Name: Biden declared winner in Wisconsin with 20,000 vote margin; Trump campaign vows request for recount
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Biden declared winner in Wisconsin with 20,000 vote margin; Trump campaign vows request for recount

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel The Associated Press declared Democrat Joe Biden the winner in Wisconsin on Wednesday&nbsp;after the state once again went down to the wire in the presidential election.Unofficial results showed Biden with a lead of about 20,000 votes&nbsp;out of 3.2 million cast, and the Trump campaign in a statement vowed it would request a recount.Biden's lead is very close to Trump's winning margin in 2016 over Hillary Clinton.&nbsp;Biden overtook Trump in the early morning hours when the Milwaukee reported its roughly 170,000 absentee votes, which were overwhelmingly Democratic. Then early morning&nbsp;returns from Green Bay and Kenosha on Wednesday added to his slender lead.Trump had nurtured a lead of more than 100,000 votes before those returns came in.Meagan Wolfe, the director of the state Elections Commission, said Wednesday that unofficial results had been completed for all communities except Willow, a town in Richland County with fewer than 300 voters.&nbsp;"All of our unofficial results have come in from the local election offices," she told NBC News. "Now we’re in the important process of triple-checking the results."Results:More:Live blog:Full coverage:This would be the fourth time in six&nbsp;presidential elections that Wisconsin was decided by less than a percentage point. It would be the sixth time in eight presidential races that the winner failed&nbsp;to reach 50%.&nbsp;The Trump campaign, in a statement Wednesday, said it would seek a recount and claimed without evidence that voting irregularities had occurred.Separately, the campaign &nbsp;and Georgia to stop the vote counts in those states.&nbsp;“Despite ridiculous public polling used as a voter suppression tactic, Wisconsin has been a razor thin race as we always knew that it would be," campaign manager Bill Stepien said. "There have been reports of irregularities in several Wisconsin counties which raise serious doubts about the validity of the results. The President is well within the threshold to request a recount and we will immediately do so.”Wolfe, the state's elections director, told reporters there were no major surprises as votes were tallied Tuesday and early Wednesday. She noted she has been saying for weeks that absentee ballots would come in late in some communities and emphasized that all parts of the vote-counting process were publicly observable.“There are no dark corners or locked doors in elections. Anybody was free to watch those processes as they unfolded yesterday,” she said during an&nbsp;online news conference. “Some of those jurisdictions even did things like live streams. You could watch ballots being counted all day if you wanted to and all night.”In 2016, . The results barely shifted from the initial count of ballots.&nbsp;"We’ve had a recount before and it showed we have a really good process," Wolfe said. "We have a really good system. …&nbsp;I believe that that would be the case if we had a recount again in our state, that you would find that we have a really solid system here and that there’s an incredible paper trail here for every single request, registration and ballot that’s cast."Democratic Gov. Tony Evers expressed frustration at Trump for his accusations about voting irregularities, calling it "more of the same BS.""Our election officials work so goddamn hard,"&nbsp;Evers said.Trump can demand a recount if the official tally shows him losing by 1 percentage point or less. If he were behind by less than a quarter of a point, the state would pay for the recount. If he were behind by a quarter of a point to 1 point, his campaign would have to pay a few million dollars to cover the cost of the recount.&nbsp;But Dane County came in massively for Biden, who carried the county by more than&nbsp;180,000 votes, compared to Hillary Clinton's margin of roughly 146,000 in 2016.&nbsp; Trump also continued to lose&nbsp;ground in the Republican outer suburbs of Milwaukee. He carried Ozaukee County by just 12 points after winning it by 18 in 2016, and after Mitt Romney carried it by 30 in 2012. He carried Waukesha County by&nbsp;21 points after winning it by&nbsp;27 in 2016 and after Romney carried it by 35 in 2012.&nbsp;Compared to 2016, there was a shift of more than 60,000 votes toward the Democrats in metro Milwaukee and Dane. In&nbsp;effect, Trump's slippage came in the same places he "underperformed" four years ago.&nbsp;Yet Trump matched or exceeded his lopsided 2016 margins across much of central, northern and western Wisconsin.And the race ended up being far tighter than the pre-election polling suggested, an echo of four years ago.&nbsp;In a closing crescendo of campaign travel, Trump made five trips to Wisconsin in the final month of the race during a surging coronavirus caseload.Biden made his only October visit to the state on the Friday before the election.Trump drew big crowds. Biden outspent Trump heavily in the home stretch on TV in the state’s most important media markets — Milwaukee and Green Bay.