Joe Biden on Thursday pulled ahead of President Donald Trump in Georgia, setting the stage for him to become the first Democrat to win Georgia since 1992.
Biden leads by only 917 votes out of 4.9 million total votes tallied, with less than 1% still to be counted. The margin is so narrow that many news organizations, including BuzzFeed News, are not projecting a winner. A recount could potentially flip the state back to Trump.
Still, the fact that Biden pulled ahead in a Republican stronghold in the deep South is a major achievement. And a win in Georgia would bring Biden’s Electoral College tally to 269 — just one vote shy of the 270 needed to win the presidency. In that case, any one of the three swing states still in play — Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania — would catapult Biden into the White House.
In Georgia and throughout the South and Southwest, Democrats have been working for years to translate the states’ diversifying electorates into a new path to 270 votes in the Electoral College.
Early results had Trump far ahead, as votes from rural Georgia poured in. But Biden pulled ahead with strong support in absentee ballots from cities like Atlanta and Savannah and their suburbs.
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