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By Bloomberg 
20h ago
By Jordan Fabian and Josh Wingrove
Joe Biden said Wednesday that 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 counts in at least two states.
“I am not here to declare that we have won, but I am here to report that when the count is over, we believe we will be the winners,” he told reporters in Wilmington, Delaware.
His comments came after he blazed a clearer path to the White House with a victory over Trump in Wisconsin, closing off one of the president’s best routes to reelection.
The Trump campaign said it is suing in Pennsylvania and Michigan to stop the counting of votes that has had a bias toward Biden.
Trump falsely declared victory in Pennsylvania, one of six states that has yet to be summoned 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 need to be counted.
Biden’s victory in Wisconsin gave him 248 electoral votes to Trump’s 214.
Biden only needs to win two of the few standout states, like Nevada and Michigan, where he leads, or Georgia, where his campaign believes absentee votes will push him over the 270 electoral votes needed to win.
Trump faces a tougher path to victory. Trump would have to win Alaska and all but one of the other five battleground states the AP has yet to call out.
It’s unclear when those states will report the final counts, but Michigan suggested it could be as early as Wednesday.
Biden’s victory in Wisconsin reverses Trump’s surprise in 2016, when he became the first Republican presidential candidate to win the state since 1984, defeating Hillary Clinton by fewer than 30,000 votes.
The Trump campaign said it would require a recount in the state, where the candidates were separated by less than 1 percentage point.
Biden also has a slight lead in Michigan with the presidential race on the line for the second day. Biden leads there by 15,000 votes out of an estimated 5.2 million cast.
Biden’s campaign said it hopes to be able to declare victory Wednesday afternoon, earlier than many expected based on delayed counts on battlefields, including Pennsylvania. Biden plans to address Americans later in the day, the campaign said.
Election officials continued to count votes in various battle states as Democrats, whose expectations of a “blue wave” faded.
Trump tweeted throughout the day casting doubt on the tally of mail-in ballots, which were largely Democratic, after votes were counted in person on Election Day, which were leaning Republican.
“How is it that every time they count the landfills by mail they are so devastating in their percentage and power of destruction?” The president said on Twitter. Another tweet reflected on his clues “magically” disappearing in states run by Democratic governors.
Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, insisted that the president was heading for re-election and that the campaign was grooming his lawyers to challenge the results in some states.
In a midnight White House speech, Trump threatened to ask the US Supreme Court to intervene to stop what he called the disenfranchisement of Republican voters, without offering evidence that any crime had been committed. .
“Frankly, we won this election,” Trump said, noting that he had an advantage in several states where the results were still uncertain. “So we will go to the Supreme Court of the United States. We want the voting to stop. “
It was not immediately clear what Trump was referring to, as states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada counted votes cast legally. It’s routine for states to continue counting votes after Election Day, and Pennsylvania said the results likely won’t be finalized for several days.
US stocks held their gains after the news, led by tech stocks, on speculation that a divided Congress would ensure the extension of key bull market elements, such as Trump’s 2017 corporate tax cuts. Treasury bonds also recovered.
The unsolved outcome, due to an unusually large number of mail-in ballots due to the coronavirus, risks further stoking tensions in the US, beset by an economic recession and the raging virus.
But the Biden campaign was optimistic about the outcome and criticized Trump’s efforts to stop the vote counting.
“When all the votes are counted, 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.”
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