been demanding the postal service deliver mail-in ballots in time to be counted in the election.
Georgia ballot fightThe Trump campaign on Wednesday evening filed a lawsuit in state court in Chatham County, Georgia. Unlike the Pennsylvania and Michigan actions, that lawsuit is not asking a judge to halt ballot counting. Instead, the campaign said it received information that late-arriving ballots were improperly mingled with valid ballots, and asked a judge to enter an order making sure late-arriving ballots were separated so they would not be counted.
After the announcement just now that there will be a press conference in Nevada this morning featuring the Republican chair of the state and attorneys, presumably we’ll be able to add Nevada to that list soon.

8.47am EST08:47

This could be intriguing. 8:30am PST is 4:30pm this afternoon if, like me, you are in London.

Andrew Feinberg
(@AndrewFeinberg)
INBOX: @TeamTrump will make a “major announcement” in Las Vegas this morning, headlined by 2000 Brooks Brothers Riot participant ⁦@mschlapp⁩, ex-Acting DNI Ric Grenell, Nevada GOP Chair Michael McDonald, and ex-NV AG Adam Laxalt. pic.twitter.com/OCGjmnOKRz

November 5, 2020

Nevada still has around 25% of its votes to count, which is approaching 400,000. Joe Biden has a narrow lead of about 7,500 at the moment. Under state law, ballots can still be accepted so long as they were postmarked by Election Day up until 10 November.
Trump narrowly lost Nevada in 2016 as the state has trended toward the Democrats in the past decade. The last Republican to win the state was George W. Bush in 2004.
The tweet mentions Matt Schlapp as a Brooks Brothers Riot participant. For those of us without total recall of US elections from twenty years ago, my colleague Adam Gabbatt reminded us what the Brooks Brothers Riot was recently:

In late November 2000, hundreds of mostly middle-aged male protesters, dressed in off-the-peg suits and cautious ties, descended on the Miami-Dade polling headquarters in Florida. Shouting, jostling, and punching, they demanded that a recount of ballots for the presidential election be stopped.
The protesters, many of whom were paid Republican operatives, succeeded. The counting of disputed ballots in Florida was abandoned. What became known as the Brooks Brothers riot went down in infamy, and George W Bush became president after a supreme court decision.

Updated
at 9.23am EST

8.39am EST08:39

A very simple message coming out from the Biden campaign this morning: Count every vote.

Joe Biden
(@JoeBiden)
Every vote must be counted. pic.twitter.com/kWLGRfeePK

November 5, 2020

8.29am EST08:29

These two charts sum up exactly why in one state Trump supporters were protesting to keep the count going, and in another state the Trump campaign has been taking legal action to try and shut the counting down.

Sophy Ridge
(@SophyRidgeSky)
Here’s the changing situation in Arizona & Pennsylvania – things are narrowing in opposite directions. It could really go to the wire pic.twitter.com/OdWpR2OvvR

November 5, 2020

Pennsylvania’s Gov. Tom Wolf, by the way, was quite clear yesterday on the state’s determination to count every vote, saying:

Pennsylvania is going to count every vote and make sure that everyone has their voice heard. Pennsylvania is going to fight every single attempt to disenfranchise voters and continue to administer a free and fair election.

8.07am EST08:07

I suspect it is the experience of watching Donald Trump grind out the last few Electoral College votes to win in 2016 that is making some people still lack confidence that Biden will actually win.
However, as well as Jennifer Rubin being convinced, Giovanni Russonello writes this for the New York Times politics newsletter this morning. Note, that unlike Fox News and the Associated Press (and us), NYT have not yet put Arizona into Biden’s column. But he writes:

Joe Biden has now won 253 electoral votes and has multiple routes to the White House, with five swing states still undecided and uncounted votes in several likely to favor him. While Trump has not indicated that he has any plans to concede, and his campaign insists he could still prevail, at this point a path to victory would most likely run through the courts. It’s a hard road ahead for him.

He does point out though that capturing the presidency won’t take away all the question marks about the Democratic performance at this election.

