WE CAN NOW SAY DEFINITIVELY THAT JOE BIDEN has the upper hand in the battle for the presidency. But we can also say with similar confidence that this battle will be a multi-front political and legal struggle that could drag on for weeks. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP has demonstrated precisely what his White House and campaign suggested he'd do: He is filing lawsuits, lobbing rhetorical bombshells and trying to stave off defeat. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS has BIDEN at 264 electoral votes after it put Arizona in his corner -- just six short of the presidency. Other media organizations have held off at putting him this close. (The Trump camp has said the early Arizona calls for Biden were premature and should be retracted. Nate Silver said the same thing on FiveThirtyEight on Wednesday night, though he still gives Biden a slight edge in the state overall.) HOW FAR WILL TRUMP GO? He is warning of "secretly dumped ballots" and inexplicably has claimed victory in Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina -- comments that were flagged by social media giants. SO HERE'S WHERE WE ARE: ARIZONA updated its total at 2:40 a.m. D.C. time, and BIDEN is winning by 68,000 votes statewide. Hundreds of protesters -- some carrying guns -- gathered outside the Maricopa County election office chanting "count the vote." Among the protesters: Rep. PAUL GOSAR (R-Ariz.). -- ARIZONA REPUBLIC: "In latest batch, Trump gets share of votes he would need to reclaim Arizona. But next rounds of ballots present new challenges": "President Donald Trump received almost the exact share he would need to charge back to win Arizona's 11 electoral votes and potentially reelection. … But the problem for Trump is that he needs to replicate that performance across all of the remaining 470,000 votes left to count in the state. And he needs to do it across all Arizona's 15 diverse counties, which include areas that are very blue: Pima, Coconino and Santa Cruz counties." GEORGIA OFFICIALS were working through the night to count the 90,750 outstanding ballots there. TRUMP was ahead by some 23,000 votes with 95% of the vote counted. Most of the uncounted ballots should, as they have elsewhere, favor BIDEN. An update is expected from Georgia Secretary of State BRAD RAFFENSPERGER at 10:30 a.m. today. -- ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION: "Thousands of absentee ballots still need to be counted in Georgia": "About 76% of outstanding absentees are in Fulton, Clayton, Chatham, DeKalb and Gwinnett counties." PENNSYLVANIA still has 488,000 mail-in ballots to count, with at least 120,000 in the Philadelphia area alone. BIDEN has sliced into TRUMP'S lead there, which was down to 153,000 by Wednesday. Democrats and election analysts believe BIDEN will be able to catch up. If BIDEN wins here, he'll win the presidency. THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN has filed lawsuits in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Nevada. -- DETROIT FREE PRESS: "Trump campaign files lawsuit to temporarily stop vote count in Michigan": "The lawsuit alleges that a poll challenger from Roscommon County — a small, rural county in northern Michigan — was excluded from viewing the counting of the absentee ballot counting board. "The man who filed the lawsuit with Trump, Eric Ostergren, said he is from Roscommon but served as a poll challenger in Oakland County. The county received hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots, as did other large counties across the state. Ostergren alleges he was inappropriately removed from a site where he was watching absentee ballots being counted." -- NEVADA INDEPENDENT: "A Republican victory in Nevada is still less likely than a Democratic one at this point, not just because of Biden's lead, albeit narrow, but because almost all of the outstanding ballots are mail ballots, which heavily favor Democrats simply because they are far more preferred by Democrats than Republicans. Of the nearly 600,000 mail ballots that have been returned by voters statewide, nearly half of them have been from Democrats while only a quarter have been from Republicans and the rest from nonpartisans and those registered with minor political parties." NYT FRONT PAGE: "BIDEN BUILDS AN EDGE IN CRUCIAL STATES AS TRUMP CHALLENGES THE VOTE COUNTS" NATASHA KORECKI, ELENA SCHNEIDER and ALEX ISENSTADT: "Biden campaign gears up for legal warfare as he nears 270," by Natasha Korecki, Elena Schneider, and Alex Isenstadt: "Biden's team activated teams of attorneys