Biden leads Trump as key states hang in the balance
Washington, Nov 3 (EFE).- Democratic challenger Joe Biden led Republican incumbent Donald Trump 117-89 in Electoral College votes based on media projections of the outcomes in 18 states in Tuesday’s US presidential election.
A candidate needs 270 Electoral College votes to win.
With the polls closed in all but 10 of the 50 states, estimates showed the president winning Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Louisiana and Wyoming.
The real estate mogul won all of those states in 2016.
Biden, who served as vice president under Barack Obama, carried the states of Vermont, Virginia, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Rhode Island, Illinois and New York, as well as the District of Columbia.
Florida, the third most-populous state, remained too close to call with more than 90 percent of the ballots counted.
Trump took the Sunshine State’s 29 electoral votes in 2016.
Biden had a significant lead in the Midwestern state of Ohio, which has traditionally been a bellwether of the outcome in presidential contests, but with roughly 48 percent of the votes still to be counted, it was too early to make a projection.
The same was true of North Carolina, a state that went for Trump in 2016.
Other key states, including Texas (38 electoral votes) were too close to call. The last Democratic presidential candidate to win the Lone Star State was Jimmy Carter in 1976
Like virtually every aspect of life in 2020, the presidential election has been marked by the coronavirus pandemic. With 9.3 million confirmed cases 232,000 deaths, no country has been hit harder by Covid-19 than the United States.
Early voting in this election cycle has broken records, as more than 100 million voters cast their ballots prior to Nov. 3, including 64.8 million mail-in votes, according to the U.S. Elections Project at the University of Florida.
With reports of robust turnout at the polls on Tuesday, it is expected that participation will handily exceed the 136.6 million ballots – corresponding to 55.7 percent of the electorate – cast in the 2016 election.
Besides the president, Americans are choosing all 435 members of the House of Representatives, a third of the 100-member Senate and thousands of state and local officials. EFE
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