Joe Biden has pulled ahead of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, a key state in the presidential race, results data show.
The Democratic candidate is leading by more than 13,000 votes, with 98% counted. If Joe Biden takes the state, he will win the election.
Earlier, Joe Biden edged ahead of his Republican rival in Georgia, another key battleground state, where a recount will now be held.
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign said: “This election is not over.”
Trump campaign lawyer Matt Morgan claimed without evidence that ballots in Georgia were “improperly harvested” and that in Pennsylvania election observers were not given “meaningful access” to counting, despite a judge’s order allowing them further access on November 5.
In a statement later, President Trump said: “From the beginning we have said that all legal ballots must be counted and all illegal ballots should not be counted, yet we have met resistance to this basic principle by Democrats at every turn.
“We will pursue this process through every aspect of the law to guarantee that the American people have confidence in our government. I will never give up fighting for you and our nation.”
A senior Trump administration official has told CBS News President Trump does not plan to concede in the event of a victory declaration by Joe Biden.
There are reports from the Biden campaign in Delaware that he will make a primetime address to the nation on Friday evening local time. This is believed to be dependent on the race being called by then.
Joe Biden currently has 253 Electoral College votes, while Donald Trump has 214. To win the White House, a candidate needs 270.
Some news organizations have a higher tally for Mr Biden, having projected a win for the Democrat in Arizona.
Pennsylvania, where Joe Biden was born, has 20 Electoral College votes. If the Democrat wins it, he will secure the victory with 273 votes.
Election officials there said the count could take several days.
Pennsylvania has always been a major political battleground. The state voted Democrat in six consecutive races before it swung to Donald Trump in 2016.
In Georgia, Joe Biden is currently leading with more than 1,500 votes, with 99% of the ballots counted. Georgia’s secretary of state said there would be a recount because the margin was so small.
Georgia is a traditionally Republican state and has not been won by a Democrat in a presidential race since 1992.
President Trump’s team says legal challenges and recounts in some states will favor them.
Bob Bauer, a Biden campaign lawyer, says the lawsuits are legally “meritless” and designed “to message falsely about what’s taking place in the electoral process”.
The vote is also currently too close to call in Nevada and North Carolina.
A win in just Pennsylvania, or two of the other four remaining states would be enough to confirm Joe Biden as president-elect.
Donald Trump, meanwhile, would need to win Pennsylvania and three of the remaining four states.
He has cut the Democratic candidate’s lead in Arizona (11 electoral votes) to less than 44,000 votes, with 93% counted.
He also had a lead of more than 76,000 in North Carolina (15 electoral votes), with 96% of votes tallied.
In Nevada, Joe Biden has an edge of more than 20,000 over Donald Trump. The state has six votes under the electoral college system. An election official there said the results from more than 51,000 postal ballots would be updated on November 6.
President Trump has made unsubstantiated claims of election fraud.
Speaking from the White House on November 5, the president said: “If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes they can try to steal the election from us.”
Beyond allegations of irregularities, the Trump campaign has not presented any evidence.
President Trump added: “We were winning in all the key locations, by a lot actually, and then our numbers started getting miraculously whittled away in secret.”
He actively discouraged his supporters from voting by mail, while Joe Biden urged his voters to do so, and it is these postal ballots that are now being tallied in the key states.
Election analysts also say President Trump’s claims of Democratic electoral corruption are undermined by the better-than-expected performance of his fellow Republicans in congressional races across the map.
President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden have been travelling across the nation as the US election enters its closing stage.
Donald Trump visited five battleground states while Joe Biden spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania.
Joe Biden maintains a solid national lead in the polls ahead of November 3 general election.
However, his advantage is narrower in key states which could decide the result.
More than 90 million people have already cast their ballots in early voting, putting the country on course for its highest turnout in a century.
The election comes amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The US has recorded more cases and more deaths than any other country worldwide, reporting more than 99,000 infections on October 31 alone.
Top virus expert Dr. Anthony Fauci has sharply criticized the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic, drawing a rebuke from the White House on November 1.
President Trump had a punishing schedule on November 1, holding rallies in Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina and Georgia, followed later by Florida – all states where polls suggest a tighter race.
Speaking in Washington, a town in Michigan north of Detroit, President Trump told his supporters that under his leadership “the economy is now growing at the fastest rate ever recorded”.
He predicted he would take the state again as he did in 2016, and said that the state known for its car manufacturing “didn’t have any auto plants four years ago” when he was elected.