If Democrats end up declaring a victory over all, it will be a beleaguered one. Not only did Trump outperform their expectations in the battlegrounds, but Democratic candidates for both the House and the Senate also lost races — some in states that split their tickets and favored Biden for president — that the party had been fairly confident about. More

How could the electoral circumstances for the US Democrats have been more favourable? A quarter of a million Americans have died in a pandemic bungled by the incumbent president, and at least 6 million have consequently been driven into poverty. The coronavirus crisis is the devastating climax of a presidency defined by hundreds of scandals, many of which alone, in normal circumstances, could have destroyed the political career of whoever occupied the White House.Despite having the active support of almost the entire US press, Joe Biden’s victory looks to be far narrower than predicted. During the Democratic primaries, Biden’s cheerleaders argued that his socialist challenger Bernie Sanders would repel Florida’s voters, and yet Donald Trump has triumphed in the sunshine state. They argued that his “unelectable” rival would risk the Senate and down-ballot races, yet the Republicans may retain control of the Senate, and Democrats are haemorrhaging seats in the House of Representatives.Without coronavirus, Trump would have undoubtedly secured another term and potentially dismantled an already flawed US democracy for a generation or more. This should have been a landslide, and now the world will pay the cost for the self-inflicted wounds of the Democratic establishment. Trump may be defeated; Trumpism lives on.While attention should now focus on resisting attempts by Trump and his allies to steal the election, the Democratic establishment must also understand why this entirely avoidable farce came to pass. As their phones lit up four years ago with notifications that he had become the 45th president of the American republic, Trump was, to self-styled Democratic “moderates”, a sudden hurricane that materialised under clear blue skies: an aberration; a glitch; a perverse accident to be undone so normality and civility could be restored.Many Democrats comforted themselves with the notion they had nothing to answer for: they had simply been cheated, Russia was to blame, and Hillary Clinton – whose hubristic campaign had initially wanted Trump as its preferred Republican nominee – had been tragically wronged. Rather than offering an inspiring alternative, Biden would bask in the reflected glory of Barack Obama, present himself as the “grownup” in the room, and focus on flipping erstwhile Trump voters on the grounds of competence alone. Striking, then, that not only did Trump win more votes than 2016, but 93% of Republicans opted for him this time around, up three points from that fateful election.Ample criticisms can be made of Biden’s candidacy, which limited its political horizons in deference to the Democrats’ corporate client base, when even Fox News exit polls showed that most Americans favoured a government-run healthcare plan. Democrats have taken Latino and black Americans for granted, an oversight that Trump ably exploited, winning (albeit from low numbers) increased support among both groups. But the roots of this failure go back decades. The Democratic establishment has long refused to embrace even the basic tenets of social democracy – not least taxing the better-off to fund programmes such as a comprehensive welfare state and universal healthcare.The political consequences of this failure have been devastating. In the 1960s, the Democratic president Lyndon B Johnson launched a series of “great society” programmes to tackle poverty. Yet while the tax burden of the average American family nearly doubled between the mid-1950s and 1980, taxes on corporate America have been successively slashed. Here was a resentment to be tapped into: that hard-working Americans, rather than the boss class, were subsidising those demonised as the “undeserving” poor.This fury became racialised as the struggle of black Americans – which was met with harsh white backlash – forced the federal government to introduce basic civil rights. When Ronald Reagan furiously denounced “welfare queens”, many blue-collar workers heard a dog whistle targeting often single black mothers, who their hard-earned tax dollars were supposedly subsidising. When Bill Clinton’s administration backed trade agreements that devastated industrial jobs in the rust belt, here was another grievance waiting to be mined. And it was, by the most unlikely figurehead, the former host of the Apprentice. Trumpism has exploited racism, and fury at economic grievances, successfully welding both forces together.In the aftermath of the financial crash, Obama’s presidential campaign appeared to offer a break with the failures of successive Republican and Democratic administrations. But while he rescued the banks and let financial executives off the hook for their role in the 2008 crash, wages for millions of Americans stagnated or declined. While the slice of national income belonging to middle Americans fell from 62% to 43% between 1970 and 2018, the number of billionaires has surged: from 66 in 1990 with a combined wealth of $240bn, to 614 today, with a total fortune of nearly $3tn. America is now a society in which one in every 11 black adult is either in prison, or on parole or probation – racial injustices that Black Lives Matter has urgently underlined.The Democratic establishment has proved itself politically bankrupt and unable to meet these challenges. The party lost against Trump in 2016, and has at best scraped a stillborn administration this time around. We will all pick up the tab for this failure. Although Biden committed to signing the world’s biggest polluter back up to the Paris climate accords, a failure to win the Senate will block a Green New Deal that is desperately needed to tackle the existential threat of the climate emergency. The world cannot afford another four years of inaction. With Biden’s likely presidency held hostage by a potentially hostile Senate and supreme court, the Republicans will be able to further gerrymander an already fatally compromised democratic system and, come mid-terms, tap into people’s disillusionment with an inevitably do-nothing government.That does not mean there is no hope. The so-called Squad of progressive Congressional Democrats – whose most famous member is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – has doubled in number, including the election of former nurse Cori Bush in Missouri and the first queer black Congressman, Mondaire Jones, in New York. The old Democratic establishment has failed to inflict the final reckoning on Trumpism that is deserved. It falls to this new generation of progressive leaders – predominantly working-class people of colour – to finish the job, not just for the United States, but for all of us.Join Guardian journalist Owen Jones, Labour MP Dawn Butler and academic Maya Goodfellow as they discuss the hostile environment and attitudes towards immigration in Britain. Tuesday 24 November, 7pm GMT Book tickets here More

