By Jordan Fabian and Josh Wingrove
Joe Biden said Wednesday he is confident he will win the presidency once the remaining votes are counted after President Donald Trump opened a legal fight to stop the tallies in at least two states.
“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,” he told reporters in Wilmington, Delaware.
His remarks came after he opened a clearer path to the White House with a win over Trump in Wisconsin, closing off one of the president’s best routes to re-election.
Trump’s campaign said it is suing in Pennsylvania and Michigan to halt vote counts that have been trending toward Biden.
Trump falsely declared victory in Pennsylvania, one of the six states that has yet to be called by the Associated Press. The president was ahead in the state by 383,000 votes but Pennsylvania officials said more than a million ballots still have to be counted.
Biden’s win in Wisconsin gave him 248 electoral votes to Trump’s 214.
Biden needs only to win two of a few outstanding states, such as Nevada and Michigan where he is leading, or Georgia, where his campaign believes absentee votes will push him over the 270 electoral votes needed to win.
Trump faces a more difficult path to victory. Trump would have to win Alaska and all but one of the other five battleground states that AP has yet to call.
It is unclear when those states will report final tallies, but Michigan has suggested it could be as early as later Wednesday.
Biden’s Wisconsin victory reverses Trump’s upset in 2016, when he became the first Republican presidential nominee to win the state since 1984, defeating Hillary Clinton by less than 30,000 votes.
Trump’s campaign said it would demand a recount in the state, where the candidates were less than 1 percentage point apart.
Biden also has a narrow lead in Michigan with the presidential race hanging in the balance for a second day. Biden leads there by 15,000 votes of about 5.2 million cast.
Biden’s campaign said it expects to able to declare victory Wednesday afternoon, sooner than many expected based on delayed counts in battlegrounds, including Pennsylvania. Biden plans to address Americans later in the day, the campaign said.
Election officials continued to count votes in several battleground states as Democrats, whose expectations for a “blue wave” were dashed.
Trump tweeted throughout the day casting doubt on the count of mail-in ballots, which were heavily Democratic, after the Election Day in-person votes were counted, which leaned Republican.
“How come every time they count Mail-In ballot dumps they are so devastating in their percentage and power of destruction,” the president said on Twitter. Another tweet mused about his leads “magically” disappearing in states run by Democratic governors.
Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, insisted the president was headed for re-election and that the campaign was readying its lawyers to challenge results in some states.
In a middle-of-the-night speech from the White House, Trump threatened to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene to stop what he called the disenfranchisement of Republican voters, without offering evidence that any wrongdoing had occurred.
“Frankly, we did win this election,” Trump said, noting that he held a lead in a number of states where results were still uncertain. “So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.”
It wasn’t immediately clear what Trump meant, as states including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada were counting legally cast votes. It is routine for states to continue counting votes after Election Day, and Pennsylvania said results likely wouldn’t be finalized for several days.
US stocks held onto their gains after the news, led by technology shares, on speculation that a split Congress would ensure the extension of key elements of the bull market, such as Trump’s 2017 corporate tax cuts. Treasuries also rallied.
The unresolved outcome -- due to an unusually large number of mail-in ballots because of the coronavirus -- risks stoking tensions further in the U.S., beset by an economic downturn and the raging virus.
But the Biden campaign was optimistic of the outcome and slammed Trump’s efforts to halt vote counting.
“When all of the votes are tallied, we are confident that Vice President Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States,” said Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon.
O’Malley Dillon said in a statement early Wednesday that Trump’s remarks were “outrageous, unprecedented and incorrect” and “a naked effort to take away the democratic rights of American citizens.”