Joe Biden has claimed he is on course to win the US presidential election and issued a plea for national unity, even as Donald Trump threatens to fight the outcome in court.
The former vice-president won the crucial battleground state of Wisconsin on Wednesday, giving him 248 electoral college votes to Trump’s 214. The target is 270 to win the White House.
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“After a long night of counting, it’s clear that we’re winning enough states to reach 270 electoral votes need to win the presidency,” Biden said in Wilmington, Delaware. “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.”
Biden noted that he was set to Wisconsin by 20,000 votes, similar to the president’s margin in 2016, and was leading in Michigan by more than 35,000 votes and growing – substantially more than Trump managed four years.
As Trump seeks to fire up his supporters for a bitter legal struggle, Biden called for people on both sides “to unite, to heal, to come together as a nation”.
With running mate Kamala Harris standing nearby, Biden added: “I will work as hard for those who didn’t vote for me as I will for those who did vote for me. Now, every vote must be counted. No one’s going to take our democracy away from us. Not now. Not ever.”
It was a clear rebuke to Trump’s attempt to sow doubt with claims of fraud and threats to dispute the election all the way to the supreme court, ushering in a potentially prolonged and messy endgame to the election.
Biden was called the winner in the critical battleground of Wisconsin, and was ahead in Michigan and Nevada, while Trump held leads in Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina.
If the current standings are sustained, it would take Biden over 270 votes, even without the deadlocked state of Pennsylvania, where a million ballots were yet to be counted by Wednesday afternoon.
Unleashing a long-planned legal offensive, the Trump campaign demanded a recount in Wisconsin and called for the count in Michigan to be halted, on the grounds that its representatives did not have “meaningful access”.
Throughout the day, starting with a television statement after 2am, Trump repeatedly and falsely claimed that the routine counting of ballots after election day was somehow fraudulent. But in practice, Trump campaign officials were supporting continued vote counts where the president was behind and vigorously opposing them where he was ahead.
On Wednesday afternoon, Trump staged a rally of his supporters outside a convention centre in Philadelphia where votes were being counted, echoing Republican tactics to stop the count in Florida 2000, which helped win the election for George W Bush.
That fiercely-contested election was finally decided by the supreme court, and on Wednesday afternoon, the Trump campaign also asked the supreme court to rule on its objections to an extended vote count in Pennsylvania. The court has a 6-3 conservative majority after the recent controversial appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
The Biden camp has assembled its own legal teams at the chief electoral flashpoints, and launched a “fight fund” to finance the effort.
Meanwhile the US postal service was criticised by a judge for failing to carry out a sweep of its sorting offices for postal votes that had not yet been delivered to polling stations, amid claims that thousands of ballots were stranded at sorting offices.
As the legal manoeuvring gathered momentum, it was clear the fate of the US presidency is likely to be determined by a few thousand votes in a handful of states.
It was also evident the nation had not delivered the decisive “blue sweep” repudiation of Trumpism Democrats had hoped for, nor did it look likely the election would give them control of the Senate.
Ultimately, the US presidency looked likely to be determined by a few thousand votes in a handful of states, and possibly the decisions of an array of judges.
Even before the counting was finished, Biden had won more votes than any president in history – more than 70m – edging out Barack Obama’s 2008 record and about 2.5m ahead of Trump, once again highlighting the disparity between the popular vote and the arithmetic of the US electoral college system.
In the scramble for states and their assigned electoral college votes, Biden failed in his bid to win over Florida and Ohio, but looked likely to flip Arizona, another closely contested state that Trump won in 2016.
As had been predicted, Trump appeared on television from the White House early on Wednesday morning and falsely claimed he had won, describing the vote count “a major fraud on our nation”. Speaking after 2am, he announced he would be taking a case to the US supreme court, saying: “We want all voting to stop.” Voting had stopped by that time, and it appeared he meant to say vote-counting.
Trump’s own campaign officials, briefing the press on Wednesday morning, expressed support for continued vote-counting in states where the president was behind.
Neither the vice-president, Mike Pence, nor the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, echoed Trump’s spurious allegation that late-counted votes were inherently fraudulent.
“We don’t know who won the presidential race yet,” McConnell said, after winning his own re-election battle in Kentucky.
An election observer mission sent by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe criticised the actions of the president, issuing a statement saying: “Baseless allegations of systematic deficiencies, notably by the incumbent president, including on election night, harm public trust in democratic institutions.”
In Pennsylvania, one of the states that could decide the presidency, governor Tom Wolf warned: “There are millions of mail-in ballots that are being counted. And that takes longer than the standard in person voting. So we may not know the results even today, but the most important thing is that we have accurate results.”
In the battle for control of the Senate, Democratic hopes of toppling Republicans in Maine, Iowa, South Carolina, Montana and North Carolina fell short and a Senate Democrat in Alabama, Doug Jones, lost to a former football coach, Tommy Tuberville.
Democrats gained seats in Colorado and Arizona, but their remaining hopes of a 50-50 Senate rested winning at a runoff contest in Georgia, and pulling off wins in close races in Michigan and North Carolina.
One issue that both camps agreed on was that the pollsters had once more got their predictions wrong, in some cases by a wider margin than in 2016, consistently undercounting Trump voters around the country.
The standoff drew warnings from Human Rights Watch, an organisation often more associated with election monitoring in failing democracies. Kenneth Roth, its executive director , said: “Millions of US voters turned out to cast their ballots in recent weeks and during a day of largely trouble-free voting.
“Politicians don’t decide who wins. Election officials are carrying out an impartial and transparent counting process so that the will of the people decides.”
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