Biden says he's on course to win US election as
Trump threatens to fight outcome
Democrat said ‘it’s clear that we’re winning enough
states’ while president seeks to fire up supporters for bitter legal battle
Julian
Borger and David Smith in Washington
Thu 5 Nov
2020 01.14 GMTFirst published on Wed 4 Nov 2020 22.40 GMT
Joe Biden
has claimed he is on course to win the US presidential election and issued a
plea for national unity, even as Donald Trump threatens to fight the outcome in
court.
The former
vice-president flipped the crucial battleground states of Michigan and
Wisconsin on Wednesday, giving him 264 electoral college votes to Trump’s 214.
The target is 270 to secure the White House.
“After a
long night of counting, it’s clear that we’re winning enough states to reach
270 electoral votes need to win the presidency,” Biden said in Wilmington,
Delaware. “I’m not here to declare that we’ve won but I am here to report that,
when the count is finished, we believe we will be the winners.”
Biden
praised a historic turnout of about 150 million and noted that he was set to
win Wisconsin by 20,000 votes, similar to the president’s margin in 2016, and
leading in Michigan by more than 35,000 votes and growing – substantially more
than Trump managed four years ago. Both states have been called for Biden.
As Trump
seeks to fire up his supporters for a bitter legal struggle, Biden called for
people on both sides “to unite, to heal, to come together as a nation”.
With his
running mate, Kamala Harris, standing nearby, Biden struck the tone of a
president-elect: “I will work as hard for those who didn’t vote for me as I
will for those who did vote for me. Now, every vote must be counted. No one’s
going to take our democracy away from us. Not now. Not ever.”
It was a
clear rebuke to Trump’s attempt to sow doubt with claims of fraud and threats
to dispute the election all the way to the supreme court, ushering in a
potentially prolonged and messy endgame to the election.
Late on
Wednesday there were signs of desperation as Trump felt his presidency slipping
away. He tweeted a thread stating that he was establishing a “claim” on
Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina, all of which remain too close to
call.
“We have
claimed, for Electoral Vote purposes, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (which
won’t allow legal observers) the State of Georgia, and the State of North
Carolina, each one of which has a BIG Trump lead,” he wrote.
“Additionally,
we hereby claim the State of Michigan if, in fact ... there was a large number
of secretly dumped ballots as has been widely reported!”
The tweets
were met with ridicule since no president can unilaterally declare himself the
winner of multiple battleground states with many votes still left to be
counted. Almost immediately Twitter flagged the posts with a warning that
“official sources may not have called the race when this was tweeted”.
After a
nerve-jangling election night that resolved little, the picture became clearer
on Wednesday as Biden moved closer to 270 electoral votes. Even without the
deadlocked state of Pennsylvania, where a million ballots were yet to be
counted by Wednesday afternoon. Trump still held leads in Georgia and North
Carolina.
Unleashing
a long-planned legal offensive, the Trump campaign demanded a recount in
Wisconsin and called for the count in Michigan to be halted on the grounds that
its representatives did not have “meaningful access”.
Dozens of
Trump supporters there chanted, “Stop the count!” inside the TCF Center in
Detroit, where ballots were being handled, while the president tweeted: “Our
lawyers have asked for ‘meaningful access’, but what good does that do? The
damage has already been done to the integrity of our system, and to the
Presidential Election itself. This is what should be discussed!”
The Trump
campaign also filed a lawsuit seeking to pause the count in Georgia, claiming
that a Republican poll observer had witnessed 53 late absentee ballots being
illegally added to a stack of on-time absentee ballots in Chatham County. “We
will not allow Democrat election officials to steal this election from President
Trump with late, illegal ballots,” said Justin Clark, deputy campaign manager
and senior counsel.
Throughout
the day, starting with a television statement after 2am, Trump repeatedly and
falsely claimed that the routine counting of ballots after election day was
somehow fraudulent. But in practice, Trump campaign officials were supporting
continued vote counts where the president was behind and vigorously opposing
them where he was ahead.
