The United States eclipsed 100,000 new daily reported cases of the coronavirus on Wednesday, November 4th, a day that likely-outgoing President Trump declared would mark the end of coronavirus coverage.

According to the COVID Tracking Project, the US logged more than 103,000 new cases of the coronavirus, pushing the seven-day moving average of new cases over 89,000.  The US also recorded more than 1,000 fatalities for the third straight day.

Most ominously, the number of patients hospitalized with coronavirus jumped over 52,000, the highest level it’s been in three months, since August 6th.

Texas alone accounted for 10% of the cases in the US, with more than 10,000 new confirmed patients.  It also registered more than 150 deaths, 250% more than the next state.

John James now a two-time loser. NBC News makes the call at 8:00PM EST Wednesday.

“With Florida looking red early on Tuesday night, President Trump and his advisers thought they were witnessing a repeat of election night 2016, when a victory in Florida foreshadowed a victory over all. That mirage of victory was pierced when Fox News called Arizona for 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. Jason Miller, Mr. Trump’s political adviser, disputed the accuracy of the call on Twitter and frantically called Fox News, asking the network to retract it. He was unsuccessful. Instead of retracting it, the decision desk at Fox News doubled down on its call, putting Arnon Mishkin, the head of the desk, on air to defend the call. Several hours later, The Associated Press also called Arizona for Mr. Biden” – New York Times.

Daily Beast: “As Election Day turned into election week early Wednesday morning, Donald Trump had a simple message for his closest political and legal advisers as they began charting a plan to challenge and temporarily halt ballot counts in several key states: give them a court fight that ‘they’ll never forget.’ The president’s remarks, relayed by two people familiar with them, came on the morning after an inconclusive election night, but one that seemed trending Joe Biden’s way. And for Team Trump, it was meant as a clarion call to use every possible legal resource and bit of political organizing to help re-tip the balance of the scale.”

“Trump told his advisers that, even if Biden were to claw the presidency away from him, he wanted them to ‘go down fighting’ harder than they ever had before, one of the sources with direct knowledge said. By Wednesday afternoon, some semblance of that approach began to materialize. In Detroit, pro-Trump protesters showed up at a ballot counting site demanding access to the officials and insisting that the counting be ended. In Arizona, one of Trump’s closest congressional allies, Rep. Paul Gosar, put out a ‘call to action’ for ‘red blooded American patriots’ to attend a rally to ‘protect our president’ at the Maricopa County election center. In Nevada, a Trump supporter interrupted a registrar of voters press conference by declaring ‘the Biden crime family steals this election.’ And throughout the day, the Trump campaign peppered donors and supporters with text messages and emails asking for money to help fund—what it erroneously called—an attempt by Democrats to ‘steal’ the election.”

Sorry, folks, I made a mistake and briefly posted a spoofed AP twitter account making a prediction call.  My bad.

…..there was a large number of secretly dumped ballots as has been widely reported!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 4, 2020

Two hundred thousand outstanding votes in Pennsylvania were processed this afternoon, according to the latest data dump, and Donald Trump’s lead in the state shrank from 390,000 to 320,000, according to the vote tracker at the New York Times.

The count of the outstanding Pennsylvania ballots shows that Biden is pulling 67% of the outstanding vote.  If this pattern continues with the 1.1 million remaining outstanding Pennsylvania ballots, Biden would take the state with a cushion of more than 150,000 votes.

The most important races, now, aren’t for the White House.  They’re for the Senate, and they need to be decided before January 6th to prevent a McConnell debacle.

Based on math, it looks like Biden will pull out a victory in the Electoral College.  With Nevada, Michigan and Pennsylvania rolling up Biden votes, he’ll finish with at least Electoral College votes.

But let’s turn our sights on to the ballot tallying in Georgia and North Carolina.  Based on the number of outstanding votes in each state, it’s possible that Biden could eke out victories there, too.

But those are not the races we should be looking for.  Democrats *really* need the outstanding votes to break for the states’ respective Democratic Senate candidates as much as for Biden.

CNN calls it at 4:16pm EST Wednesday.

We’re the number one news website in the world, National Zero has officially declared. Amazon Alexa Rank and other platforms for measuring web traffic are biased and try to hide the truth. The bottom line is that National Zero gets more visitors daily than the New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, The Hill, Breitbart, Daily Caller, Axios, Talking Points Memo, CNN, and Fox News combined. They just don’t see numbers like we do – not even close.

That’s it. National Zero has won. Stop counting the visitors to those other sites. They don’t matter – and they’re probably cheating anyway. Just stop. We won. You lost. We mean it.

President @realDonaldTrump wins #Pennsylvania! pic.twitter.com/5BUwYMxaby

— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) November 4, 2020

VICTORY for President @realDonaldTrump in PENNSYLVANIA ‼️

— Kayleigh McEnany (@kayleighmcenany) November 4, 2020

We have won Pennsylvania!

