President Trump won a series of key battlegrounds early on Wednesday morning, including Florida, Ohio and Iowa, as Joseph R. Biden Jr. expressed confidence he would ultimately prevail across key Northern states and Arizona as the presidential contest turned into a state-by-state slog that could drag deeper into the week.
“We believe we are on track to win this election,” Mr. Biden said in a brief speech after 12:30 a.m. Eastern, saying he was “optimistic” about the outcome once all the votes were counted.
No full states had yet flipped from their 2016 results as of 1 a.m., but several key states had huge portions of ballots still to be counted. Mr. Biden did flip a single Electoral College vote that Mr. Trump had won in 2016, carrying Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, which includes Omaha.
With millions of legitimate votes still waiting to be counted, Mr. Trump prematurely and recklessly declared that he won the election. Appearing at the White House, he pressed for more vote counting in Arizona, where he is behind, and called to stop the count where he is ahead as he baselessly declared the election “a fraud on the American public.”
In an unprecedented move that drew bipartisan condemnation, the president said he intended to go to the Supreme Court to intervene to halt the legitimate counting of the vote.
So far, Mr. Trump was holding off Mr. Biden in two Southern states that the former vice president had hoped to snatch back from the Republican column: Georgia and North Carolina. These were not must-win states for Mr. Biden, but he spent heavily in both states and visited them in the final stretch of the campaign. Mr. Biden lost Texas, a long-shot hope that some Democrats invested in late in hopes of earning a landslide repudiation of Mr. Trump that did not arrive.
Georgia has not gone Democratic since 1992. But while Mr. Trump held a narrow lead, much of the remaining vote to be counted appeared to be in the greater Atlanta area, where Mr. Biden performed strongest.
Shortly after Mr. Biden spoke, Mr. Trump responded on Twitter, misleadingly saying he was “up big” and claiming without evidence that “they are trying to STEAL the election.” Twitter immediately marked it as content that was “disputed and might be misleading.”
The most encouraging sign on the map for Mr. Biden was in Arizona, where he was leading in a state that Mr. Trump won in 2016. He won New Hampshire and Minnesota, two states that Hillary Clinton had only narrowly carried four years ago and that Mr. Trump had once hoped to flip in 2020.
“We’re going to win this,” Mr. Biden said, urging “patience.”
Mr. Biden’s win in Nebraska’s 2nd District was only one of the 270 Electoral College votes that he needs. But it could prove important. It opened a potential pathway to the White House without winning Pennsylvania, if Mr. Biden carried all the states that Mrs. Clinton did and added Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin, plus Nebraska’s lone vote.
In a briefing for donors on Tuesday night, Biden campaign officials acknowledged underperforming among Cuban-Americans in the Miami area, but saw positive signs with their strength in some suburbs in Ohio that they said could be predictive across the Midwest, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Campaign officials signaled that Biden’s team was preparing to wait for votes to be counted in three Northern battlegrounds that Mr. Trump carried in 2016 — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — where it still feels bullish.
North Carolina and Arizona could still be called relatively quickly. But vote-counting in the so-called former “blue wall” that Mr. Trump flipped in 2016 — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — is not expected to be completed until later in the week.
— Shane Goldmacher and
With millions of votes still left to be counted, President Trump early Wednesday falsely declared that he had won his race for re-election, warning that he would go to the Supreme Court to try to prematurely shut the election down.
In a post-midnight appearance in the White House, Mr. Trump offered what amounted to a reckless attack on the democratic process at a time of extraordinary angst and division in a nation that had been riveted by a polarizing and unresolved election. He listed states where he falsely claimed he had already won — like Georgia, where Republicans thought Joseph R. Biden Jr. had a solid chance of winning — as he baselessly argued that opponents were trying to steal the election from him.
Mr. Trump’s combative remarks offered a sharp contrast with an appearance an hour earlier by Mr. Biden, who counseled the nation to be patient. Mr. Biden noted that vote counting typically takes days, and sometimes longer, in normal years to count ballots, and would certainly so particularly in the middle of a pandemic that prompted many people to vote by mail.
Mr. Biden’s campaign manager, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, called Mr. Trump’s remarks “outrageous, unprecedented, and incorrect,” saying they were “a naked effort to take away the democratic rights of American citizens.”
Pennsylvania, a state that Mr. Trump falsely claimed he had won, is just beginning to count hundred of thousands of early votes mailed in that are expected to be heavily Democratic. Gov. Tom Wolf said on Twitter that the state had more than one million mail ballots to count.
“It’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who has won this election,” Mr. Biden said. “That’s the decision of the American people.”
It was unclear to what extent Mr. Trump’s remarks were calculated or extemporaneous. There was a teleprompter in front of him, though he appeared to improvise, like when he complained that a news organization — it was Fox News, though he never named it — had awarded Arizona, a state that Mr. Trump won 2016, to Mr. Biden.
“We did win this election,” he said. “So our goal now is to ensure the integrity for the good of this nation. This is a very big moment. This is a major fraud on our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.”
Mr. Trump’s comments appeared sure to escalate a bitter legal battle over how the votes should be counted.
It was unclear what sort of Supreme Court challenge the president had in mind. There is no legal argument to compel states to stop counting ballots that were properly filled out and submitted on time.
Lawyers with both parties had been expecting a possible move by the Trump campaign or allied Republicans to renew a bid to get the Supreme Court to stay a decision by Pennsylvania’s high court to allow election workers to count all ballots postmarked on Nov. 3 or earlier for three days after Election Day. That had not happened as of Tuesday night.
Republicans had also filed suits in state and federal court on Tuesday challenging Pennsylvania election officials’ move to allow counties to contact voters whose mail-in ballots were rejected because of mistakes to give them the opportunity to fix those ballots or cast provisional, replacement ballots. State and federal judges were scheduled to hear arguments on Wednesday, as well as complaints from Mr. Trump’s campaign that its elections observers were not being given enough access to the counting process for potential challenges to Democratic votes.
It was not known as of early Wednesday how many such votes may have been cast, and whether it could be significant enough to affect the outcome in the state.
But Democrats were prepared for other legal maneuvers from Republicans. Mr. Trump’s campaign has planned its legal strategy for months, and it was always devised to address the very scenario that emerged overnight Tuesday — one in which election night returns showed Mr. Trump winning in states in which mail ballots threatened to tip the balance to Mr. Biden.
Mr. Trump’s defiance — his rejection of an election while it was still playing out and his threat of legal action — shocked even some of his top Republican supporters. “It’s a bad strategic decision,” Chris Christie, the Republican former governor of New Jersey and an adviser to the president, said on ABC. “It’s a bad political decision.”
— Adam Nagourney and
(New York Times)
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