On
Wednesday afternoon, Trump staged a rally of his supporters outside a
convention centre in Philadelphia where votes were being counted, echoing
Republican tactics to stop the count in Florida 2000, which helped win the
election for George W Bush.
That
fiercely contested election was finally decided by the supreme court, and on
Wednesday afternoon, the Trump campaign also asked the supreme court to rule on
its objections to an extended vote count in Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro,
Pennsylvania’s attorney general, said in a CNN interview the lawsuit was “more
a political document than a legal document”.
Trump’s
attempt to involve the supreme court (Scotus) appeared to be a long shot.
Edward Foley, an election law professor at Ohio State University, posted on
Twitter: “The valid votes will be counted. SCOTUS would be involved only if
there were votes of questionable validity that would make a difference, which
might not be the case. The rule of law will determine the official winner of
the popular vote in each state. Let the rule of law work.”
The Biden
camp has assembled its own legal teams at the chief electoral flash points, and
launched a “fight fund” to finance the effort.
As the
legal manoeuvring gathered momentum, it was clear the fate of the US presidency
is likely to be determined by a few thousand votes in a handful of states.
It was also
evident the nation had not delivered the decisive “blue sweep” repudiation of
Trumpism that Democrats had hoped for, nor did it look likely the election
would give them control of the Senate.
Ultimately,
the US presidency looked likely to be determined by a few thousand votes in a
handful of states, and possibly the decisions of an array of judges.
Even before
the counting was finished, Biden had won more votes than any president in
history – more than 70m – edging out Obama’s 2008 record and about 2.5m ahead
of Trump, once again highlighting the disparity between the popular vote and
the arithmetic of the US electoral college system.
In the
scramble for states and their assigned electoral college votes, Biden failed in
his bid to win over Florida and Ohio, but looked likely to flip Arizona,
another closely contested state that Trump won in 2016.
As had been
predicted, Trump appeared on television from the White House early on Wednesday
morning and falsely claimed he had won, describing the vote count “a major
fraud on our nation”. Speaking after 2am, he announced he would be taking a
case to the US supreme court, saying: “We want all voting to stop.” Voting had
stopped by that time, and it appeared he meant to say vote-counting.
Trump’s own
campaign officials, briefing the press on Wednesday morning, expressed support
for continued vote-counting in states where the president was behind.
And
speaking in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani said
without evidence: “This is a concerted effort of the crooks that run the
Democratic Party. You know these big city machines are crooked.”
Neither the
vice-president, Mike Pence, nor the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell,
echoed Trump’s spurious allegation that late-counted votes were inherently
fraudulent.
“We don’t
know who won the presidential race yet,” McConnell said, after winning his own
re-election battle in Kentucky.
In
Pennsylvania, one of the states that could decide the presidency, governor Tom
Wolf warned: “There are millions of mail-in ballots that are being counted. And
that takes longer than the standard in person voting. So we may not know the
results even today, but the most important thing is that we have accurate
results.”
In the
battle for control of the Senate, Democratic hopes of toppling Republicans in
Maine, Iowa, South Carolina, Montana and North Carolina fell short and a Senate
Democrat in Alabama, Doug Jones, lost to a former football coach, Tommy
Tuberville.
Democrats
gained seats in Colorado and Arizona, but their remaining hopes of a 50-50
Senate rested winning at a runoff contest in Georgia, and pulling off wins in
close races in Michigan and North Carolina.
One issue
that both camps agreed on was that the pollsters had once more got their
predictions wrong, in some cases by a wider margin than in 2016, consistently
undercounting Trump voters around the country.
An election
observer mission sent by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in
Europe criticised the actions of the president, issuing a statement saying:
“Baseless allegations of systematic deficiencies, notably by the incumbent
president, including on election night, harm public trust in democratic
institutions.”
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