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There are many permutations in the race for the holy grail of 270 electoral college votes required to take the White House as eyes turn to those states where votes are still being counted.
As of 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, Democratic contender Joe Biden was leading President Donald Trump by 225 votes to 213, leaving both candidates still a few dozen electoral college votes shy of victory.
Vote counting is still ongoing in states where there are close races, including Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia and Nevada. Their electoral college votes are crucial for either candidate to get over the line.
Following Biden's defeat in Ohio and Florida, the 10 electoral college votes up for grabs in the Midwestern state of Wisconsin are pivotal to the Democrat's chances.
On Wednesday morning, with 99 percent of votes counted, Biden had a slim lead in the Badger State whose Democratic Party chair had tweeted that the former Vice President had won more votes there than any other presidential candidate in history.
Michigan's secretary of state Jocelyn Benson has said that "hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots" are still to be counted in her state and there would be a more complete picture about the outcome by the end of the day, CNN reported.
The race for the Great Lake State's 16 electoral college votes could not be tighter, with the candidates within a percentage point of each other.
Results in Pennsylvania, where mail-in ballots did not start until all the in-person votes had been counted, may not be known until closer to the end of the week. The Keystone State's 20 electoral college votes have been in the crosshairs of the Biden campaign, keen to overturn the narrow win that Trump had there in 2016.
Meanwhile, although Trump is leading in the GOP stronghold of Georgia, Democrats will be encouraged by the closeness of the count in which Biden is trailing by less than two percent with 94 percent of the votes counted. The Peach State holds 16 electoral votes, without which Trump cannot win the White House, according to The Hill.
A result in Nevada will have to wait at least until Thursday after election officials said that thousands of mail-in ballots still had not been counted. The fight for its six electoral votes is incredibly tight, with the candidates within a percentage point of each other.
The graphic below provided by Statista shows the tightest election races since 1892.
About the writer
Brendan Cole is a Newsweek Senior News Reporter based in London, UK. His focus is Russia and Ukraine, in particular ... Read more