He said: “We brought back your car industry. Your car industry was finished. You would have had nothing left.”
At a later rally in Dubuque, Iowa – joined by high-profile supporters like his daughter Ivanka and aide Hope Hicks – President Trump promised secure borders and more conservative judges in the courts.
Addressing Covid-19, the president told supporters they had a choice between a “deadly Biden lockdown” or “a safe vaccine that ends the pandemic”.
Donald Trump’s comments came after Anthony Fauci, head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the Washington Post that the US is “in for a whole lot of hurt” in the coming months.
“All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors,” he told the newspaper.
Joe Biden was “taking it seriously from a public health perspective”, while President Trump had a different perspective and was focusing on “the economy and reopening the country”, he added.
White House spokesman Judd Deere said on November 1 that Dr. Fauci’s comments were “unacceptable”, saying that the expert chose “to criticize the President in the media and make his political leanings known by praising the President’s opponent”.
Joe Biden meanwhile headed to Pennsylvania, place of his birth and another key state in the election. President Trump narrowly won there in 2016 but polls suggest Joe Biden is slightly ahead this year.
At a rally in Philadelphia the former vice-president addressed the city’s black community, vowing to address “systemic racism” in the US and attacking the president’s handling of the pandemic – something which has disproportionately affected African Americans.
He said: “It’s almost criminal the way he’s handled it.
“It’s a mass casualty event in the black community and it’s totally unnecessary.”
Earlier in the day Joe Biden also courted Latino voters with a tweet in Spanish, speaking of the separation of migrant families at the border and his response to Hurricane Maria after it hit Puerto Rico.
He tweeted: “President Trump has attacked the dignity of Latino families time and again…This will end when I am president.”
Joe Biden also addressed a report by news site Axios which says the president will declare victory on Tuesday night if it looks as if he is ahead.
“The president’s not going to steal this election,” he told reporters.
Joe Biden also criticized President Trump for encouraging his supporters after some forced a Biden campaign bus to stop on a Texas highway, something the FBI has now confirmed it is investigating.
Donald Trump tweeted on November 1 that in his opinion, “these patriots did nothing wrong.”
The president denied the Axios report, but told journalists before his North Carolina rally that counting ballots after Election Day was a “terrible thing”.
“I don’t think it’s fair that we have to wait for a long period of time after the election,” he said.
Joe Biden’s campaign said he and his running mate Kamala Harris would “fan out” to “all four corners” of Pennsylvania on November 2, joined by their partners and Lady Gaga and John Legend.
On November 1, Kamala Harris campaigned in Georgia, another state which President Trump won in 2016 but which the Democratic Party is trying to win this year.
President Donald Trump and his Democratic rival Joe Biden clashed over Covid-19 and race while trading corruption charges, in their final live TV debate which took place on Thursday night in Nashville, Tennessee.
The first debate was a chaotic, insult-filled exchange between the two candidates. But on October 22, the personal attacks were (mostly) out – instead audiences got the chance to hear some of what Biden and Trump had to offer to Americans.
The muted mics probably helped to cool temperatures and the moderator, Kristen Welker, has been celebrated for encouraging a higher standard of debate.
With arguments on coronavirus, race, climate change and corruption, both candidates made it clear how different their visions for the US were.
On the pandemic, Joe Biden would not rule out more lockdowns, while President Trump insisted it was time to reopen the US.
Donald Trump cited unsubstantiated claims Joe Biden personally profited from his son’s business dealings. The Democrat brought up President Trump’s opaque taxes.
Joe Biden has a solid lead with 11 days to go until the presidential election.
However, winning the most votes does not always win the election, and the margin is narrower in a handful of states that could decide the race either way.
More than 47 million people have already cast their ballots in a voting surge driven by the pandemic.
This is already more than voted before polling day in the 2016 election. There are about 230 million eligible voters in total.
In snap polls – from CNN, Data Progress and US Politics – most respondents said Joe Biden had won the debate by a margin of more than 50% to about 40%.
The final debate was a less acrimonious and more substantive affair than the pair’s previous showdown on September 29, which devolved into insults and name-calling.
Following that political brawl, debate organizers this time muted microphones during the candidates’ opening statements on each topic to minimize disruption.
However, the 90-minute debate, moderated by NBC’s Kristen Welker, was the scene of plenty of personal attacks between the opponents, whose mutual dislike was palpable.
