Washington (CNN)Former Vice President Joe Biden has taken the lead in his birth state of Pennsylvania as the number of outstanding ballots has dwindled, putting the Democrat within striking distance of the 270 electoral votes that he needs to win the White House.

CNN has not yet called the commonwealth for the former vice president, but for Biden -- a son of Scranton -- eclipsing Trump in the Keystone State was a symbolic moment in the course of a political career that has spanned nearly five decades.

With the latest batch of tabulated vote counts released Friday morning, Biden now has a lead of 5,587 votes in the state.

During the long and hard-fought primary Democratic primary, Biden repeatedly made the case that he alone could sway the blue-collar voters who abandoned his party to support Donald Trump in 2016 and could rebuild the Democrats' "blue wall" in the Midwest that Trump had demolished.

Read the source article at cnn.com