Democrat Joe Biden pushes closer to the 270 Electoral College votes needed to carry the White House, securing victories in the “blue wall” battlegrounds of Wisconsin and Michigan and narrowing President Donald Trump’s path.
Two days after Election Day, neither candidate has amassed the votes needed to win the White House. But Biden’s victories in the Great Lakes states left him at 264, meaning he was one battleground state away — any would do — from becoming president-elect.
Trump, with 214 electoral votes, faced a much higher hurdle. To reach 270, he needed to claim all four remaining battlegrounds: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia and Nevada.
With millions of votes yet to be tabulated, Biden already has received more than 71 million votes, the most in history. At an afternoon news conference Wednesday, the former vice president said he expected to win the presidency but stopped short of outright declaring victory.
Dozens of angry supporters of Trump converged on vote-counting centers in Detroit and Phoenix as returns went against the president in the two key states, while thousands of anti-Trump protesters demanding a complete count of the ballots in the still-undecided election took to the streets in cities across the U.S.
The protests came as the president repeatedly insisted without evidence that there were major problems with the voting and the ballot counting, and as Republicans filed suit in multiple states, preparing to contest election results.
In Minnesota, law enforcement officers arrested more than 600 demonstrators who marched onto Interstate 94 Wednesday night, protesting Trump’s threats to challenge the results of Tuesday’s unsettled election, as well as a variety of social injustices.
Officers in riot gear surrounded the crowd and ordered them to sit on the pavement and wait to be arrested. No force or chemicals were used to make the arrests, according to the Minnesota Department of Public Safety.
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Irak Saenz can be reached at saen4341@stthomas.edu.