US Election 2020: Biden inches closer to victory with leads in Pennsylvania, Georgia

WASHINGTON/WILMINGTON: Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden took a narrow lead on Friday in two key states required by Republican president Donald Trump to secure a second term, in a major upset for the incumbent in the presidential race.

Biden now leads in Pennsylvania and Georgia, which have 20 and 16 electoral college votes respectively, and if won, will add 36 more votes to his current 264 — taking him past the 270 required to win the presidency.

Biden is also currently in the lead in Nevada, which has six votes, just the number he needs to clinch victory.

Trump has 214 votes in all and needs to win four states — Pennsylvania,  Georgia, North Carolina, and Nevada — which will give him a boost of 57 votes, bringing him to 271 votes.

Alaska, the other remaining state that has not declared a potential winner yet, has three electoral college votes, so is not the major boost any of the candidates seek at this juncture.

According to CNN, in Pennsylvania, Biden is in the majority by 5,587 votes. Overall, he has 3,295,304 votes, or 49.4% of the total in the state. Trump has 3,289,717 votes, or 49.3%.

In Georgia, there just north of 4,000 votes left to count, the publication added.

Figures 'far from final'

Added security for Biden

Meanwhile, the US Secret Service has increased its protective bubble around Biden as chances increased that he will be the next US president, the Washington Post reported.

The Secret Service sent an extra squad of agents to Biden's campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware as expectations rose that the Democratic candidate would be able to declare victory over President Donald Trump as early as Friday, the Post reported.

The Secret Service, an agency under the Department of Homeland Security, is in charge or protecting the White House and senior government officials, visiting high officials, and others.

It had already deployed some agents to protect Biden around early July after he triumphed in the Democratic Party´s presidential primaries.

As a former vice president, Biden could have requested Secret Service protection before then, but reportedly did not.

If Biden becomes president-elect, Secret Service protection is expected to ramp up to a higher level.

Additionally, according to CNN, restricted "national defense airspace" has been put in place over Biden's home.

'Election being stolen'

With his re-election chances fading as more and more votes are counted in a handful of battleground states, Trump launched an extraordinary assault on the country's democratic process from the White House on Thursday, falsely claiming the election was being "stolen" from him.

Offering no evidence, Trump lambasted election workers and alleged fraud in the states where results from a dwindling set of uncounted votes are pushing Democrat Joe Biden nearer to victory.

"This is a case where they're trying to steal an election," Trump said, who spoke for about 15 minutes in the White House briefing room before leaving without taking questions.

'Messy' democracy

Trump's remarks followed a series of Twitter posts from Trump earlier in the day that called for vote counting to stop, even though he currently trails Biden in enough states to hand the Democrat the presidency.

Trump's campaign, meanwhile, pursued a flurry of lawsuits in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania, though judges in Georgia and Michigan quickly rejected the challenges. Legal experts said the cases had little chance of affecting the electoral outcome.

Biden wrote on Twitter shortly after Trump's White House appearance, "No one is going to take our democracy away from us." In earlier remarks from his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, Biden expressed confidence he would win and urged calm as votes were tallied.

"Democracy's sometimes messy," Biden said. "It sometimes requires a little patience as well. But that patience has been rewarded now for more than 240 years in a system of governance that has been the envy of the world."

The close election underscored the nation's deep political divides, while the slow count of millions of mail-in ballots served as a reminder of the deadly pandemic that continues to upend American life.

Read more: What is Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden's net worth?

Biden, if he prevails, will nevertheless have failed to deliver the sweeping repudiation to Trump that Democrats had hoped for, reflecting the deep support the president enjoys despite his tumultuous four years in office. Trump's influence on the Republican Party will remain strong, even if he ultimately loses a tight election.

The winner will face a pandemic that has killed more than 234,000 Americans and left millions more out of work, even as the country still grapples with the aftermath of months of unrest over race relations and police brutality.

He is trying to avoid becoming the first incumbent US president to lose a re-election bid since fellow Republican George H.W. Bush in 1992.

Trump, who often relished legal battles during his turbulent business career, was at the White House working the phones and monitoring developments on television, two Trump advisers said. He has been talking to state governors as well as close friends and aides and dispatched some of his closest advisers out in the field to fight for him.

"He's very engaged, he's monitoring, talking to all the states," a Trump confidant said. "It doesn't look good but this guy wants to keep fighting. He's in a fighting mood right now. He's not melancholy or dejected. But the path is getting harder and harder."

Twitter and Facebook have flagged numerous posts from Trump since Election Day as misleading.

Trump's rhetoric had gained traction with some supporters, however. A Facebook group called "Stop the Steal" pushing false claims of voter fraud gained hundreds of thousands of members on Thursday before the social media giant took down the page, citing calls for violence.

Supporters of both candidates also held small protests outside voting centres on Thursday, though the demonstrations were largely peaceful.