We will win, says Biden as Trump threatens legal war
Democrat confident of victory despite president taking action to halt vote counts
JOE BIDEN last night declared it was “clear” he had won the US presidential election as Donald Trump launched legal challenges with the result still in the balance, meaning it could be days before a winner is officially announced.
With critical swing states still counting their votes last night in a remarkably close race, the Democratic candidate gave a speech in which he framed himself as the victor.
“It’s clear that we’re winning enough states to reach 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency,” Mr Biden said. “I’m not here to declare that we’ve won. But I am here to report when the count has finished we believe we will be the winners.”
The former vice-president added that “there will be no blue states and red states when we win. Just the United States of America.”
Wisconsin and Michigan were called for Mr Biden, meaning that if he converted the leads he held in two other battleground states – Arizona and Nevada, with 17 electoral college votes between them – into victories he would be elected America’s 46th president.
But there were still no guarantees, as hope remained for Mr Trump if he won Arizona and then held Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, three states he took in 2016.
Moments after Mr Biden had spoken, Mr Trump tweeted saying he had “claimed” Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina and Michigan. Twitter added a caption warning that official sources had not called the states for him.
Mr Trump, whose campaign had declared victory earlier in the day, was seeking to halt vote counts in battleground states through the courts, suggesting a turbulent few days to come.
The Trump campaign last night filed lawsuits demanding vote-counting be halted in Michigan and Pennsylvania as the spectre of the election ending in the Supreme Court loomed large.
Mr Trump’s campaign also doubled down on the president’s premature declaration of victory. Bill Stepien, the Trump campaign manager, said: “If we count all legally cast ballots, we believe the president will win.”
Mr Trump pushed a narrative on his Twitter feed and through campaign fundraising emails that the election was being stolen from him, despite there being nothing unusual with long vote counts in tight races.
“They are finding Biden votes all over the place – in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. So bad for our Country!” the president wrote in one tweet.
Some of the president’s tweets were marked by Twitter with a message saying their content was “disputed and might be misleading”.
Early on Tuesday morning, the Trump campaign had issued an email seeking donations headlined in red font: “Breaking! Democrats plan to steal the election!”
Mr Trump’s decision to declare himself the victor explicitly on election night, even with millions of votes still to be counted across the country and the result anything but clear, was unprecedented in modern US political history.
“This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election,” the president had told a crowd in the White House late on Tuesday night.
It now looks possible that the election result will end up in some form in the Supreme Court, a situation that has not happened since the chaotic 2000 election between Al Gore and George W Bush. It was more than a month before that race was settled.
The manoeuvring was a result of an election that was much closer than had been expected. Mr Biden’s poll lead, which had him far in ahead nationally and winning in almost all of the key battleground states, proved illusory. Mr Trump secured at least four million votes more than he did in 2016, driven in part by a better showing among Latino voters and African-american men.
It meant the president held Florida, a critical swing state, as well as Texas, which Democrats had hoped to turn blue, and denied Mr Biden a landslide.
The Biden campaign had hoped that Mr Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 230,000 Americans this year, would sweep the president emphatically from office, but that was not the case.
Mr Biden, for his part, did much better among white men than Hillary Clinton had done at the last election, eating into Mr Trump’s core base.
Mr Biden was ahead on the electoral college vote count yesterday afternoon. Some media outlets had called Arizona for Mr Biden as well as Michigan and Wisconsin. That meant he needed only Nevada to reach 270 – the magic number that secures a presidential candidate’s victory. However, the Trump camp in a briefing yesterday argued that the president could still win Arizona, with hopes also of taking Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina.
The president’s team was left infuriated with Fox News for calling Arizona for Mr Biden earlier on election night, claiming that Mr Trump was still on track to hold the state.
They also made clear that they would be launching legal challenges, which will likely focus on whether postal ballots – which lean towards Mr Biden – should be thrown out in key swing states owing to lack of scrutiny at the counts.
Jason Miller, a senior Trump campaign adviser, said: “We want to make sure all legally cast ballots are counted. We also want to make sure illegally cast ballots are not counted.”
Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who is a lawyer for Mr Trump, said the president’s team could launch a national lawsuit over the election.