Trump's lead in Georgia has dipped below 10,000 votes with 47,000 left to be counted (Update: Down to 1,267 votes)

We’re still waiting for votes to be counted in Nevada, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Arizona. Meanwhile, President Trump’s lead in Georgia has been dwindling all day and is now down to a few thousands votes. But there aren’t many votes left to count at this point:

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Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, told reporters during a press conference at the state capitol Thursday there are 47,277 votes left to be counted, though he said election officials in the state are working to finish their tallies Thursday if possible.

“Having an accurate, fair count is much more vital than having a fast count,” he said at a news conference Thursday morning.

Here’s how close this is right now. According to the NY Times, Trump has 2,439,925 and Biden has 2,430,499, a difference of just 9,426 votes. Nearly every county in the state shows 98% reporting, but there are still two counties that show less than 90% reporting.

The biggest of those is Chatham County, which includes the city of Savannah. In Chatham with 87% reporting, Biden leads 57.7 to 40 percent. So it’s probably safe to say Biden will get the majority of those outstanding votes but not by a lot. Doing some very rough math, if 13% of the vote in Chatham is outstanding that’s probably around 15,000 votes. If Biden gets close to 60% of those he’ll likely close the gap by about 2,500 votes.

But Floyd county is also still counting and has reported 89% of the vote. Floyd county is currently running 70.4% for Trump to 28.4% for Biden. But it’s a smaller county so the outstanding vote is probably only around 4,000 votes. If Trump wins 70% of those he’ll extend the gap by around 1,700. Combing the two counties it’s not quite a wash, Biden still gains several hundred votes, but the change in gap between them is relatively small.

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But those two counties represent a bit less than 20,000 outstanding votes. So there are more votes out there yet to be counted and it’s not clear how those will split between the candidates. I guess the point is that Trump could hang on to Georgia but it’s not a sure thing yet just because it’s so close.

Meanwhile, in the Georgia Senate races, it looked for a while as if David Perdue would avoid a runoff by pulling out a win over Jon Ossoff with just over 50% of the vote, but at present Perdue is down to 49.9% of the vote. He’s still leading Ossoff but because he’s under 50%, this race (and the other GA Senate race) will head to a runoff.

That’s significant because if Biden wins the White House then Dems could control a 50-50 Senate if they win both Georgia seats. I don’t think that’s likely. In fact, I think both Republican candidates are likely to win the runoff elections but with the Senate potentially on the line (assuming a Biden win) you can imagine the kind of resources the left will pour into these races. It could be hundreds of millions of dollars in negative ads.

Of course if Trump pulls out a win they won’t have the same incentive. His first order of business is to win Georgia, even if it’s only by a couple thousand votes.

Here’s the press conference Georgia election officials gave this morning. Keep in mind this was 6 hours ago so vote totals have been updated since then:

Update: The race is even tighter now. The NY Times site shows Trump with 2,446,850 votes to 2,443,364 for Biden, a difference of 3,486 votes. I do see that Chatham county, discussed above, now shows 98% of votes are in, like everywhere else in the state. Meanwhile, Floyd county, also discussed above, is still at 89% reporting. It’s going to be really tight either way.

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If the state is called for Biden that would put him at 269 EVs, though Fox News would presumably have to declare Biden the winner because they have already called Arizona.

Update: Just saw this from NBC:

As of 7:15 p.m., 18,936 votes are left to count in the state, according to the secretary of state.

So not a lot of votes left to make up the remaining gap.

Update: Even closer. Trump has 2,447,015 to Biden’s 2,444,518 votes. A difference of 2,497.

I mentioned Arizona above. That race also continues to tighten as of right now Biden’s lead in the state is down to 46,257 votes with 10% of the vote yet to be counted.

Update: It’s still narrowing. The NY Times reports: “We received 1,031 additional votes from Georgia. Trump is currently up by 1,902 votes.” The biggest county left to report is Clayton which has reported 96% of votes but which is running 85% for Biden. So there are a few thousand more votes there and most will go to Biden. There’s also one more small county running Trump’s direction but it’s tiny, i.e. less than 4,000 votes in all.

Frank Luntz says there’s another pro-Biden dump from Clayton coming at midnight.

Update: This is interesting.

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By the way, Trump’s lead is currently at 1,775 votes.

Update: My last update for the night. From the NY Times: “We received 541 additional votes from Georgia. Trump is currently up by 1,267 votes.” And with that, Clayton county has finally ticked over from 96% reporting to 97% reporting.

This race is going to be so tight that Democrats are urging voters to “cure” any problematic ballots, by submitting an affidavit, before the deadline tomorrow.

With Georgia’s 16 electoral votes likely to be decided by a tiny margin, Democrats are urging voters there to fix absentee ballots that were rejected because of invalid or missing signatures before the deadline on Friday evening.

I’m sure we’ll have more on this tomorrow.

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