E-Paper
Biden catches up with Trump in key states, prez vents steam again
The race changed incrementally and surely in Biden’s direction all through Thursday, Day 2 of counting of votes.
Democratic nominee Joe Biden caught up with Donald Trump in Georgia, wiping out the US president’s early lead of hundreds of thousands of votes in the presidential election.
Biden had slashed Trump’s lead in Pennsylvania by a few more thousands of votes as the president had raged in a monologue from the White House briefing room earlier at around 7 pm, “If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” he said, adding later, re-airing an old but unfounded grievance, “they are trying to steal an election” and that there was an effort under way to “rig” the elections. He made these claims without presenting any evidence.
Daniel Dale, the CNN fact-checker, was aghast. “I’ve read or watched all of Trump’s speeches since 2016. This is the most dishonest speech he has ever given.”
Even close Republican allies were publicly uncomfortable with the American president’s wild allegations. Chris Christie, the former Republican governor of New Jersey who had helped Trump prepare for his presidential debates, called for the president to produce evidence.
“Keep the faith, folks,” Biden tweeted shortly after the president wrapped up his angry speech that was packed with unproven allegations of election fraud and showed an astonishing lack of understanding of the US election process.
Mysteriously, he had said, his early leads in some states disappeared at one stage. Those were because of absentee ballots, which were counted later. It might have been a deliberate ploy, though, to muddy the waters.
The race changed incrementally and surely in Biden’s direction all through Thursday, Day 2 of counting of votes. The former vice-president kept piling up his votes in Pennsylvania and Georgia, the former a well-known battleground state and latter a solidly Republican state that has not voted Democratic in a presidential election since 1992, when Bill Clinton won it in a three-way fight.
As President Trump’s leads collapsed in these two states, he gained on Biden in Arizona, which some news organisations had already called for the former vice-president.
The tally of Electoral College votes, which will decide the White House race, remained unchanged. Biden was still at 264 in Associated Press’s tracker, which has called Arizona for Biden, and Trump stayed at 214. They need 270 to win. The popular vote, which Biden leads by 4 million at this stage, is of no consequence.
Sometime in the evening, with everything happening in counting centres, on streets and on television, Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s former chief of staff, injected a new element into the narrative. The president might lose this election but he will not go away and may make another run again in 2024. He attributed it to his former boss’s deep dislike of losing.
The dread of defeat, however, had been overtaken by a sense of desperation in the Trump world. The president’s elder son, Don Trump Jr, demanded Republicans who would be on the ballot in 2024 to rally around the president and support his flailing re-election chances. His younger brother Eric Trump patronisingly thanked senior Republican Senator Lindsey Graham’s message of support for “having a spine”.