&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;While Biden led easily in some surveys, the state’s leading poll, by the Marquette Law School, gave Biden a much smaller lead (5 points). But it also registered virtually no change in the race since May during all the twists and turns and crises of 2020, making a Trump comeback seem all the more daunting.Turnout topped 3.2 million — the most votes ever cast in a Wisconsin election. At least 71% of the state's voting-age adults cast ballots — the highest turnout rate ever after the&nbsp;2004 election.&nbsp;&nbsp;Wisconsin was not only at the epicenter of the presidential race. It was also at the center of the two national crises that shaped the campaign's final six months: the pandemic, and . Its coronavirus caseload rose faster than any other top battleground.Almost half of Wisconsin voters said&nbsp;the most important issue facing the country was the coronavirus pandemic, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 3,400 voters in the state conducted for The Associated Press by NORC at the University of Chicago. Those voters heavily favored Biden&nbsp;More than one in four cited the economy and jobs as the most important issue.&nbsp;Those voters overwhelmingly favored Trump.&nbsp;Six in 10 Wisconsin voters say the country is headed in the wrong direction, and more than half termed the economy “not so good” or “poor.”AP Votecast is a wide-ranging poll of 2020 voters conducted nationally and in battleground states over the course of the eight days leading up to polls closing Tuesday night. The Wisconsin poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.1 percentage points.It showed Wisconsin voters were divided in this election by gender, party, race, education&nbsp;and urban-suburban-rural lines. Biden was favored by urban voters, Trump by rural and small town voters, and suburban voters were almost evenly divided.&nbsp;&nbsp; The poll also underscored the role played by the coronavirus crisis in this election.&nbsp;The pandemic was the issue most often cited as the biggest one facing the country, and six in 10 Wisconsin voters said it was “not at all under control.” About a quarter said it was “somewhat under control” and a smaller number said it was mostly under control.Wisconsin has been the state hardest hit by the pandemic among the top battlegrounds in the 2020 presidential race. On a record-breaking day,. The previous record for new cases reported in a day, about&nbsp;5,200, was set Saturday.&nbsp;Before last week, the state had never reported more than 5,000 cases in a day.Track COVID-19 in Wisconsin:About four in 10 voters said they or someone in their household had lost a job or income because of the crisis.Given a choice of two approaches, almost two in three voters said the federal government’s top priority should be limiting the spread of the virus “even if it damages the economy,” while a little more than a third said it should be to limit additional economic damage “even if it increases the spread of the coronavirus.”Almost three-quarters said they favored requiring people to wear masks when around other people outside their homes.Voters also gave Dr. Anthony Fauci much higher marks on handling the pandemic than Trump. &nbsp;Given a list of four choices, almost four in 10 voters called the federal government’s response to the coronavirus crisis the single most important factor in their vote.Almost one in four said it was the economic downturn.One in&nbsp;seven said it was Supreme Court nominations.And a similar number said it was protests over police violence.Four in 10 voters called racism in society a “very serious problem” and a similar share called racism in policing a very serious problem. In both cases, around a third of voters called it a “somewhat serious problem.”A little more than 40% said they approved of&nbsp;recent protests against police violence, but almost 60% said they disapproved.More than eight&nbsp;in 10 Wisconsin voters said they were very or somewhat confident that people who are eligible will be allowed to vote. &nbsp;Two-thirds of those polled said they were very or somewhat confident that people who are not eligible to vote will not be allowed to vote.Molly Beck of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel The Associated Press declared Democrat Joe Biden the winner in Wisconsin on Wednesday&nbsp;after the state once again went down to the wire in the presidential election.Unofficial results showed Biden with a lead of about 20,000 votes&nbsp;out of 3.2 million cast, and the Trump campaign in a statement vowed it would request a recount.Biden's lead is very close to Trump's winning margin in 2016 over Hillary Clinton.&nbsp;Biden overtook Trump in the early morning hours when the Milwaukee reported its roughly 170,000 absentee votes, which were overwhelmingly...

Biden declared winner in Wisconsin with 20,000 vote margin; Trump campaign vows request for recount

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