Election Results WI: Trump Vs. Biden As Count Drags On

Being one of three states that gave President Donald Trump a narrow win four years ago over Hillary Clinton, Wisconsinites and Americans alike are waiting to see who pulls off a win in the state, a key part of the path to 270 Electoral College votes for both candidates.

Both Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden stopped in Wisconsin in the final days of the campaign, with Biden making a stop in Milwaukee and Trump holding a campaign rally in Kenosha late Monday. In 2016, Trump won Wisconsin with just about 23,000 votes over Clinton.

Patch will be updating this story with live results as they come in. Refresh below for the latest:

Trump: 1,472,119

Biden: 1,355,944

(Results as reported by The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, about 90 percent of the estimated vote has been counted)

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So far, among the major battleground states — Ohio and Florida have been called for Trump.

For Trump to win Wisconsin, he'll need to outperform in rural areas outside of Milwaukee and Madison, as noted by The Associated Press. The AP also notes that polling suggests Trump is not doing as well as he did in the Republican-leaning suburbs around Milwaukee.

One of those counties is Waukesha County, a heavy Republican county where Trump won in 2016 by a much narrower margin than previous presidential races. As The Washington Post notes, it could be a county where Republicans unhappy with Trump could end up voting for Biden, pointing out that Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson got nearly 9,000 votes in the county in 2016.

At Trump's rally in Kenosha — the city that saw days of violent protests and unrest following the police shooting of Jacob Blake —Trump emphasized "peace and order." The crowd chanted ’’back the blue” as Trump claimed that Democrats were “waging war on the police.” Biden's final event in Wisconsin was much smaller due to precautions taken around the coronavirus pandemic.

Wisconsin has been hit hard by the pandemic, with the state reporting very high disease activity in all but two counties in the state. Overall, the state is reporting a seven-day positivity rate of over 30 percent, an all-time high. The state also reported another all-time high of daily case counts with 5,771 cases reported Tuesday and 52 deaths.

With the surge in mail-in and early voting, just over 1.9 million people had already voted in Wisconsin prior to Election Day. Still voters were at the polls to vote in person or drop off their mail-in ballots so they could be received by 8 p.m. A last minute ruling from the Supreme Court scrapped an order that would have allowed ballots to be counted as long as they were received up to six days after the election. That urged Democrats and Republicans to push voters to drop off ballots in person instead of relying on the United States Postal Service.

Results in Wisconsin are expected to be available in the early morning hours on Wednesday. Clerks in Wisconsin were not allowed to count mail-in ballots prior to Election Day and once the vote count starts in Wisconsin, it must continue until all ballots have been counted — making it a long night for election workers.