Biden: ‘ We’re going to win this race’
Mailin vote counts push him to cusp of victory
WASHINGTON — Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden all but declared victory Friday night, saying “we’re going to win this race with a clear majority of people behind us” and promising a more inclusive presidency aimed at healing the divisiveness of the past four years.
“We have serious problems to deal with,” the former vice president told a crowd gathered at an arena in Wilmington, Del. “We don’t have any more time to waste in partisan warfare.”
He called for the nation to remember that the purpose of American politics “isn’t to fan the flames of conflict, but to solve problems, to guarantee justice.”
Elections like the one that’s nearing its end bring tension and hard feelings, Biden said, but it’s time to move past that.
“We may be opponents, but we’re not enemies,” he said. “We’re Americans.”
The day saw Biden take clear command of the race against President Trump in Pennsylvania and Georgia as heavily Democratic mail ballots were counted, while holding on to his leads in Arizona and Nevada. Hoping fruitlessly that he would be declared the winner by the television networks, Biden waited until nearly 11 p.m. on the East Coast before coming on stage with his running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, to give a sevenminute, not quite a victory speech.
Biden talked about leading Trump by more than 4 million votes, and the likelihood he will win states like Arizona and Georgia that Democrats haven’t carried for decades, saying voters have given him a “mandate for action.”
The election is more than a numbers game, he said. Those votes represent people, “men and women who exercised their fundamental right to have their voices heard.”
He has heard them, Biden promised.
“We’re certainly not going to agree on a lot of issues but at least we can agree to be civil to one another,” he said. “It’s time to come together as a nation to heal.”
The speech came after a day when Biden inched closer to victory by the hour, with a late surge of voting results pushing him to leads in four of five remaining battlegrounds, and leaving President Trump with few plausible paths to hold on to the White House.
Though the race remained uncalled, the momentum was dramatically different than previous days, as Biden overtook Trump early Friday morning in vote tallies in the main battlegrounds of Georgia and Pennsylvania and did not relinquish those leads as the counting wore on.
The race was nevertheless achingly close, and Biden has been careful not to declare victory while votes are being counted.
The Trump campaign continued to accuse Biden and the Democrats of working to steal the election from the president.
“This election is not over,” Matt Morgan, general counsel for the Trump campaign, said in a statement Friday as he detailed legal efforts Republicans have taken in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada.
The campaign later put out a statement from Trump that pledged to fight to ensure only legal votes were counted with transparency, leaving out any mention of a path to victory in the states still in play.
“This is no longer about any single election,” the president said. “This is about the integrity of our entire election process.”
As his hopes of reelection grew dimmer, Trump returned to social media to sow distrust in the results without offering any real evidence of wrongdoing. Election officials in all the states counting votes assured the public that there was no indication of widespread irregularities in the results, they said.
The accusations, as well as many of the lawsuits the president and his supporters have filed, have lacked detailed evidence of the type of fraud that could overturn an election.
That’s a problem, Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, told ProPublica.
“A lawsuit without provable facts showing a statutory or constitutional violation is just a tweet with a filing fee,” he said.
Biden grew his lead in Pennsylvania to more than 28,000 votes Friday — a pivotal state that would send him to the White House were the tally to hold as expected. Still, the state remained uncalled, as analysts ran calculations to try to determine if Trump could mount a comeback.
In Georgia, where an election official said a recount was almost certain, Biden held a lead of more than 4,000 votes, with a dwindling number of ballots outstanding, most from mainly Democratic areas of the state. A wild card in the Georgia race are the nearly 8,900 military and overseas civilian ballots that were sent out but have not yet been returned. Friday was the deadline for those ballots being received.
Other updates Friday morning also favored Biden’s chances. His lead in Nevada grew to more than 22,000 votes, and while his lead shrank in Arizona,
returns announced Friday did not show Trump gaining at the rate he would need to overtake Biden in that state.
The dramatic shift in the vote leads in the uncalled states were a function of the way the pandemic affected the election, and of efforts by Republicans to curtail voting by mail. Inperson votes were counted first, while mailin ballots were largely the votes still being tabulated. Trump supporters largely voted in person, whereas Biden supporters mostly voted by mail
— creating a lopsided effect in early returns that changed as more results came in.
With protesters chanting outside their windows and livestream cameras trained on them inside, ballot counters worked day and night in the key battleground states as vote results trickled in — sometimes in batches of mere hundreds at a time. But the trend in the numbers was steady: growing for Biden and lessening the likelihood of Trump’s reelection.
Arizona was the only state moving in Trump’s favor. The Associated Press projected Biden the winner of Arizona on Tuesday, though the Trump campaign insisted the president could still win it. Hundreds of thousands of ballots in the state remained to be counted Friday, with Biden ahead by fewer than 30,000 votes, mainly from Democratic areas. The nature of remaining ballots was unknown, however, and Biden’s lead became harder to overtake after a Friday evening release.
The Biden campaign has remained confident they will be victorious.