Biden takes lead in critical Pennsylvania

Former Vice President Joe Biden has taken the lead in his birth state of Pennsylvania as the number of outstanding ballots has dwindled, putting the Democrat within striking distance of the 270 electoral votes that he needs to win the White House.

CNN has not yet called the commonwealth for the former vice president, but for Biden -- a son of Scranton -- eclipsing Trump in the Keystone State was a symbolic moment in the course of a political career that has spanned nearly five decades.

With the latest batch of tabulated vote counts released Friday morning, Biden now has a lead of 5,587 votes in the state.

During the long and hard-fought primary Democratic primary, Biden repeatedly made the case that he alone could sway the blue-collar voters who abandoned his party to support Donald Trump in 2016 and could rebuild the Democrats' "blue wall" in the Midwest that Trump had demolished.

Biden succeeded in that goal by notching wins in Michigan and Wisconsin, according to CNN projections, and Pennsylvania would be the capstone of that long-held dream for the former vice president.

For several days now, Biden advisers have insisted that they are confident the Democratic nominee can hold Pennsylvania and the momentum has moved unrelentingly in Biden's favour.

As officials have counted the hundreds of thousands of vote-by-mail ballots, Biden dramatically narrowed Trump's lead, infuriating the President and his allies, who know the President's path to reelection is over if he cannot hold the commonwealth. If Pennsylvania serves as the key in Biden's path to the White House, it would be a fitting end to his longstanding effort to cultivate his image as "Middle Class Joe" who understands and empathizes with the frustrations of the working-class voters of the industrial Midwest -- voters Trump courted by calling them the "forgotten men and women" of America.

To underscore that point on the morning of Election Day, Biden made a final trip to his childhood home where his Scranton supporters surrounded him on the street to wish him good luck. On one of the living room walls in his boyhood home, he wrote: "From this House to the White House with the Grace of God," signing his name and the date, "11.3.2020." But Pennsylvania was not the only state that was tightening Friday morning in this cliffhanger election.

The momentum of the race has shifted in Biden's favour -- putting him on the doorstep of the critical threshold of 270 electoral votes needed to become president -- as he has racked up huge margins among mail-in ballots favoured by Democratic voters.

Biden jumped ahead of Trump in Georgia around 4:30 am ET Friday and leads by just more than 1,000 votes. The former vice president's surprising strength in Georgia stemmed from huge turnout from Black voters in Fulton County and other suburbs around Atlanta, fatigue with Trump in Georgia's fast-growing suburbs -- which have become increasingly young and diverse in recent years -- and assiduous work over more than a decade to boost Democratic registration in the state.

No Democratic presidential nominee has won the state since Bill Clinton in 1992. Clinton narrowly defeated former President George H.W. Bush in that state in part because he and Bush were in a three-way race that included Ross Perot, an independent candidate for the presidency.

As the drama unfolded across the country, the President's allies launched legal challenges and floated conspiracy theories while Trump tweeted "Stop the Count!"

Tight races are also going into overtime in two other states that could influence the destiny of the race, Nevada and Arizona.

Biden so far has 253 electoral votes and Trump has 213, according to CNN projections.

Pennsylvania, the state that could take Biden over the 270-vote threshold, could complete most of its outstanding counts on Friday, officials there said.

Tens of thousands of votes remain to be counted. The remaining pool of Philadelphia votes to be counted is about 25,000, according to a city official and an official familiar with the counting. These will take longer to count because they are provisional ballots as well as ones that require review because of issues like dates or signatures. The sources said city election officials are starting this batch from scratch. "It's going to be a while," one of the sources said.

Trump cannot find a route to 270 electoral votes without Georgia and Pennsylvania, so his chances of securing reelection will hinge on developments in the two states in the coming hours.

But on Thursday night, Trump effectively sent a signal that he has no intention of leaving power without a fight if he ends up losing the election.

The President's speech from the White House briefing room could end up being one of the most dangerous presidential statements in American history. In it, Trump falsely claimed that votes that were cast before and during the election, but counted after Election Day, are illegal votes.

Trump made ludicrous claims that his leads on election night shrunk because Democratic officials keep finding ballots, when in fact the counts have narrowed because election officials in many states counted the vote-by-mail ballots, which favoured Democrats, after the Election Day votes, which tended to favour Republicans.

As the President spoke, the daily tally of new US coronavirus infections hit 114,876, the worst daily count ever, encapsulating how Trump's political obsessions have driven his neglect of a crisis that has killed more than 234,000 Americans.