Yes, Donald Trump and his Republican enablers will keep denying defeat and firing off legal challenges that are 99.9 percent certain not to flip any of the states that have been called for Joe Biden by all the relevant experts. But now the margin for any real doubt is gone, as the last two undecided states were called by the New York Times; other sources will soon follow:
The calls have been inevitable for a while. Biden leads in Georgia by 14,052 votes, with 5 million ballots having been cast. The hand-recount of all these ballots ordered by embattled Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, which will last until next Wednesday, could allay some wild charges of irregularities from the Trump camp, but is extremely unlikely to cut significantly into Biden’s lead.
In North Carolina, the deadline for receipt of mail ballots postmarked by Election Day arrived yesterday, and it appears there just aren’t enough remaining mail or provisional ballots to eliminate Trump’s 93,602 vote lead even if Biden got them all. The results there could become official as soon as later today; the deadline for final state certification is November 24, but that will be an afterthought.
So, for those of us who live in the world of verifiable facts rather than spin, the final mystery of the 2020 presidential contest has been resolved. Joe Biden won 25 states (plus the District of Columbia) with 306 electoral votes, and Donald Trump won 25 states with 232 electoral votes. As a footnote, Biden picked up one electoral vote from Nebraska and Trump took one from Maine in the two states that let individual congressional districts cast an electoral vote.
This is a precise reversal of the 2016 Electoral College results, if you ignore the “faithless electors” (two from the Trump column, five from Clinton’s) who defected long after the voting. Trump did not flip any of Clinton’s states, but Biden flipped five of Trump’s (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin).
Seven House races are currently uncalled, and two Senate races in Georgia are going to a January 5 runoff.