When Donald Trump supporters gathered outside a vote-counting centre in Phoenix, Arizona, on Wednesday night, they had a simple and perhaps unexpected chant: “Fox News Sucks!”
Although the channel has become synonymous with Trump’s rise to power, in the last two days Fox News has become the focus of the Trump campaign’s anger after it made an early call on Tuesday night that the state of Arizona was going to Joe Biden.
In the process, the channel switched the media’s attention away from Trump’s substantial success in Florida and undermined the president’s attempts to focus attention on the vote counting in Pennsylvania.
Such was the level of fury within the Trump campaign at the call that his team reportedly attempted to have the decision overturned. According to the New York Times, this involved Jared Kushner contacting Fox’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, while in Vanity Fair’s reporting it was the president himself who called the media mogul. Regardless of who was placing the calls, Fox has stuck by its decision – much to the anger of many of its viewers who have bombarded the channel with complaints.

The decision to call the ultra-close Arizona race for Biden – a victory that was later also declared by the Associated Press, which provides results data to the Guardian – was made by Fox’s Arnon Mishkin, who runs the broadcaster’s decision desk. Before the election, Mishkin, a registered Democrat who has worked for Fox News for decades, had made clear that he would not be swayed by internal pressure in making calls for states.
As a result, Mishkin has been portrayed as a defender of the truth, representing the uneasy balance that exists between Fox’s straight news division and the highly opinionated rightwing hosts who shape the external perception of the channel.
On Thursday, Mishkin, who has become a target for angry Trump supporters, told the channel’s viewers that he would not be changing his mind on the basis that “we strongly believe that our call will stand, and that’s why we’re not pulling back the call”.
Dismissing claims from Trump’s team that they could still edge ahead in the ultra-close race as more votes were counted, a visibly exasperated Mishkin pushed back and said the objections were like talking about what would happen “if a frog had wings”.
“We’re confident that the data will basically look like the data we’ve noticed throughout the count in Arizona,” he said.

