First Thing election special: Trump rages as power slips from his grasp

Good morning.

The electoral college map remained all but unchanged throughout Thursday as the vote counting went on in several key states. However, in Washington the mood grew darker. Donald Trump delivered another virtually fact-free tirade from the White House, attempting yet again to undermine the legitimacy of a presidential election that he seems almost certain to have lost.

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MSNBC cuts away from Trump’s address after he again falsely declares election victory – video

Numerous Republicans condemned the president’s claims, while several news networks cut short their coverage of a speech in which, writes David Smith, Trump may have broken his own record for dangerous lies:

It seemed like a desperate last stand from a fearful strongman who can feel power slipping inexorably away.

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Joe Biden urges calm: ‘In America, the vote is sacred’ – video

In the small hours of Friday, Joe Biden took the lead in Georgia by just over 900 votes. If that lead holds, it should be enough to give him the 270 electoral college votes he needs to declare victory – even without Pennsylvania, where Biden also seems on track to win. And, unlike his opponent, the Democrat called for calm:

Democracy is sometimes messy. It sometimes requires a little patience, as well. But that patience has been rewarded now for 240 years with a system of governance that’s been the envy of the world.

• In Philadelphia, Trump supporters tried to sow chaos as poll workers kept counting mail-in ballots. The president’s lawyers have petitioned the US supreme court to intervene in the state’s vote count, but it is unclear whether their demand to discount ballots received after 3 November would have any effect on the result. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign’s last-ditch legal efforts to disrupt the results in other states appear to be going nowhere.

Democrats still have a long-shot at the senate

After the Democrats’ chances of winning a majority in the US senate appeared to have slipped away following a string of disappointments on Tuesday night, newly purple Georgia will now give the party a last chance to wrench control of the upper chamber from Republicans. Not one but two senate races in the state are now expected to go to a runoff in January.

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‘You’re a crook’: barbs-strewn Georgia election debate goes viral – video

While the Democrats both remain longshots to win, the rev Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff will each get a second attempt to unseat the incumbent Republicans, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, which would tie the senate and 50-50 and potentially give a vice-president Kamala Harris the deciding vote.

• The senate races in North Carolina and Alaska also remain undecided, but Republicans are confident that they will hold both seats.

Have voter demographics changed since 2016? Not so much

This week’s US election attracted 150 millions voters, the highest turnout for more than a century. But the composition of those voters was not markedly different from those who cast a ballot four years ago, according to experts who have studied the exit poll data. The gender gap barely widened, despite predictions that Biden would win overwhelming support from women.

The divide between young and old did grow, however, with those aged under 30 rejecting Trump by an even greater margin than in 2016. As Kenya Evelyn reports from Milwaukee, the activism and votes of young Black people provided the backbone of Biden’s support in several key swing states, including Wisconsin.

Perhaps the Democrat’s starkest demographic failure was in Florida, where analysts say the Biden campaign focused on securing the support of seniors, while Trump was busy building a formidable base among the state’s mixed Latino community, particularly in Miami-Dade county.

In other election news…

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Cori Bush delivers electrifying victory speech: ‘This is our moment … I love you’ – video

• The most electrifying speech of election night may have come not from a presidential candidate, but from Cori Bush, a nurse, single mother and Covid-19 survivor who is now the first Black woman from Missouri to be elected to Congress.

• Many Trump supporters have turned against Fox News after the network accurately reported the results of the presidential election, while the Trump campaign is reportedly furious with the Rupert Murdoch-owned channel for being the first news outlet to call Arizona for Biden on Tuesday night.

• San Francisco voters approved tax hikes for tech firms as well as a new tax surcharge for any CEO who earns more than 100 times the wage of their company’s average worker.

Stat of the day

Biden is racking up votes all over the map, but nowhere is the count under greater scrutiny than in Philadelphia, the Democratic stronghold that could deliver Pennsylvania – and with it, the White House – to the former vice-president. With Trump supporters and counter-protesters demonstrating outside the city’s convention centre, election workers are still methodically counting the city’s 358,257 mail-in ballots.

Don’t miss this

Nobody is enjoying the messy results process more than Washington’s adversaries abroad, with enemies and rivals lining up to mock the delays and claims of election fraud, in barely veiled references to US scrutiny of their own elections:

• “What a spectacle!” said Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran. “One says this is the most fraudulent election in US history. Who says that? The president who is currently in office.”

• A state-run newspaper in China said the chaos and delay made the US look “a bit like a developing country”.

• Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro – whose overthrow Trump has encouraged – raised an eyebrow at America’s “surprising electoral process” but insisted: “The United States. I don’t stick my nose in.”

Last Thing: worth it for the memes?

Amid the doomscrolling, some Twitter users have made productive use of the time they might have otherwise wasted waiting for the next half-dozen votes to be counted in Clark County, Nevada. Poppy Noor rounds up some of the funniest election week memes so far.

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