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WILMINGTON, Delaware / WASHINGTON, Nov. 4 (Reuters) – Democrat Joe Biden predicted a U.S. election victory over President Donald Trump on Wednesday after pivotal victories in Michigan and Wisconsin, while the Republican president sought to make up for a narrow path. towards reelection with trials and demands for recount.
* Biden: ‘It’s clear we’re winning enough states’
* Trump campaign says it is suing in key states
* Biden leads the national popular vote
* No sitting US president has lost since 1992
By Trevor Hunnicutt and Steve Holland
The victories in those Midwestern states gave Biden, a former vice president who has spent five decades in public life, a critical boost in the race to garner 270 electoral votes in the state-by-state Electoral College necessary to win the White House.
Trump, who won both states in 2016, now has fewer options to secure a second four-year term. With the count still in progress, he falsely declared victory, accused the Democrats of trying to steal the election, and vowed to fight the states in court.
“It’s clear that we are winning enough states to get (the) 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency,” said Biden, who appeared with his running mate Kamala Harris, in his home state of Delaware. “I am not here to declare that we have won. But I’m here to report that when the count is over we believe we will be the winners. “
Trump has spent months seeking to undermine the credibility of the voting process should he lose and accusing Democrats, without evidence, of trying to steal the election.
His campaign fought to keep Trump’s chances alive with lawsuits in Michigan and Pennsylvania to stop the vote counting. He demanded a recount in Wisconsin.
The campaign asked the United States Supreme Court to allow Trump to join a pending lawsuit brought by Pennsylvania Republicans over whether the state on the battlefield, which still counted hundreds of thousands of mail ballots, should be able to accept late ballots sent by Election. Day on Tuesday.
The maneuvers amounted to a sweeping effort to challenge the results of a still-indecisive election a day after millions of Americans went to the polls during the coronavirus pandemic that has disrupted everyday life.
As he struggled to stop the count in states where he feared losing, Trump criticized news organizations that were projecting losses in Arizona and Nevada, states he thought he should be winning.
Biden said that all votes must be counted. “No one is going to take away our democracy, not now, not ever. America has gone too far. America fought too many battles, America endured too much to allow that to happen, ”he said.
Trump is trying to avoid becoming the first sitting US president to lose a re-election bid since George HW Bush in 1992.
Biden won Michigan by 67,000 votes, or 1.2%, while it was ahead in Wisconsin by just over 20,000 votes, or 0.6%, according to figures from Edison Research, which projected Biden as the winner in Michigan. Various media outlets projected Biden as the winner in Wisconsin, although Edison did not, citing the pending recount.
Wisconsin law allows a candidate to request a recount if the margin is less than 1%, which the Trump campaign immediately said it would do.
In response to Michigan’s lawsuit, Ryan Jarvi, a spokesman for the state attorney general, said the elections had been “conducted in a transparent manner.”
Voting concluded as scheduled Tuesday night, but many states typically take days to finish counting the ballots. There was an increase in mail-in ballots nationwide amid the pandemic. Other hotly contested states, including Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, were still counting votes, leaving the outcome of national elections uncertain.
At the moment, excluding Wisconsin, Biden leads Trump from 243 to 213 in Electoral College votes, which are largely based on a state’s population.
THE PANDEMIC EFFECT
The controversial fallout culminated a virulent campaign that unfolded amid a pandemic that has killed more than 233,000 people in the United States and left millions more out of work. The country has also faced months of unrest related to protests over racism and police brutality.
Supporters of both candidates expressed anger, frustration and fear with little clarity about when the election would be resolved.
Trump held a narrow lead in North Carolina, while his lead declined in Georgia and Pennsylvania. Without Wisconsin and Michigan, he would have to win all three, as would Arizona or Nevada, where Biden led in the last vote counts.
Biden would be just the second Democratic presidential candidate to win Arizona in 72 years. Trump won the state in 2016.
In Pennsylvania, Trump’s lead narrowed to around 196,000 votes as officials gradually worked their way through millions of mail-in ballots, seen as likely to benefit Biden. Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien called the president the winner in Pennsylvania, although state officials had not completed the count. Biden said he felt “really good” about his chances in the state.
In the popular nationwide vote, Biden on Wednesday was comfortably ahead of Trump, with about 3 million more votes. Trump won the 2016 election over Democrat Hillary Clinton after winning crucial states on the battlefield despite garnering about 3 million more votes across the country.
Legal experts had warned that the election could get bogged down in state-by-state litigation over a number of issues, including whether states can include late-arriving ballots that are mailed before Election Day. Both campaigns have assembled teams of attorneys in preparation for any dispute.
In the Pennsylvania case where the Trump campaign tried to intervene, the U.S. Supreme Court previously allowed the state to move forward with a plan to count ballots mailed before Election Day that arrive up to three days later.
But some conservative judges suggested they would be willing to reconsider the matter, and state officials planned to segregate those ballots as a precaution.
Before the election, Trump had said he wanted the Senate to confirm his last appointee by the United States Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett, in case the court had to hear any electoral disputes. Democrats had criticized the president for appearing to suggest that he expected Barrett to rule in his favor.
Trump has repeatedly said, without evidence, that widespread voting by mail would lead to fraud, although US election experts say fraud is very rare.
Trump continued to make unsubstantiated attacks on the vote-counting process on Twitter on Wednesday. Both Facebook and Twitter flagged various posts by the president for promoting misleading claims.
“We were preparing to win this election. Frankly, we won this election, ”Trump said before launching an extraordinary attack on the electoral process by a sitting president. “This is a huge fraud in our nation. We want the law to be used appropriately. So we will go to the Supreme Court of the United States. We want the voting to stop. “
Trump did not provide evidence to back up his fraud claim and did not explain how he would fight the results in Supreme Court.
The election will also decide which party will control the United States Congress for the next two years, and the Democratic push to gain control of the Senate did not appear to be enough. Democrats had traded two Republican seats while losing one of their own, and five other races remained undecided: Alaska, Michigan, North Carolina and two in Georgia.
(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt in Wilmington, Delaware, and Steve Holland and Jeff Mason in Washington Additional reporting by Jason Lange and Susan Heavey in Washington; Patricia Zengerle in Raleigh, North Carolina; and Rich McKay in Atlanta Written by Joseph Ax and Jeff Mason Editing by Paul Thomasch, Will Dunham and Howard Goller)