Trump and his team have an increasingly complicated relationship with Fox News. Throughout his presidency he has been an obsessive watcher of the channel, often providing commentary on his Twitter feed about its audience ratings when he objects to its coverage and phoning in to dispute specific issues.
On the day of the election he complained on air about the channel’s coverage not being sufficiently supportive: “Somebody said what’s the difference between this and four years ago, and I say Fox … In the old days you wouldn’t put ‘Sleepy Joe’ on every time he opens his mouth. You had Democrats on more than you had Republicans. I’m not complaining. I’m just telling people.”
One of the bigger questions in US rightwing media is what happens if Trump loses the election, with longstanding speculation that he could be tempted to start his own media outlet in a bid to communicate directly with his supporters. More

Supporters of Donald Trump gathered outside the Maricopa County Elections Department, chanting ‘count the votes’ after Joe Biden was named victor in the state by a number of news organisations. Media, including Fox News and the Associated Press, called the state in Biden’s favour, but Trump has been narrowing the gap. Maricopa county, Arizona’s most populous and a conservative stronghold, has been the focus of attention as the overall election results remains in the balance
Trump supporters protest at Arizona vote counting centre
US election 2020 live: Biden wins Michigan in vital step towards presidency as Trump tries to challenge results
US election 2020 live results: Donald Trump takes on Joe Biden in tight presidential race More

As the US election slowly draws to its conclusion, one of the areas of confusion is that different media outlets are showing different results for the electoral votes.
The president is elected by winning at least 270 electoral college votes, not the outcome of the popular vote. Because there is no centralised federal election system, it has become tradition in the US that “decision desks” at media organisations make a call that states have been won by one candidate or the other when enough votes have been counted. States that are too close to call – such as Nevada and Georgia at the moment – remain in the balance until a network “calls” them.
The Guardian uses the data collected and analysed by the Associated Press (AP) news agency as the source for when we will call election results. There are a number of other highly reputable election decision desks in US media, including NBC, Fox News and others. They may call races earlier or later than AP. US networks obviously use the decisions from their own desks – other channels may chose to follow one, or wait for two desks to call a state before they count it.
This year, Arizona has brought this into sharp relief. Our current total of 264 electoral votes for Joe Biden includes the fact that AP has called Arizona for the Democratic nominee. Not all decision desks have yet.
AP has issued this guide to all of the states it has called. This is what it says about Arizona:

The AP called the race at 2.50am EST Wednesday, after an analysis of ballots cast statewide concluded there were not enough outstanding to allow Trump to catch up. With 80% of the expected vote counted, Biden was ahead by 5 percentage points, with a roughly 130,000-vote lead over Trump, with about 2.6m ballots counted. The remaining ballots left to be counted, including mail-in votes in Maricopa county, where Biden performed strongly, were not enough for Trump to catch up to the former vice-president.

The Trump campaign disagrees. Biden’s lead is currently down to about 68,000 votes in the state – or less than three percentage points – with 88% of the votes counted. More

Biden has the clearest path to victory
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has won 264 of the 270 electoral college votes needed to declare victory, strengthening his lead with wins in Michigan and Wisconsin on Wednesday. Donald Trump has 214 electoral college votes after gaining one vote in Maine.
As of 2 am ET on Thursday, Biden holds a lead in Nevada, which has six electoral college votes – just enough to get him over the line.
Trump’s lead in Georgia began to narrow late on Wednesday, and as more postal votes are counted Biden could flip the state and win its 16 electoral college votes. More Georgians voted by mail than voted in total in 2016 and these mail-in ballots could skew blue. As of 2 am ET on Thursday, Trump led by 22,000 votes in the state, with an estimated 100,000 votes left to be counted.
Biden could also net Pennsylvania, which would gain him 20 votes, although counting in the state is expected to continue for quite a while.
Addressing supporters at the Chase Center in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden said it was “clear” he would hit the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. “I’m not here to declare that we won, but I am here to report that when the count is finished, we will be the winner,” Biden said. More