in Nevada, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan in preparation for court battles, and blasted out requests for donations to combat myriad legal challenges. "The campaign is gearing up for an onslaught of court challenges. The campaign told donors it expected Arizona to be called for Biden Wednesday evening — the Associated Press has already done so — and Nevada on Thursday morning. They warned that vote counting in Georgia, Pennsylvania and North Carolina would take time. "As Wednesday wore on, Trump advisers privately acknowledged they had all but given up on Michigan and Wisconsin and were pinning their hopes in Arizona and Pennsylvania. They also said they were nervously eyeing Georgia, a state where Trump's lead has narrowed as votes from Atlanta have come in. "Much of the campaign's focus is on legal options, especially in Georgia and Pennsylvania. During an afternoon call with supporters, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel requested donations to help fund forthcoming court action." POLITICO -- WSJ ED BOARD: "What matters ultimately is the rule of law. As long as the judiciary follows it, neither candidate will have cause to claim an illegitimate outcome. If either side's supporters take to the streets, Messrs. Trump and Biden have an obligation to calm them. Amid fears of unrest, shops in Midtown Manhattan and other major cities are boarded up. What a sad sight to behold in the United States. "America's experiment with mass mail voting was forced by the pandemic, but it's turning out to be a brush with chaos that shouldn't be repeated. The task for this year is to finish the job by the book: Ignore overheated rhetoric, let state and local officials complete the count, and trust in the rule of law." Good Thursday morning. THE STEP BACK -- WAPO'S PHIL RUCKER and BOB COSTA: "Election reveals deeper divides between red and blue America": "When Donald Trump narrowly won Wisconsin in 2016 to clinch the presidency, he carried 23 counties that had previously voted for President Barack Obama. But when Joe Biden was projected on Wednesday to put Wisconsin back in the Democratic column, he was on track to pry back just two of them: Door and Sauk. "Rather than flipping more Obama-Trump counties, Biden instead exceeded previous Democratic win margins in Wisconsin's two biggest cities, Milwaukee and Madison. That pattern extended to Michigan and other battleground states, with Biden building upon Democrats' dominance in urban and suburban jurisdictions but Trump leaving most of exurban and rural America awash in red. "The urban-rural divide illustrates the pronounced polarization evident in preliminary 2020 election results. The split underscores fundamental disagreements among Americans about how to control the coronavirus pandemic or whether to even try; how to revitalize the economy and restore jobs; how to combat climate change or whether it is an emergency at all; and the roles of morality, empathy and the rule of law in the body politic." TERRIFIC TICK TOCK … NYT'S MAGGIE HABERMAN and ANNIE KARNI: "Fox's Arizona Call for Biden Flipped the Mood at Trump Headquarters": "That mirage of victory was pierced when Fox News called Arizona for former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. at 11:20 p.m., with just 73 percent of the state's vote counted. Mr. Trump and his advisers erupted at the news. If it was true that Arizona was lost, it would call into doubt on any claim of victory the president might be able to make. "What ensued for Mr. Trump was a night of angry calls to Republican governors and advice from campaign aides that he ignored, leading to a middle-of-the-night presidential briefing in which he made a reckless and unsubstantiated string of remarks about the democratic process. Standing in the East Room at 2:30 a.m., he dismissed the election as a 'fraud' and claimed he wanted to stop the counting of votes and leave the results to the Supreme Court. … Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law and senior adviser, was also in touch with Rupert Murdoch, the Fox News owner, as the night wore on. And on Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump's campaign manager, Bill Stepien, insisted the president would win Arizona by 30,000 votes. … "Mr. Kushner was making calls, looking for what he described as a 'James Baker-like' figure who could lead the legal effort to dispute the tabulations in different states, according to a person briefed on the discussions. (Mr. Baker led George W. Bush's successful recount case in 2000.)" AND