USA Election 2020 Live Updates: Biden Expressing Confidence as a Fifth Day of Counting Begins

Alaska has counted just 56 percent of its votes so far. Why?

As of Saturday morning, only 56 percent of Alaska voters’ ballots had been counted, less than in any other state.

There is little question about who will take the state’s three electoral votes — President Trump is leading, and the state has voted for a Republican in every presidential election since 1964 — but its slow count has put Alaska in league with the five states where close races have kept most news outlets from projecting a winner (Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina).

Two factors seem to be responsible for the slow count: the state’s late deadline for mailed absentee ballots and a process of ensuring that voters do not vote twice.

Alaska allows absentee ballots to arrive up to 10 days after Election Day for most voters, as long as they are postmarked by Election Day.

Election officials also must wait for paper voter history records to be mailed from precincts to make sure no one votes twice. Only then can the ballots from a precinct be opened and counted, Tiffany Montemayor, a spokeswoman for the state’s election division, said in an email.

“Given the geographic expanse of Alaska, this does take some time,” she said.

Rethinking the causes of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat: Should the 2020 results prompt a reassessment?

There was one subset of the political world that felt vindicated by the nail-biter presidential race: Democrats who worked for Hillary Clinton. The closeness of the Biden-Trump race suggests that the 2016 election outcome may have been less about Mrs. Clinton’s political weaknesses than it was about Mr. Trump’s political strengths.

In some of the states that Mr. Biden managed to flip, like Wisconsin, his victory was by a slim margin of about 20,000 votes. Four years ago, Mrs. Clinton lost the state by about 22,000. A potential victory with more than 300 electoral votes would look like a blowout for Mr. Biden, but it would also mask the fact that in some of the most critical states, the race was still only won by a hair.

Mr. Biden has not received the wide margins nationwide that many liberals had been hoping for. The silver lining for some former members of Clintonworld, as one put it: The 2016 Democratic nominee might not go down in history as the political version of Bill Buckner, who blew the World Series for the Red Sox in 1986 by letting a ground ball go through his legs.

“His electoral strength in 2016 had less to do with any shortcomings of Hillary Clinton as a candidate or of her campaign than with Trump’s own appeal to a broad segment of the population,” Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and a member of the D.N.C.’s executive committee, said of Mr. Trump. “We need as Democrats to understand that and confront it more effectively going forward.”

Philippe Reines, a former top adviser to Mrs. Clinton both in the Senate and at the State Department, was even more blunt. “Hillary’s owed more than a few apologies for how her campaign was assessed,” Mr. Reines said. Jennifer Palmieri, who served as communications director for the 2016 Clinton campaign, said that the current election gives a new perspective to the race four years ago.

“There’s only so much you can do to ameliorate larger forces,” Ms. Palmieri said. “When I see young Latino and African-American men siding with Trump in a way they didn’t in 2016, I don’t fault the Biden campaign’s African-American radio program. It is a symptom of a larger change that’s happening.”

Trump on Saturday morning was tweeting more baseless claims about election irregularities, focusing his ire on Pennsylvania, where a loss would seal his fate as a one-term president.