Misinformation loves a vacuum, and the uncertainty around the outcome of the US presidential race has created a mighty one. As election officials work to count ballots, Donald Trump and his allies have launched a campaign to cast doubt on the electoral process. False declarations of victory and false allegations of fraud are being pumped into the information void, where their salacious narratives compete with the more prosaic reality that counting takes time.
We spoke with experts on disinformation about why people believe the false narratives Trump is pushing, what those people might do in response, and why Trump’s latest conspiracy theory might not catch on the way he hopes.
The big lie
For months, Trump has seeded doubt about the legitimacy of mail-in ballots, laying the groundwork for the vague conspiracy theories about fraudulent ballots that he tweeted wildly about throughout the day Wednesday.
Trump’s claims are perfectly suited to people who share what Whitney Phillips, a professor of communications at Syracuse University, calls “deep memetic frames” or “deeply, viscerally held stories about the world that shape what you think to be true and what you think should be done in response”. One such frame is characterized by deep distrust of institutions and “a general sense that there are people who are out to get people who look like us” – such as the so-called “Deep State”.
This mindset has been prevalent in recent months amid the rise of QAnon and Covid-skeptic communities, Phillips said. “In some ways, the sensationalist child-eating, blood-drinking QAnon stuff distracts from the really corrosive part of the narrative, which is the idea that liberals, scientists and Jews are all coming to get you, so you better go get your guns.”
Phillips views Trump’s failure to debunk or denounce conspiracy theories as preparations for selling this latest conspiracy theory. “In the past few months, Trump started using the deep state by name; he started specifically engaging with and embracing QAnon,” she said. “That underlying frame – ‘don’t trust “them”’ – was the groundwork for his efforts to contest the election.”
Notably, this disinformation effort remains a top-down approach. “We’re not talking about misinformation from the grassroots or foreign actors, said Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, at a Wednesday morning election debrief. “It’s known influencers.”
Online to offline
Among people who believe Trump’s false claims about election theft, there is likely to be a strong impetus to take action. “Anytime people feel that their rights are being taken from them, especially by the government, we do see widespread social unrest,” said Joan Donovan, research director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.
Already, protesters have targeted the TFC Center in Detroit, demanding access to the office where ballots are being counted. And worryingly, the American right does not have the same tradition of street protest that the political left does.
“If you don’t have a robust repertoire of tactics as you’re heading into a street protest, then it becomes very appealing to use violence as the messenger,” Donovan said. “It does tend to enliven the spirit of paramilitary organizations and people who are supporters of the second amendment, who believe that a Democratic president would be coming for their guns. We’re going to see a lot of those issues coalesce in the next few days.”
The role of the platforms
Under intense pressure from the traditional news media, researchers and civil society, the social media platforms that long allowed Trump tremendous leeway to break their polices have taken a more aggressive stance toward his false claims about the election. In the run-up to the election, Twitter and Facebook began applying misinformation labels to some of Trump’s false statements, and Facebook even expanded its policy on premature declaration of victory on Wednesday – an uncommonly quick response from a company that tends to dig in its heels when facing criticism from the press.
The labels are by no means a panacea. “For people behind a certain frame, a label on a tweet is just more evidence that there’s censorship,” said Phillips. Stamos also noted that the lack of lasting punishments (like suspensions or bans) for repeat offenders has created a reverse incentive for certain influencers. “They seem to enjoy being punished,” he said. “It’s part of their brand now.”
Losing the megaphone
While Trump is certainly pushing the false idea of a stolen election, and while some of his supporters are deeply susceptible to believing that narrative, it’s still unclear if the narrative will take hold more broadly.
“In order to do disinformation well, you have to have a few key elements,” said Donovan. “One is an online cavalry ready to troll. The second is either key figures or key evidence that allow you to make your claim. The third thing is the claim has to be very straightforward and people have to have something to circulate.”
While various videos and photos have emerged as supposed “proof” of fraud, they have all been debunked by fact-checkers and none appear ready for prime time – the fourth element of a successful disinformation campaign. “To really break out, you need the megaphone of conservative media,” Donovan said.
On election night, Fox News declined to validate Trump’s conspiracy theory and instead hewed generally to evidence-based projections. “The Maga coalition that brought Trump’s presidency into being has been fractured,” Donovan added. “The tale of the tape is going to be if Fox News calls it for Biden ahead of other outlets or in line with other major news outlets. If they are not on board with Trump’s challenges ideologically and in terms of evidence, then Trump is going to have a really big uphill battle in terms of controlling the narrative of who won.” More