Joseph R. Biden Jr. stood on the threshold of the American presidency in the early hours of Friday, seizing a slim lead over President Trump in Georgia and drawing closer to overtaking him in Pennsylvania. Those victories would secure the 270 electoral votes needed to lay claim to the White House.
Mr. Biden had already begun to project the image of a man preparing to assume the mantle of office, meeting on Thursday with his economic and health advisers to be briefed on the coronavirus pandemic.
Speaking briefly to reporters in Wilmington, Del., Mr. Biden urged the public to show a “little patience” as the vote counting in battleground states stretched into a third day.
“Democracy,” he said, “can sometimes be messy.”
Mr. Biden’s appeal to let the process play out contrasted with that of Mr. Trump, who took the lectern in the White House briefing room to falsely claim that the election was riddled with fraud, as part of an elaborate coast-to-coast conspiracy by Democrats, the news media and Silicon Valley to deny him a second term.
As the number of outstanding ballots slowly dwindled, Mr. Trump was left increasingly with only legal challenges to forestall defeat, while Mr. Biden was betting on the steady accumulation of mail-in ballots to vault him over the top in Pennsylvania. Georgia, which has not elected a Democrat since Bill Clinton in 1992, was headed for a photo finish that could supply an extra cushion of electoral votes to Mr. Biden.
Inside the candidates’ campaign war rooms, staffers took urgent soundings with their field operations to see where the outstanding votes were and how they would break for the candidates.
In Pennsylvania, Mr. Trump’s lead stood at fewer than 19,000 votes, with roughly 163,000 mail-in ballots still to count in the state, including more than 58,000 in the Democratic bastion of Philadelphia. In Georgia, Mr. Biden’s total vaulted above Mr. Trump’s around 5 a.m., giving the former vice president a 917-vote lead.
But if the eastern battlegrounds were trending toward Mr. Biden, the Trump campaign drew some comfort from the West.
In Arizona, the continuing count whittled Mr. Biden’s early lead in the state to roughly 47,000 votes. After a delay in counting the remaining ballots from Maricopa County early Thursday, election officials continued to plow through tens of thousands of ballots from Phoenix and its sprawling suburbs. In Nevada, Mr. Biden clung to a lead of more than 11,000, with absentee ballots left to count in vote-rich Clark County, which includes Las Vegas.
Still, Mr. Biden’s victory in the Midwestern battleground states of Michigan and Wisconsin put him in a strong position, with multiple paths to victory, depending on what happens in the states yet to be called. Mr. Trump needed a victory in Pennsylvania.
The process was agonizing for partisans on both sides, though for the most part, fears of widespread unrest did not materialize. Officials reported few instances of problems with the voting-counting process.
The candidates’ differing reactions hinted at how they are likely to handle the coming days and weeks as the counting gives way to legal challenges, calls for recounts and a potentially turbulent transition.
Mr. Biden’s pivot to policy issues seemed intended to create an air of inevitability about his victory. His briefing on the pandemic was a reminder that the United States recorded a record 121,200 new infections on Thursday.
Mr. Trump remained focused on his political fortunes. He said nothing about the virus in a rambling statement replete with unsubstantiated accusations of “legal” and “illegal” ballots being tabulated.
As Mr. Trump spoke, the three major broadcast networks cut away from his remarks, an extraordinary break with tradition that network executives attributed to the president’s failure to tell the truth.
Many prominent Republicans were silent in the face of Mr. Trump’s efforts to sow doubt in the democratic process. But he found support from some of his most loyal backers on Capitol Hill, including Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who echoed Mr. Trump’s charges of voter fraud.
“Philadelphia elections are crooked as a snake,” Mr. Graham told the Fox News host Sean Hannity. When Mr. Hannity suggested that votes in Pennsylvania should be thrown out, Mr. Graham replied, “Everything should be on the table.”
Courtesy – The NewYork Times
