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Joe Biden will deliver a speech to the nation Friday night as he takes the lead in voting in key states needed to win the US presidential election, a campaign official said.
Biden, who has failed to proclaim victory but has been called “president-elect” by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, will speak later in the day from his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, the official said on condition of anonymity.
Biden came close to winning the White House on Friday after taking the lead in the potentially decisive state of Pennsylvania, but President Donald Trump showed no signs of being ready to give in and his campaign insisted that the bitterly contested race “has not finished”.
Pennsylvania, and its 20 electoral votes, would be enough for Biden, 77, to exceed the magic number of 270 votes in the Electoral College, which determines the presidency.
With tens of thousands of votes remaining to be counted in Pennsylvania, many from heavily Democratic areas, Biden opened a 9,000-vote lead over the Republican incumbent, based on real-time state election results.
Biden currently has at least 253 electoral votes and leads in three other states, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, where the ballots for Tuesday’s hard-fought election continue to be counted.
The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in Congress, welcomed what she called the “firm mandate” given to “President-elect Biden.” It is “a happy day for our country. Joe Biden is a unifier, because he is determined to bring people together, ”Pelosi said.
While his re-election hopes may be fading, Trump is making it clear that he is not ready to accept defeat, launching unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud during an extraordinary appearance at the White House on Thursday and claiming that he had actually won.
“This election is not over,” Trump campaign general counsel Matt Morgan said after news broke of Biden’s leadership in Pennsylvania.
“The false projection of Joe Biden as a winner is based on results in four states that are far from final,” Morgan said in a statement.
“Biden relies on these states for his false claim on the White House, but once the election is final, President Trump will be re-elected.”
Morgan alleged that ballots had been cast “incorrectly” in Georgia, where a recount was expected, and Nevada, and claimed that Republican vote counting observers had been denied access to Pennsylvania.
The Biden campaign responded to the Trump campaign’s refusal to admit defeat with a statement tinged with sarcasm.
“As we said on July 19, the American people will decide this election,” he said. “And the US government is perfectly capable of escorting intruders out of the White House.”
– Secret service protection –
With a Biden victory increasingly likely, the US Secret Service increased its protective bubble around the former vice president and dispatched an additional squad of agents to his campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, The Washington Post reported Friday.
At the White House on Thursday, Trump spent nearly 17 minutes making inflammatory statements about the country’s democratic process of a kind never before heard from a US president.
According to Trump, the Democrats were using “illegal votes” to “steal the election.”
“If you count the legal votes, I win easily,” he said. “They are trying to manipulate an election. And we cannot allow that to happen. “
With Trump refusing to admit defeat, there was growing concern about the potential for unrest in an increasingly tense nation and the focus was on the reaction of members of his Republican Party.
Several prominent Republicans rallied behind the president and pointed out that they could challenge the legitimacy of the results if he loses.
“I think everything should be on the table,” Sen. Lindsey Graham said when Fox News anchor and Trump loyalist Sean Hannity asked whether Pennsylvania’s Republican-led legislature should decline to certify the results.
“The Philadelphia elections are twisted like a snake,” Graham said.
Another Trump ally, Senator Ted Cruz, told Hannity: “I’ll tell you the president is angry and I am angry and the voters should be angry.”
Cruz falsely alleged that Pennsylvania’s Democratic attorney general had ordered the counting of votes in Philadelphia, the largest city in the state, to continue “until Joe Biden wins.”
– ‘Dangerous and wrong’ –
Other Republicans denounced Trump’s comments to Rep. Will Hurd of Texas calling them “dangerous and wrong,” and Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, which has long said Trump’s fraud allegations were “unfounded.”
“The president’s accusations of grand-scale election fraud and theft are simply not substantiated. I am not aware of any significant crime here, “Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania told the” Today “show.
Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, who wrote a book criticizing the president after leaving the administration, tweeted that Republicans “face a test of character.”
“All candidates have the right to seek appropriate electoral law remedies if they have evidence to support their claims,” Bolton said. “They certainly shouldn’t lie.”
The powerful leader of the Republican majority in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, made a nuanced statement.
“This is how this should work in our great country: Every legal vote must be counted,” McConnell said. “Any ballot sent illegally should not do so.
“All parties must come to observe the process. And the courts are here to enforce the laws and resolve disputes. This is how the votes of the Americans decide the outcome. “
Much of the anger of the Trump campaign has centered on the large number of ballots mailed this year, which were not counted in Pennsylvania until after Election Day and have tipped voting there in favor of Biden.
Mail-in ballots have tended to lean heavily towards Democrats, who used them more than Republicans for fear of risking Covid-19 exposure in crowded polling stations.
In addition to Pennsylvania, Biden has also leapt ahead of Trump in the once-trusted Republican state of Georgia, with an advantage of about 1,500 votes.
Biden has a 43,000-vote lead in Arizona, which Trump won in 2016, and a 20,000-vote lead in Nevada.
The victories in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania would give Biden 306 of the 538 Electoral College votes, the exact number Trump won in his surprise victory over Hillary Clinton.
The Trump campaign has filed a host of lawsuits in battlefield states challenging outcomes that Biden’s campaign has dismissed as “without merit.”
Supporters of the president have also staged noisy protests in front of several vote counting centers.
Outside an election office in Phoenix, Arizona, far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones roused a heavily armed crowd, shouting into a megaphone about Trump’s alleged enemies: “They will be destroyed because America is on the rise.”
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