Update November 4, 3 pm ET: Our partners at Decision Desk have called the state for former Vice President Joe Biden. President Donald Trump’s campaign has said it will request a recount.
Live results: Biden wins Wisconsin
Joe Biden has won the presidential race in Wisconsin by a thin margin.
Amanda Northrop/Vox
Li Zhou is a former politics reporter at Vox, where she covers Congress and elections. Previously, she was a tech policy reporter at Politico and an editorial fellow at the Atlantic.
Wisconsin, with its 10 electoral votes, is among the swing states that could well determine the course of the presidential election — though final results weren’t available on election night.
The outcome was close in 2016: President Donald Trump won the state by just 1 percentage point that year, after President Barack Obama won it by 7 in 2012. This cycle, former Vice President Joe Biden — who’s held a slight lead in recent polls — is attempting to flip the state back to Democrats.
The state was unable to complete its count Tuesday due to a huge influx of mail-in ballots this cycle.
“If unofficial results aren’t available until [Wednesday], it does not mean something went wrong,” Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe said. “It just means that election officials are doing their jobs.”
In Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — some of biggest swing states in the 2020 election — Republican state legislatures did not allow counting of absentee ballots until Election Day.
But like many other states, Wisconsin has seen a staggering number of voters cast their ballots early, either in person or via mail. Roughly 1.9 million Wisconsinites did so, suggesting the state is poised to surpass its 2016 turnout, when about 3 million people voted in total.
Given how close the margins were in the 2012 election, several counties are seen as prime battlegrounds between Biden and Trump. Among them is Kenosha County, the site of massive protests against police brutality and racism after Jacob Blake was shot by law enforcement earlier this year. Other counties with close margins in 2016 were Sauk, Columbia, and Door counties.
As the results from Wisconsin come in, our partners at Decision Desk will have live results throughout Tuesday evening and the rest of the week.
Vox also has results pages for the presidential race and these key swing states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada.
And you can follow Senate live results here and House live results here. Finally, here’s how Vox (and other media outlets) will be making calls.
More in: The 2020 presidential election
