President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. narrowly defeated President Trump in Georgia and Mr. Trump won North Carolina, as the two final states were called on Friday a week and a half after Election Day, The New York Times reported.
Mr. Biden now has 306 electoral votes and Mr. Trump has 232. Mr. Biden became president-elect when he won Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes on Saturday, passing the required 270-vote threshold.
The victory for Mr. Biden in Georgia — a once reliably Republican state whose politics have been pushed to the left — means he flipped five states that Mr. Trump won in 2016. The others were Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Mr. Trump did not flip any states this year.
Mr. Biden’s margin in Georgia currently stands at just over 14,000 votes, or 0.28 percentage points, with nearly all of the ballots counted. Mr. Trump’s margin in North Carolina is more than 73,000 votes, or 1.3 percentage points.
Mr. Biden’s late surge in Georgia, thanks to his dominance in Atlanta, Savannah and the increasingly Democrat-friendly suburbs around both, transformed what had seemed to be a safe Trump state in early tabulations last week into one of the closest contests in the nation.
Mr. Trump spurred near-record turnout in the rural southwestern parts of the state bordering Alabama and the Florida Panhandle, the white outer suburbs and small cities, and the Appalachian northwest, which touches deep-red Tennessee. Mr. Biden was powered by high turnout among Black voters in Atlanta, and flipped some suburban white voters in the moderate suburban counties that ring the city.
In North Carolina, Black voters shattered early voting records in the weeks leading up to the election. But despite a significant, late get-out-the-vote push by Democrats to motivate Black and Latino voters, Mr. Trump — who visited North Carolina a half-dozen times in the weeks leading up to the election — was more effective in motivating his base of white working-class and rural voters.
Mr. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in North Carolina in 2016 by fewer than four percentage points, but the state has been reliably red for decades: Since 1976, the only Democrat to prevail has been Barack Obama, who narrowly won in 2008.
Flipping Georgia, a state last won by a Democrat in 1992, was dramatic, but it was years in the making: Mr. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the state in 2016 by five percentage points, a far slimmer margin than Republicans enjoyed in previous presidential elections.
Georgia’s vote count is currently the subject of an audit, though state officials have said that the results are unlikely to change.
The Trump campaign loses a court challenge in Michigan and withdraws one in Arizona
In a strong blow to the Trump campaign’s legal efforts to try to overturn the results of the election that President Trump lost, a state court judge in Michigan rejected on Friday a Republican request to halt the certification of the vote in Wayne County — home to Detroit — pending an audit of the count.
The ruling by the judge, Timothy M. Kenny, ended an unusual legal effort that could have disrupted the certification of the vote in Michigan. It was one two decisive defeats the Trump campaign suffered on Friday in its efforts to challenge the nation’s election results.
In his ruling, Judge Kenny noted that the audit requested by the two Republican plaintiffs in the case would have been “unwieldy” and forced the rest of Michigan to wait for its results to be certified.
“It would be an unprecedented exercise of judicial activism for this court to stop the certification process,” he added.
Judge Kenny’s decision came in response to a wide-ranging lawsuit filed by two Republican poll workers, Cheryl Costantino and Edward McCall, who made broad claims of irregularities during the vote count in Detroit’s TCF Convention Center.
The plaintiffs maintained that some poll workers were coaching voters to cast their ballots for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., that some Republican poll challengers were not given adequate access to monitor the vote count, and that loads of ballots were improperly brought into the convention center in the middle of the night.
Lawyers for Detroit and the Michigan Democratic Party had argued in court papers that about 100 Republican poll challengers were in fact let into the convention center, but that some were not allowed to return after leaving once the room filled up.
Judge Kenny wrote that while he took some of these allegations seriously, some were too general to be proven and others were “rife with speculation and guesswork.”
Less than two hours before the ruling in Detroit, the Trump campaign effectively dropped its so-called “Sharpiegate” lawsuit in Arizona, which had claimed that some ballots cast for Mr. Trump were invalidated after voters used Sharpie pens, admitting that not enough presidential votes were at stake in the case to affect the outcome of the race.
The suit stemmed from a viral rumor that falsely claimed Arizona’s voting machines were incapable of tabulating ballots that were filled out with Sharpies.
In what is known as a notice of mootness, Kory Langhofer, a lawyer for the campaign, acknowledged that “a tabulation of the votes statewide has rendered unnecessary a judicial ruling as to the presidential electors.”
The Arizona attorney general had already conducted an inquiry into the matter and found that the use of Sharpies in Maricopa County “did not result in disenfranchisement.”
Mr. Biden was declared the winner of Arizona’s 11 electoral votes Thursday night, after he finished more than 11,000 votes ahead of President Trump.
At a hearing on Thursday, a Maricopa County elections official testified that only 191 presidential votes in the county might have been affected by Mr. Langhofer’s suit. The case will continue, however, for two minor down-ballot races.
SOURCE: The New York Times