After a long day of ups and downs, the US presidential race has boiled down to a handful of key states, with the race too close to call.

Democratic candidate Joe Biden, who currently has 253 electoral votes to his name, has multiple paths to victory. On the other hand, US President Donald Trump, would need to take all the remaining states to take his tally past 270, the number of electoral votes required to claim victory. Trump currently has 214 electoral college votes.

Six states still haven’t been called – Pennysylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada and Alaska. While there are 20 seats on offer in Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona have 16, 15 and 11 respectively. Nevada has 6 electoral votes and Alaska has 3.

Biden turns Michigan blue again

Biden capturing Michigan and Wisconsin has turned the tide in his favour, with the 26 seats from the two states taking his tally to 253.

In 2016, Michigan put Donald Trump in the White House ending a run of six consecutive Democratic presidential election victories in the Midwestern state. Trump won Michigan’s 16 Electoral College votes by fewer than 11,000 votes.

This time around, Biden is ahead of Trump by over 120,000 votes, with 2% of the ballots yet to be counted.

Along with other swing states or key battlegrounds, including Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Michigan was the third brick in the Democratic Blue Wall that voted for Trump in 2016.

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Since 1998 and George HW Bush, Michigan hadn’t voted for a Republican in a presidential election. Obama won it by 10 points. In 2016, Hillary Clinton appeared to take victory in the state for granted.

Democrats raise a flag in Wisconsin

Till late on Tuesday evening, Trump had a marginal lead in Wisconsin. He would have to repeat his 2016 feat, where he had defied polls and went to win the state by just 22,748 votes.

But the state, which has voted Republican only once since 1984, went back to supporting the Democratic National Party. Joe Biden won the state with a margin of just 20,000 votes.

One of the factors that may have gone against Trump in the state is the custodial kills and police brutality against marginalised communities.

On August 23 this year, Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old African-American man, was shot by police officer Rusten Sheskey in front of his three children in Kenosha County, Wisconsin. The shooting had invoked a major outcry against systemic racism and racial violence across Wisconsin and eventually the entire country.

The tight White House race and recriminations evoked memories of the 2000 election between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore.

That race, which hinged on a handful of votes in Florida, eventually ended up in the Supreme Court, which halted a recount while Bush was ahead.

The US Elections Project estimated total turnout at a record 160 million including more than 101.1 million early voters, 65.2 million of whom cast ballots by mail amid the pandemic.