Joe Biden is now the clear favourite to be the 46th president of the United States.
There are still pathways for Donald Trump to win but they are fast disappearing.
Let’s look at the scenarios.
As Australia slept, Biden crept past Trump in the two crucial Midwest states of Michigan and Wisconsin thanks to late counting of mail-in votes which favoured Biden.
Biden has since won Wisconsin.
This means that Biden just needs to win just Michigan and Nevada in order to reach the 270 electoral college votes needed to become president.
In Michigan he holds a narrow lead of 49.5 per cent to 48.8 per cent with 94 per cent of the vote counted.
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In Nevada Biden holds a thin 49.3 per cent to 48.7 per cent lead with 86 per cent of the vote counted.
The problem for Trump is that the few remaining votes to be counted in both states are mail-in votes which are expected to favour Biden. In Michigan, many of the outstanding votes are from Democrat-voting Detroit. In Nevada they are from Democrat-voting Las Vegas.
In elections anything is possible, but it is a big call for Trump to win these states.
If Biden wins both Michigan and Nevada he doesn’t need to win the big prize of Pennsylvania with its 20 electoral college votes.
Even so, Biden is far from finished in Pennsylvania. While Trump currently leads there by 53.1 per cent to 45.6 per cent with 82 per cent counted there are still 1.4 million mail-in ballots to be counted in that state, most of which will favour Biden.
What about Arizona? Republicans insist they still have a chance in Arizona despite the states being called for Biden by both Fox News and AP. Biden leads by 51 per cent to 47.6 per cent with 86 per cent of votes counted. Could Trump win Arizona? Trump needs to win two-thirds of the remaining votes. Not impossible but highly unlikely.
Biden is also an outside chance to win Georgia but Trump is the likely victor there.
So unless there is a major upset Biden will win the 270 votes needed to become president.
Which leaves legal challenges by the Trump campaign to overturn the results.
It is early days as we learn more about what nature these challenges will take.
But this is what we know so far.
Wow! It looks like Michigan has now found the ballots necessary to keep a wonderful young man, John James, out of the U.S. Senate. What a terrible thing is happening!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 4, 2020
The Trump team says it will demand a recount in Wisconsin which it can because the margin was less than one per cent. However the history of recounts in US states is that they rarely move the final result by more than several hundred votes in either direction. Biden leads Trump in Wisconsin by 20,000. There would have to be sizeable fraud for a mistake of that size to have occurred.
In Michigan, the Trump campaign is taking legal action to stop the counting of ballots while it seeks ‘meaningful access’ to observe the tallying process. It wants to review those ballots which were opened and counted while it did not have meaningful access.
This sounds more like a ‘wing and a pray’ move by Trump’s team rather than an act based on knowledge or reasonable suspicion of fraud.
And finally there is Trump’s threatened Supreme Court action which appears to be directed at Pennsylvania
Trump is unhappy about rules in Pennsylvania that allow mail ballots to be counted if they are postmarked by Election Day and arrive within three days of the November 3 poll.
But the Pennsylvania Supreme Court last week rejected a legal challenge to the law.
It is far from clear that the US Supreme Court would seek to take up the case, much less how it would rule.
In any case, if Biden wins Michigan and Nevada, he doesn’t need Pennsylvania.
This is a fluid and volatile moment in American politics and something unexpected could still change the course of this election result.
But as things now stand, Biden is on the cusp of the presidency.
Cameron Stewart is also US Contributor for Sky News Australia
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