AP News in Brief at 6:04 p.m. EST

Biden wins Wisconsin, presidency still hangs in balance

WASHINGTON (AP) — On a day of electoral uncertainty and legal action, Joe Biden won Wisconsin on Wednesday, reclaiming a key part of the “blue wall” that slipped away from Democrats four years ago and narrowing President Donald Trump's pathway to reelection.

A full day after Election Day, neither candidate had cleared the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House. Margins remained tight in several fiercely contested states including the Great Lakes battlegrounds of Michigan and Pennsylvania. But Biden's victory in Wisconsin loomed as an important step to the presidency.

Speaking at an afternoon news conference, Biden, joined by his running mate Kamala Harris, said he now expected to win the presidency, though he stopped short of outright declaring victory.

“I will govern as an American president,” Biden said. ”There will be no red states and blue states when we win. Just the United States of America."

It was a stark contrast to Trump, who early Wednesday morning falsely proclaimed that he had won the election, even though millions of votes remained uncounted and the race was far from over.

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Trump sues in Pennsylvania, Michigan; asks for Wis. recount

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump's campaign filed lawsuits Wednesday in Pennsylvania and Michigan, laying the groundwork for contesting the outcome in undecided battlegrounds that could determine whether he gets another four years in the White House.

The new filings, joining existing Republican legal challenges in Pennsylvania and Nevada, demand better access for campaign observers to locations where ballots are being processed and counted, the campaign said. However, at one Michigan location in question The Associated Press observed poll watchers from both sides monitoring on Wednesday. Nevada is undecided as well.

The Trump campaign also is seeking to intervene in a Pennsylvania case at the Supreme Court that deals with whether ballots received up to three days after the election can be counted, deputy campaign manager Justin Clark said.

The actions reveal an emerging legal strategy that the president had signaled for weeks, namely that he would attack the integrity of the voting process in states where the result could mean his defeat.

His campaign also announced that it would ask for a recount in Wisconsin, a state The Associated Press called for Democrat Joe Biden on Wednesday afternoon. Campaign manager Bill Stepien cited “irregularities in several Wisconsin counties,” without providing specifics.

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With presidency in reach, Dems grapple with disappointment

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats went into Election Day hoping to reclaim the White House and majorities in both chambers of Congress in a victory that would demonstrate an unmistakable repudiation of President Donald Trump and a Republican Party remade in his image.

It didn't work out that way.

More than 12 hours after polls closed, Biden held a narrow lead in some key states with hundreds of thousands of votes yet to be counted, and he has a comfortable advantage in the national popular vote. But as of midday Wednesday, there was no clear Democratic wave.

Republicans held key Senate seats that Democrats hoped to flip, and the GOP may ultimately shrink the Democrats' House majority. And even if Trump were to ultimately lose, the closeness of the presidential contest raised the prospect that a Biden presidency would have difficulty enacting progressive priorities or quickly move past the cultural and partisan fissures of the Trump era.

“The Trump coalition is more stubborn and resilient and capable than maybe we anticipated,” said Rep. Gerald Connolly, a six-term Democratic lawmaker from Virginia. “The country is even more polarized and divided.”

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Election officials scramble to count ballots in key states

ATLANTA (AP) — Election officials in several key states furiously counted ballots Wednesday as the nation awaited the outcome of the race between President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden and braced for possible recounts and legal challenges.

Unlike in previous years, states were contending with an avalanche of mail ballots driven by the global pandemic. Every election, what’s reported on election night are unofficial results and the counting of votes extends past Election Day. This year, with so many mail ballots and close races in key states, counting every vote was expected to take more time.

Here's what was happening Wednesday in six key states:

GEORGIA

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said he was pushing counties to complete vote tallies by the end of Wednesday, with roughly 200,000 ballots left to count as of late morning.

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Democrats' Senate drive halted by GOP; key races undecided

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats faced increasingly long odds in the the battle for Senate control as Republicans brushed back multiple challengers to protect their majority. Still, it was too soon for the GOP to declare victory.

In Maine, Republican Sen. Susan Collins won the hardest-fought race of her career, securing a fifth term by defeating Democrat Sara Gideon. Declaring victory Wednesday afternoon, Collins said the outcome was “affirmation of the work that I’m doing in Washington." Democrats had tried to tie the moderate Republican to President Donald Trump and criticized her for her vote to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018.

But key races in North Carolina and Michigan remained undecided, and at least one in Georgia was headed to a January runoff.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said President Donald Trump’s campaign helped his GOP allies, but that state election officials were still counting ballots.

“We're waiting — whether I'm going to be the majority leader or not,” McConnell said at a press conference in his home state of Kentucky.

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Did social media actually counter election misinformation?