In individual closing argument to voters, they offered starkly different visions for the nation on everything from shutting down the US to tackle coronavirus, to shutting down the fossil fuel industry to confront climate change.
Nowhere was the distinction between the two candidates more apparent than in their approach to the pandemic.
Asked about his support for more lockdowns if the scientists recommended it, Joe Biden, a Democrat, did not rule it out.
Donald Trump, a Republican, said it was wrong to inflict further damage on the economy because of an infection from which most people recover.
“This is a massive country with a massive economy,” said the president.
“People are losing their jobs, they’re committing suicide. There’s depression, alcohol, drugs at a level nobody’s ever seen before.”
Donald Trump, 74, declared that the virus was “going away” and that a vaccine would be ready by the end of the year, while Joe Biden, 77, warned the nation was heading towards “a dark winter”.
President Trump said: “We’re learning to live with it.”
Joe Biden countered: “Come on. We’re dying with it.”
He laid blame for the 220,000-plus American deaths as a consequence of the pandemic at President Trump’s door.
“Anyone who’s responsible for that many deaths should not remain president of the United States of America,” he said.
During a back-and-forth on race relations, President Trump said: “I am the least racist person in this room.”
He brought up the 1994 crime bill that Joe Biden helped draft and which Black Lives Matter blames for the mass incarceration of African Americans.
However, Joe Biden said Donald Trump was “one of the most racist presidents we’ve had in modern history. He pours fuel on every single racist fire”.
He added: “This guy is a [racial] dog whistle about as big as a fog horn.”
President Trump brought up purported leaked emails from Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, about his business dealings in China.
However, Joe Biden denied the president’s unfounded insinuation that the former US vice-president somehow had a stake in the ventures.
“I think you owe an explanation to the American people,” said President Trump.
Joe Biden said: “I have not taken a single penny from any country whatsoever. Ever.”
He referred to the New York Times recently reporting that President Trump had a bank account in China and paid $188,561 in taxes from 2013-15 to the country, compared with $750 in US federal taxes that the newspaper said he had paid in 2016-2017 when he became president.
President Trump said: “I have many bank accounts and they’re all listed and they’re all over the place.
Speaking on the final night of the Republican convention, President Donald Trump has warned Joe Biden will “demolish” the American dream if he wins the White House in November.
The president depicted his Democratic challenger as “the destroyer of American greatness”.
Donald Trump said the Democrats would unleash “violent anarchists” upon US cities.
Joe Biden has a steady single-digit lead in opinion polls over President Trump with 68 days until voters return their verdict.
The end of the RNC heralds a 10-week sprint to Election Day, and the coming campaign is widely expected to be one of the ugliest in living memory.
On August 27, President Trump asked voters for another four years in office, vowing to dispel the coronavirus pandemic that has ravaged the US economy and quell civil strife ignited by police killings of African Americans.
He accepted the GOP’s re-nomination from the South Lawn of the White House.
Donald Trump said: “This election will decide whether we save the American dream, or whether we allow a socialist agenda to demolish our cherished destiny.”
He added: “Your vote will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans, or whether we give free rein to violent anarchists, agitators and criminals who threaten our citizens.”
His reference to the sometimes violent racial justice protests that have swept the nation in recent months came as hundreds of Black Lives Matter demonstrators gathered outside the White House gates.
Some of their shouts and car horns could be heard on the South Lawn despite new fencing being erected this week along the White House perimeter to keep protesters at a distance.
President Trump said the Democrats at their party convention last week had disparaged America as a place of racial, social and economic injustice.
He said: “So tonight,I ask you a very simple question – how can the Democrat party ask to lead our country when it spends so much time tearing down our country?
“In the left’s backward view, they do not see America as the most free, just and exceptional nation on earth. Instead, they see a wicked nation that must be punished for its sins.”
In a blistering attack on his opponent’s decades-long political life, Donald Trump continued: “Joe Biden spent his entire career outsourcing the dreams of American workers, offshoring their jobs, opening their borders and sending their sons and daughters to fight in endless foreign wars.”
While President Trump portrayed his challenger as “a Trojan horse for socialism”, Joe Biden’s lengthy record as a political moderate was a hindrance for him as he competed to capture his party’s nomination.
Donald Trump mentioned Joe Biden more than 40 times; the Democrat did not once name Donald Trump in his speech last week, though criticism of the president permeated Joe Biden’s remarks.
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