— Eric Trump (@EricTrump) November 4, 2020

That’s a wrap for our live coverage, but don’t touch that dial – or the address bar in your browser if you want to be a dick about it – we’ve got plenty more to report on with the almost pretty much over presidential race here at National Zero.

Ersatz presidential candidate Kanye West apparently conceded the 2020 presidential race early Wednesday morning, tweeting an image of himself in front of an Electoral College map with the comment “Welp,” the Atlanta Constitution Journal reports.

After gaining 60,000 votes in the twelve states in which he appeared on the ballot, West soon deleted the tweet, replacing it with the same image and the comment “Kanye 2024.”

https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1323914087340781569

Five states passed referenda Tuesday to legalize marijuana through various programs, increasing the number of states that have decriminalize possession of the drug, Politico reports.  Roughly one-third of Americans now live in states where possession of marijuana is legal.

Arizona, New Jersey, Montana and South Dakota voted to legalize recreational marijuana for adults over the age of 21. South Dakotans became the first state to legalize the use of recreational marijuana and simultaneously approving a medical marijuana program

In Mississippi, voters approved an amendment allowing doctors to prescribe medical marijuana to people with certain conditions.

AFP: “Brazilian prosecutors on Wednesday charged President Jair Bolsonaro’s son Flavio with corruption, accusing him of skimming money off the top of his staffers’ salaries when he was a Rio de Janeiro state lawmaker. The charges are the first to be brought in a series of investigations involving the president’s family, and could prove damaging for the far-right leader, who ran on an anti-corruption platform.”

“Rio state prosecutors accuse Flavio Bolsonaro, 39, of embezzlement, money laundering and operating a criminal enterprise from 2007 to 2018. His former driver and fixer, Fabricio Queiroz, is also accused in the alleged scheme. Queiroz, a former police officer, was arrested in June, leading to speculation he could cut a plea deal with prosecutors in exchange for information on his former boss’ role. Fifteen other people are also accused.”

As Election Day progresses, we’ll all be looking for the times when we might see some final counts from some states, so we’re providing you with this chart to give you an idea on when we can expect what from where.

Only 10 states provide for the processing of ballots and the counting of absentee ballots prior to Election Day.  To be clear:  processing ballots means opening the envelopes and prepping them to be counted.  Counting means actually tallying the vote, typically by running them through a scanner.

Some states allow just processing the ballots prior to Election Day, and they’ll start counting the votes Election Day, which speeds up the process.  Only six states–including the all important swing state of Pennsylvania–allow for processing and counting to begin on Election Day. 

Seriously, do not post this today on The Daily Caller, PJ Media, Twitchy, Breitbart, or even The Hill. It’s misinformation and it’s wrong. Especially if Trump voters in Wisconsin, Texas, Georgia, or Florida read it. They could actually believe that it’s true and end up not voting, which would be a terrible shame. A terrible, terrible, awful shame.

“Tonight will tell whether it’s enough, but the scale of the mobilization from Blue America – primarily metro America – is unprecedented. It’s measured, for starters, in the record-setting Democratic fund-raising, mostly from small donors in well-educated areas, that’s swamped Republicans. It’s measured in outpouring of celebrity support for Biden. It’s measured in the unprecedented crossover support for Biden from top officials in the other party. Above all, the response is measured in the soaring turnout and margins metro America has provided Democrats since 2016.”

“Win or lose, GOP faces reality that places driving economic and population growth are consolidating against them to an unprecedented extent. Party faces risk of being tattooed to rising Millennials and Gen Z, not only with Trump’s racism and misogyny, but also his disdain for democracy and inciting violence. To win Trump’s favor, Republicans must not only excuse but emulate this behavior: Senator David Perdue, disgracing himself with open racism vs Harris, Marco Rubio belittling himself with groveling endorsement of vigilante violence in Texas, Texas Republicans suing to disqualify 127,000 votes. In all these ways, Trump has sentenced GOP to a strategy of squeezing bigger margins from groups and places that are shrinking – at price of provoking greater resistance from groups and places that are growing. He might make it work one more time and Senate favors the shrinking places. Also like the South in 1850s, facing a national majority coalescing against them behind the new Republican Party in the North, GOP today has laid down many procedural sandbags to block that new majority, particularly control of the Supreme Court. But under Trump Republicans have positioned party in open opposition to what America is becoming, governing only for those most fearful of the country’s changes. At any political moment, the past may win for a while. But the future always gets the last word. That may start today” – Ron Brownstein (heavily edited and condensed for clarity).

U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams pleaded not guilty Monday to violating a ban on visiting state parks during an August trip to Hawaii where he was working with state officials to control the spread of the coronavirus, ABC News reports.

Adams and his aide, Dennis Anderson-Villaluz, were found by a Honolulu police officer on Kualoa Regional Park, which had been closed to the public by the governor to prevent large gatherings in an effort to stop transmission of the virus.  Adams was taking photos of the picturesque beach.