Ahead of the election, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube promised to clamp down on election misinformation, including unsubstantiated charges of fraud and premature declarations of victory by candidates. And they mostly did just that — though not without a few hiccups.

But overall their measures still didn't really address the problems exposed by the 2020 U.S. presidential contest, critics of the social platforms contend.

“We’re seeing exactly what we expected, which is not enough, especially in the case of Facebook,” said Shannon McGregor, an assistant professor of journalism and media at the University of North Carolina.

One big test emerged early Wednesday morning as vote-counting continued in battleground states including Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. President Donald Trump made a White House appearance before cheering supporters, declaring he would challenge the poll results. He also posted misleading statements about the election on Facebook and Twitter, following months of signaling his unfounded doubts about expanded mail-in voting and his desire for final election results when polls closed on Nov. 3.

So what did tech companies do about it? For the most part, what they said they would, which primarily meant labeling false or misleading election posts in order to point users to reliable information. In Twitter's case, that sometimes meant obscuring the offending posts, forcing readers to click through warnings to see them and limiting the ability to share them.

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Jittery public awaits news as presidency remains in flux

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — They clung to their cocktails and proclaimed themselves sick with dread. They relentlessly checked the news and went outdoors for fresh air. They bemoaned a wipeout wave that never came and held out hope their favored candidate still would eke out a win.

With the fate of the White House undecided Wednesday, a jittery and bitterly divided America braced for rocky days to come and the possibility a man they despise would be leading the nation.

“I can’t turn on the news. I don’t feel good at all,” said 61-year-old Tammy Lewandowski, a supporter of President Donald Trump in Milwaukee, where former Vice President Joe Biden emerged as the state's winner. That's an outcome Lewandowski fears will amount to a loss of law and order and rioting. “I feel like we lost our country. I don’t know that anything will be the same again.”

On the other side of the divide but just as troubled, women gathering at a Fems for Dems gathering in the affluent Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills moaned and dropped their heads into their hands as the returns came in early Wednesday, some considering switching from red wine to tequila. Even as they held out hope, they knew they hadn’t won what they wanted: a nationwide repudiation of Trump.

“I honestly feel like I’m going to have a heart attack before the end of this,” said Denice Asbell. “I feel like it’s slipping. I’m scared to say this out loud, but the potential for us to see the win that we wanted is slipping away.”

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Public health may be US election loser as coronavirus surges

Regardless of the presidential election outcome, a vexing issue remains to be decided: Will the U.S. be able to tame a perilous pandemic that is surging as holidays, winter and other challenges approach?

Public health experts fear the answer is no, at least in the short term, with potentially dire consequences.

Donald Trump’s current term doesn’t end until Jan. 20. In the 86 days until then, 100,000 more Americans will likely die from the virus if the president doesn’t shift course, said Dr. Robert Murphy, executive director of the Institute for Global Health at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, echoing estimates from other public health experts.

As of Wednesday, the race was too early to call, with several key battleground states still counting votes.

The U.S. death toll is already more than 232,000 and the seven-day rolling average for new daily deaths is rising. Total confirmed U.S. cases have surpassed 9 million and new daily infections are increasing in nearly every state.

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EXPLAINER: A day later, what is the US waiting for?

Anxious Americans woke up Wednesday to an election aftermath that has yet to deliver any clear answer. Neither President Donald Trump nor his Democratic rival Joe Biden cleared the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House, and the margins are tight in five battleground states.

STILL IN PLAY

Races in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania are still too early to call. The AP called Wisconsin, which also had been in play earlier Wednesday, for Biden. Trump’s campaign has requested a recount.

WHAT TRUMP SAID

In an extraordinary move, the president issued a middle-of-the-night, premature claims of victory in a statement from the White House, and said he would take the election to the Supreme Court to stop the counting.

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Flash of luck: Astronomers find cosmic radio burst source

A flash of luck helped astronomers solve a cosmic mystery: What causes powerful but fleeting radio bursts that zip and zigzag through the universe?

Scientists have known about these energetic pulses — called fast radio bursts — for about 13 years and have seen them coming from outside our galaxy, which makes it harder to trace them back to what's causing them. Making it even harder is that they happen so fast, in a couple of milliseconds.

Then this April, a rare but considerably weaker burst coming from inside our own Milky Way galaxy was spotted by two dissimilar telescopes: one a California doctoral student’s set of handmade antenna s, which included actual cake pans, the other a $20 million Canadian observatory.

They tracked that fast radio burst to a weird type of star called a magnetar that’s 32,000 light-years from Earth, according to four studies in Wednesday’s journal Nature.

It was not only the first fast radio burst traced to a source, but the first emanating from our galaxy. Astronomers say there could be other sources for these bursts, but they are now sure about one guilty party: magnetars.