NOW, MORE ON THE PATH TO 270 … -- IN PENNSYLVANIA: HOLLY OTTERBEIN in Philadelphia: "'The math is pretty simple': Trump's lead shrinks in Pennsylvania": "With President Donald Trump leading Joe Biden by 196,000 votes and 12 percent of the estimated vote still uncounted, Pennsylvania Democrats and Republicans spent Wednesday working out the rough math surrounding the as-yet-uncounted mail-in ballots. "There were more than 1 million mail ballots left to be counted as of 2:35 p.m., according to Pennsylvania's Department of State. So far, 78 percent of mail ballots have broken for Biden and 21 percent have been won by Trump. If that pace continues -- and it's a big if -- Biden would take the lead. Looking at the amount of mail ballots Biden is winning as well as the places still to be fully counted, some Democratic elected officials and consultants, including Sen. Bob Casey, estimate Biden will carry Pennsylvania by about 100,000 votes in a tight race. "'Biden has been winning the absentee votes by a fairly steady margin, so the math is pretty simple,' said J.J. Balaban, a Pennsylvania-based Democratic strategist. 'There's no reason to think that there is going to be a big change in the uncounted mail-in ballots from the ones that have been counted.'" -- TIM ALBERTA: "Three Reasons Biden Flipped the Midwest" IN THE HOUSE … AT 2 P.M., TODAY, House Democrats will hold their first post-election caucus call. Now, remember: Calls like this are tightly controlled affairs, and Speaker NANCY PELOSI is at the wheel. Of course, there is significant discontent in the Democratic ranks about their miss Tuesday night -- they lost seats, instead of gaining the five to 15 they were predicting. But discontent has its way of quickly melting away in the House Democratic Caucus -- and PELOSI is a large part of that. There are a few things to know right now: 1) THERE ARE ALREADY MURMURS among some Democrats about delaying the leadership elections to give lawmakers more time to mull over the results. Remember: Speedy leadership elections only benefit the incumbents, who have an organization and the ability to immediately kick it into gear. Slow elections typically allow discontent to foment. That said, PELOSI has shown herself adept at leadership elections no matter when they happen -- immediately, or later on. 2) PELOSI -- who is widely expected to seek another term as speaker -- has already shown a bit of how she's framing the election. She said in a letter she sent Wednesday night that the election was "challenging," but Democrats kept the House. AGAIN, WE DON'T KNOW how angry people are, and who they will hold responsible, but this will be the first organized gathering since Tuesday night, and will go a long way toward setting a tone for the lame duck. L.A. TIMES: "Republicans may take back two congressional seats in key Orange County races," by Stephanie Lai A BRIGHT SPOT FOR SENATE DEMS -- Sen. GARY PETERS has won his reelection in Michigan. THE CORONAVIRUS IS RAGING … AP: "U.S. sets record for cases amid election battle over virus," by Lindsey Tanner: "New confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the U.S. have climbed to an all-time high of more than 86,000 per day on average, in a glimpse of the worsening crisis that lies ahead for the winner of the presidential election. "Cases and hospitalizations are setting records all around the country just as the holidays and winter approach, demonstrating the challenge that either President Donald Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden will face in the coming months. "Daily new confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. have surged 45% over the past two weeks, to a record 7-day average of 86,352, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Deaths are also on the rise, up 15 percent to an average of 846 deaths every day." MARKET WATCH -- "Global Markets Join Election Rally as Tech Stocks Gain," by WSJ's Joanne Chiu: "International markets advanced, tracking a U.S. rally, as investors positioned for a potentially divided U.S. government, with a Democratic president and a Republican Senate. U.S. stock futures rose nearly 1%, suggesting American markets could gain later on Thursday, after a session in which the broad S&P 500 index logged its biggest one-day point and percentage increase since June. Likewise, government bonds continued to rally, pushing yields on the 10-year Treasury down 0.032 percentage point to 0.735%." TRUMP'S THURSDAY -- Trump has nothing on his public schedule. | 
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