Joe Biden wins Wisconsin, presidency still hangs in balance

WASHINGTON – The fate of the United States presidency hung in the balance Wednesday as Democratic challenger Joe Biden picked up a win in Wisconsin while fighting President Donald Trump in other battleground states that could prove crucial in determining who wins the White House.

Neither candidate has cleared the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House yet, and the margins were still tight in several other states as of Wednesday morning. Top advisers for both Biden and Trump expressed confidence that they respectively had the likelier path to victory in the outstanding states.

The AP called Wisconsin for Biden after election officials in the state said all outstanding ballots had been counted, save for a few hundred in one township and an expected small number of provisional ballots.

Trump’s campaign has requested a recount. Statewide recounts in Wisconsin have historically changed the vote tally by only a few hundred votes; Biden leads by 0.624 percentage point out of nearly 3.3 million ballots counted.

It was unclear when or how quickly a national winner could be determined. The latest vote counts in Michigan gave Biden a small lead, but it was still too early to call the race

Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said the president would formally request a Wisconsin recount, citing “irregularities in several Wisconsin counties,” and the campaign filed filed suit in Michigan to halt counting of ballots because it contended it wasn’t given “meaningful access” to observe the opening of ballots and the counting process

At the same time, hundreds of thousands of votes were still to be counted in Pennsylvania.

The margins were exceedingly tight in states across the country, with the candidates trading wins in battlegrounds. Trump picked up Florida, the largest of the swing states, while Biden flipped Arizona, a state that has reliably voted Republican in recent elections.