Biden pulls even further ahead of Trump

Multiple media outlets have just named Joe Biden as the winner in Arizona, extending his lead even further past Donald Trump.

NBC and CNN are among the outlets to name Mr Biden as the projected winner of the state, earning him 11 more electoral ballots.

Arizona has long been considered a Republican stronghold, but the majority of major media outlets agree it has turned blue.

Arizona gives Mr Biden a 290-217 lead over Mr Trump in the Electoral College that ultimately decides the presidency, with 270 needed to win the White House.

It comes days after Fox News called the state for Mr Biden, sparking fury from Mr Trump and his campaign.

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The media outlet called Arizona for Mr Biden on election night when just 73 per cent of the state’s vote had been counted.

This enraged the president so much that Mr Trump’s political adviser, Jason Miller, called Fox

News in a bid to get the network to retract the call, according to the New York Times.

The president still appears to be bitter about the call, recently tweeting that Fox News’ ratings had “collapsed” because they “forgot what made them successful”.
 

.@FoxNews daytime ratings have completely collapsed. Weekend daytime even WORSE. Very sad to watch this happen, but they forgot what made them successful, what got them there. They forgot the Golden Goose. The biggest difference between the 2016 Election, and 2020, was @FoxNews!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 12, 2020

Despite Mr Biden being declared the winner of election and making a victory speech, Mr Trump has still refused to concede that he lost.

Mr Trump has been making, so far unsubstantiated, claims of widespread voter fraud and remains adamant he could still win the election.

Most recently, the president claimed in a series of tweets that 2.7 million votes for him had been “deleted” and hundreds of thousand had been switched from him to Biden in Pennsylvania and other states.

“REPORT: DOMINION DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE. DATA ANALYSIS FINDS 221,000 PENNSYLVANIA VOTES SWITCHED FROM PRESIDENT TRUMP TO BIDEN. 941,000 TRUMP VOTES DELETED. STATES USING DOMINION VOTING SYSTEMS SWITCHED 435,000 VOTES FROM TRUMP TO BIDEN.” @ChanelRion @OANN

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 12, 2020

Republicans such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have stood firm with Trump by supporting his refusal to concede and backing his legal challenges.

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi weighed in Thursday to demand Republicans stop what she called an “absurd circus” and turn to combating the pandemic.

“Now that the people have expressed their views, Joe Biden has won (and) Kamala Harris will be the first woman vice president of the United States,” Ms Pelosi said.
 

Political experts believe Republicans may be invoking such a strategy as a way to rile up Trump’s base before two US Senate run-off elections in Georgia that will determine which party controls the chamber.

In the past two weeks, Twitter has labelled about 300,000 tweets relating to the US election as “potentially misleading”, making up 0.2 per cent of election-related posts.

The social network said the labels were issued between October 27 and November 11, one week before and after the US presidential election on November 3.

Nearly half of Mr Trump’s tweets were flagged as “disputed” by the platform in the days following the election.

With AFP