Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is projected to win the battleground of Michigan, walking away with the state’s 16 electoral votes.CNN and NBC called the race for Biden on Wednesday shortly before 4:30 p.m. EST.
Biden’s victory comes four years after President Trump flipped the state by narrowly defeating then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Several polls leading up to Election Day showed Biden with a lead over Trump in the Great Lakes State.
The former vice president campaigned in Michigan with former President Obama over the weekend.
Trump won the state by a slim margin of just under 11,000 votes, or 0.23 percentage points, in 2016. Michigan is the second of three Rust Belt “blue wall” states that Trump flipped in 2016 that Biden has won, the other being Wisconsin. The final state, Pennsylvania, is continuing to count outstanding ballots.
While the president took an early lead in the state Tuesday night, the vote tally didn’t take into account mail and absentee ballots, which Michigan was prevented by law from processing before Election Day. Biden’s lead expanded as those ballots were tabulated, largely from Detroit and its suburbs.
The Trump campaign announced earlier in the day that it would sue to stop the counting of votes in the state, saying it had not been granted adequate access to observe the count.
