US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden pulled ahead in the battleground state of Georgia by 917 votes as the tallying of votes continues in the state.
Biden is locked in a tight election race with President Donald Trump in which no candidate currently has enough Electoral College votes to be declared the winner, reports Reuters.
If Biden wins Georgia and then Nevada or Arizona — both states in which he is leading — or Pennsylvania, where the continued counting of ballots is methodically erasing Trump’s advantage, he will become the president-elect.
Flipping Georgia, a state last won by a Democrat in 1992, and where Trump won by more than 200,000 votes four years ago, would represent a significant political shift. But the state has shown signs of trending blue: When Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016, he did so by only five percentage points, a far slimmer margin than Republicans enjoyed in previous presidential elections.
Biden’s late surge in this year’s count — thanks to his dominance in Atlanta, Savannah and the increasingly Democrat-friendly suburbs around both — transformed what had seemed to be a safe Trump state in early tabulations on Tuesday into one of the closest contests in the nation.
At a drive-in rally in Atlanta last week, Biden said, “We win Georgia, we win everything.”