Vox live results: Biden is catching Trump as mail ballots are counted

The state is critical in the presidential election.

Pennsylvania may well end up deciding the election.

The state was once the centerpiece of Donald Trump’s hopes for a second term, but as more votes are counted, Biden is slowly but surely gaining an edge. Election officials and experts believe the tally could conceivably be finished on Thursday, though it may take longer.

Election analysts say there are hundreds of thousands of votes still to be counted (estimates vary, but it is in the neighborhood of half a million, as of mid-morning Thursday), and they are expected to skew toward Biden. They are generally mail ballots in more Democratic areas, which should give the Democrat huge margins because Biden voters were much more likely than Trump voters to cast their ballots by mail.

The votes should continue trickling in throughout the day from Biden-friendly places like Philadelphia and Chester County, and swing counties like Bucks that are breaking for Biden. On Wednesday, Trump’s apparent lead shrank dramatically as the ballots from the more Democratic parts of the state were counted. That is expected to continue on Thursday.

The main reason Pennsylvania is taking so long is that the Republican state legislature all but guaranteed the outcome would not be known on election night by refusing to come to a deal with Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf that would allow local election officials to start counting early voting and mail-in ballots before the day of the election.

While Trump has now falsely claimed the delay in counting mail ballots is evidence of fraud, it’s a situation specifically engineered by Pennsylvania Republicans. Whatever the president might declare, the results are still being tabulated, and local election officials have promised the public that every legitimately cast vote will be counted.

With Trump winning the biggest prizes in the Sun Belt — Florida and Texas — Pennsylvania’s importance became more and more evident over the course of election night. Trump won the state, which awards 20 votes in the Electoral College, by fewer than 50,000 votes against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The Electoral College math for Joe Biden has always been fairly simple: If he could flip Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and every other state voted the same way it did in 2016, he would win the presidency. (He’s already won the second two states.) Biden also still has a chance to flip some Trump 2016 states (Arizona and Georgia appear to be the likeliest candidates), but the Rust Belt was and is his clearest path to the White House.

However, it must be emphasized: The vote count in Pennsylvania will take time. Because of the unusually high number of mail ballots used during the Covid-19 pandemic, and because Democrats were more likely to vote that way, Biden’s share of the vote was always expected to be counted later than the Trump-friendly share.

Pennsylvania is also the most likely battleground for legal challenges to the vote, with Republicans signaling on election night that they would sue to stop votes from being counted.

Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani is purportedly launching a legal fight, and the president has falsely claimed victory in the state. Election officials in Philadelphia, meanwhile, are literally livestreaming their vote count.

Political observers have been preaching patience in watching Pennsylvania’s results. With the presidential election coming down to a handful of states, that advice looks prescient now. Check back here for the latest updates.

Vox also has results pages for the presidential race and these key swing states: Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Nevada.

And you can follow Senate live results here and House live results here.

Finally, here’s how Vox (and other media outlets) will be making calls.